Free Transfigurations by Michael Bishop

members of their own tribal unit, the only tribal unit on Bosk Veld. Usually, this form of cannibalism signifies an attempt on the part of the deceased's relatives and friends to incorporate the dead one's memories and spirit by a ritual ingestion of his flesh. Eating the dead under such circumstances, then, is an act of homage and a visible expression of the community's desire to insure the continuity of its life-style and its membership. Christians, by the way, participate in symbolic endocannibalism every time they celebrate Holy Communion. Eat this — drink this — in remembrance of Me.
    Why, you may wonder, does the endocannabilism of the Asadi so offend and demoralize me? Because, God help me, I've begun regarding them as alien projections of my own consciousness, and, expecting better of myself, I expected better of them. Does that make sense? I'm afraid you'll think it doesn't. But, damn it, just when I'd begun to see glimmerings of something lofty in their makeups, old E.Z.—like some nineteenth-century Indian headman putting on a potlatch—comes dragging three carcasses into the clearing and unleashes the ravenous animal in every one of his goggle-eyed subjects! It's more than I can stand.
    The Asadi ignore me. It's hot out here, and they ignore me. They go by, they go by, revolving about me like so many motorized pasteboard cutouts. And Turnbull's not among them, he doesn't revolve anymore, he's been butchered and consumed. Butchered and consumed, do you hear? With the same wanton self-centeredness that we used to poison the Ituri and rout out the people who lived there. Turnbull's dead, base-camp buggers, and There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no

    PART THREE
    The Ritual of Death and Designation
    From the final draft of the one complete section ofEgan Chaney's otherwise unfinished ethnography:
    DEATH
    On Day 120 the old chieftain, whom I called Eisen Zwei, took ill. Because it had been several days since he had gorged himself during the general "feast," I then supposed that his sickness was unrelated to his earlier intemperance. I am still of this mind. For five days he had eaten nothing, although the other Asadi refused to observe his fast and began eating whatever herbs, roots, flowers, bark, and heartwood they came across. They ignored the old man,

    and the old man's huri, much in the way they ignored The Bachelor and me.
    Eisen Zwei's sickness altered this pattern. On the afternoon of the first day of his illness, he abruptly rose and made the horribly glottal, in-sucking noises he had used to summon his people to the meat six days before. I came running from my lean-to. The Asadi moved away from their old chieftain, stopped their shuffling and shambling, and stared with great platterlike eyes whose pinwheel-ing irises had stalled on a single color. A spastic rumbling replaced the old man's in-sucking noises, and he bent over at the waist, his arms above his head, to heave and heave again—until it seemed he would soon be vomiting into the dust the very lining of his bowels. Out of his mouth came the half-digested crimson oddments of his spectacular, six-day-old meal. Abashed by the sight, stung by the odor, I turned away. The heaving continued, and since the Asadi stared on, I turned back to observe their culture in action. Duty is a harsh mistress.
    The chieftain's huri flew up from his shoulder and flapped in the air like a small, wind-collapsed umbrella. I had never seen it fly before, and was surprised that it was capable of flight. Its ungainly flapping excited the already well-aroused population of the clearing, and together we watched the huri rise above tree level, circle back, and dip threateningly toward the branches of the trees on the western perimeter. The old man continued to vomit, but now every pair of color-stalled eyes followed the uncertain aerial progress of the huri, which, at one point, plummeted toward the perch where The Bachelor sometimes sequestered