Soul Catcher (18 page)

David sat in shocked silence. He’d never
heard an adult say that openly before. Some of his more daring
friends said it, but never anyone such as this young woman. She was
at least twenty years old.

“Shocks you, huh?” she asked. “You’re an
innocent, all right. You know what it means, though, or it wouldn’t
shock you.”

David cleared his throat.

Tskanay said: “Big mean, crazy Indian thinks
he has an innocent, huh! Okay. We’ll show him.” She got up, went to
the door, closed it.

David heard her moving, the slither of
clothing. He whispered: “What’re you doing?”

She answered by sitting down beside him,
finding his left hand and pressing it against her bare breast.

David hissed in surprise. She was naked! As
his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see her beside him.

“We’re going to play a game,” she said. “Men
and women play this game all the time. It’s fun.” She slid a hand
beneath his blanket, caressing, touched his penis. “You got hair.
You’re man enough for this game.”

David tried to push her hand away.
“Don’t.”

“Why not?” She kissed his ear.

“Because.”

“Don’t you want to get away from
Charlie-Katsuk?”

“Sure.” Her skin was soft and exciting. He
felt a strange eagerness in his loins, a hardness. He wanted to
stop her and he did not want to stop her.

“He wants you innocent,” she whispered. She
was breathing fast now.

“Will he let me go?” David whispered. There
was an odd milky smell about her that sent his pulse racing.

“You heard him.” She guided his left hand,
pressed it into the tangle of hair between her legs. “Doesn’t that
feel good?”

“Yes. But how do you know he’ll ...”

“He said he wants you innocent.”

Frightened and fascinated, David allowed her
to pull him down onto the pole bed. It creaked and stretched.
Eagerly now, he did what she told him to do. They were showing that
Katsuk! Crazy damned Katsuk.

“Right there,” she whispered. There! Ahhhhh
...” Then: “You’ve got a good one. You’re good. Not so fast. There
... that’s right ... that’s right ... ahhhh ...”

It seemed to David much later. Tskanay
rubbed him down with a blanket while he stretched out, tingling and
excited, but calm and relaxed, too. He thought:
I did it!
He
felt alive, in direct contact with every moment.
Pretty
Tskanay
. He reached up boldly, touched her left breast.

“You liked that,” she said. “I told you it
was fun.” She stroked his cheek. “You’re a man now, not a little
innocent Katsuk can push around.”

At the sound of Katsuk’s name, David felt
his stomach tighten. He whispered: “How will Katsuk know?”

She giggled: “He’ll know.”

“He’s got a knife,” David said.

She stretched out beside him, caressed his
chest. “So what?”

David thought about the murdered hiker. He
pushed her hand away, sat up. “He’s crazy, you know.” And he
wondered if he could tell Tskanay about the murder.

She spoke languidly: “I can hardly wait to
see his face when he—”

The door banged open, cutting her off and
bringing a gasp from David.

Katsuk stepped inside, his face in black
shadows from the back lighting. He carried David’s shoes and
clothing in a bundle. As the light from the doorway revealed the
two naked figures on the pole bed, Katsuk stopped.

Tskanay began to laugh, then: “Hey,
Charlie-boy! He’s not your little innocent anymore! How about
that?”

Katsuk stared at them, consternation
tightening his throat. His hands went to the knife at his waist and
he almost drew it. Almost. But the wisdom of Soul Catcher whispered
to him and he saw the trickery in her woman power. She wanted the
knife! She wanted death and the end of him by that death. She
wanted the ancient ritual defeated. Ahhhh, the slyness of her. He
threw the clothing at David, took one step forward, his face still
in shadows and unreadable.

“You going to kill us, Charlie-boy?” she
asked.

David sat frozen with terror. He expected
the knife. It was the logical thing to happen—the right thing. His
chest ached. His body felt even more exposed than its nakedness of
flesh. There was no way to prevent the knife.

Katsuk said: “Don’t think you will steal my
spirit
that
way, Tskanay.”

“But he’s not your innocent little hoquat
anymore.” She sounded puzzled. Katsuk wasn’t reacting the way she
had expected. She wasn’t sure precisely what she had expected, but
certainly not this quietness. He should be raging and violent.

Katsuk glanced at the terrified boy.
Innocent?
Could sex make the difference? No. The quality of
innocence was something else. It was tangled with intent and
sensitivity. Was there selfishness in this hoquat? Was he
indifferent to the fate of others? Was he capable of self
sacrifice?

“Are you sure he’s not innocent?” Katsuk
asked.

She slid off the pole bed, stood up, angrily
defiant in her nakedness, taunting him with it. “I’m damned
sure!”

“I am not,” Katsuk said.

“You want another performance for proof?”
she demanded.

Slowly, David got his knees beneath him on
the bed. He sensed that Katsuk was not completely in this room,
that the man listened to voices from another world. Tskanay still
could not see this. Katsuk was obeying his spirits or he would have
struck out with the knife. He might hit Tskanay again if she
continued to taunt him, but he wouldn’t use the knife.

David said, “Katsuk, don’t hurt her. She was
only trying to help me.”

“You see,” Katsuk said. “You tried to use
him against me, Tskanay, and still he doesn’t want you hurt. Is
that not innocence?”

“He’s not!” she raged. “Damn you, he’s
not!”

David said: “Katsuk, she doesn’t
understand.”

His voice oddly soft, Katsuk said: “I know,
Hoquat. Get dressed now. There is your clothing all dry and clean
and mended by Cally.”

Tskanay whispered: “He’s not, I tell you.
He’s not.”

“But he is,” Katsuk said.

David touched the clothing Katsuk had thrown
onto the bed. Why couldn’t Tskanay shut up? It was a stupid
argument. He felt defiled, tied to Katsuk even more strongly than
before. She hadn’t been trying to help. She’d been trying to get
back at Katsuk, but she couldn’t reach that part of him in the
spirit world.

Tskanay stood trembling now, her fists
clenched, her face immobile. Her whole body spoke of failure. She
had tied herself to something lost in this place and would carry
the mark of it for the rest of her life and she knew it.

Katsuk said: “Hoquat, we are truly bound
together now. Perhaps we are brothers. But which of us is Cain and
which Abel?” He turned away, went out, leaving the door open.

In the clearing, Katsuk stood a moment
thinking.

Innocence is not taken by being used.

He looked at his right hand, the hand that
had struck Tskanay earlier in anger.
It was wrong to strike her.
There was a small bit of Charles Hobuhet remaining in me. That’s
who struck her. Now she has cleansed me of that. It was a hoquat
thing to strike her. She has cleansed that away, too, and proved
the innocence of my chosen victim. I am Katsuk who can smile at
what she did and appreciate its value to me.

In the hut, Tskanay said: “Damn him! Damn
him! Damn him!” She was crying.

David put a hand on her calf, said: “Don’t
cry.” She put her hands to her face, sobbing harder. David pleaded:
“Please don’t cry, Tskanay.” She jerked away, dropped her hands.
“My name is Mary!” Still crying, she found her clothes, pulled them
on, not bothering to straighten the garments. She went to the door
and, without looking back, said: “Well, you heard him. Get
dressed.”

***

Harlow B. Watts, teacher at Pacific Day
School, Carmel, California:

Yes, David is one of my students. I’m very
shocked by all this. He’s a very good student, considerably ahead
of most in his form. We use the British system here, you know.
David is very sensitive the way he studies things. His reports and
other papers often reveal this. He sometimes says odd things. He
once remarked that Robert Kennedy had tried too hard to be a hero.
When I questioned David about this, he would only say: “Well, look,
he didn’t make any mistakes.” Don’t you think that’s an odd thing
for a boy to say?

***

In the afternoon, the sky darkened with a
heavy overcast. A cold, raw wind began blowing from the southwest.
It chilled David where he stood at the lake margin below the huts.
He rattled the six pebbles in his pocket. Six days!

Most of the people in the camp, more than
twenty of them, had gone into the big hut and built a fire there.
They had two haunches of elk turning on a spit over the fire.

David felt that everyone in the camp must
know what he and Tskanay had done. His cheeks felt hot every time
he thought about it.

Two youths squatted at the timber’s edge
watching him unobtrusively. Tskanay was no longer his guard. He had
not seen her since she had left the little hut. The two youths were
his guards now. David had tried to talk to them. They had refused,
turned away when he insisted. He heard them talking in low
voices.

Barren frustration permeated him. Again, he
thought of Tskanay. She had not changed a thing. Even worse, she
had bound him tighter to Katsuk.

“
Perhaps we are brothers now.”

Katsuk had said that.

By forgiving, by denying anger, Katsuk had
put a new burden on his captive. A link had been forged between
them.

David tried to imagine Katsuk and Tskanay
making love. It had happened. Tskanay admitted it. Katsuk as much
as admitted it. David could not imagine them doing it. They had
been two other people then—Mary and Charlie.

It was growing darker. Sunset conjured a
bloody lake at the edge of the forest’s green darkness. The wind
was blowing hard up on the ridges, sweeping the clouds away. The
moon emerged and David saw it as Katsuk would: the moon eaten, a
curve of it gnawed out by Beaver. The moon was in the lake, too. He
watched it there as it drifted against the reeds and was gone. But
the reeds remained.

One of the youths behind him coughed. Why
wouldn’t they talk to him? David wondered. Was it Katsuk’s
command?

He heard distant aircraft engines. An
airplane’s green wing light moved off to the north. The engines
flowed with the light, a cold, far sound in the sky. Sound and
light gathered up David’s hopes, bore them away. He chewed his
lower lip. He could feel himself falling into emptiness, the whole
sky opening to take him. That plane, the warmth, the light, the
people—all vanished into another dimension.

Katsuk was speaking in the big hut, his
voice rising and falling. The curtain had been thrown back. Light
spilled into the clearing. David turned away from the lake, went
toward the firelight. He passed the two youths in the dark, but
they gave no indication of noticing him. David squatted just
outside the range of the firelight, listened.

Katsuk, his powerful body clad in the
loincloth and moccasins, wore the red cedar band around his head, a
single raven feather stuck into the band at the back. He stood with
his back to the open door. The fire drew glowing outlines of his
movements, his skin now amber, now bloody.

“Have I found this innocent in my belly like
a woman?” Katsuk demanded. “Look you! I am Katsuk. I am the center,
yet I live everywhere. I can wear the chief beads. What do you
fear? The hoquat? They did not conquer us. Gun, steel, knife,
hatchet, needle, wheel—these conquered us. Look you! I wear the
chilkat cloth and moccasins made by a woman of our people.”

He turned slowly, staring at each face in
turn.

“I can see in your faces that you believe
me. Your belief strengthens me, but that is not enough. We were the
Hoh people. What are we now? Does any among you call himself a
Christian man and sneer at me?”

His voice grew louder: “We lived on this
coast more than fifteen thousand years! Then the hoquat came. Our
cedar plank houses are almost gone from this land. We hide a few
pitiful huts in this forest! Our salmon rivers are dying. I must
tell you these things mostly in English because all of you do not
speak our tongue.”

He turned, stared out into the dark, whirled
back.

“Ours is a beautiful tongue! English is
simple beside it. Things have reality in our tongue! I go from one
condition to another in my tongue and feel each condition. In
English, I feel very little.”

He fell silent, stared into the fire.

A woman shifted closer to the fire at the
right and David thought at first it was Tskanay, youth and grace in
her movements. But she turned, the light flaring briefly, and he
saw it was the old aunt, Cally. Her face was a gaunt mask. The
illusion shook him.

Katsuk said: “Look you at the preparations
you made for me. You brought body paints and a Soul Catcher rattle.
Why do these things unless to honor me?”

He touched the knife at his waist. “I am
Drukwara. I make war all around the world. I have only two dances.
One of them is Bee.”

Someone in the circle around the fire
coughed.

Cally said: “Ish, answer him. A man must
answer him.”

Ish stood up directly across the fire from
Katsuk. The old man’s gangling frame appeared taller in the low
light. His eyes reflected firelight.

He said: “You talk of old times, but these
are not old times.” Diffident voice, fear in it.

Katsuk said: “You mean we no longer bang a
log drum until moonrise.” He pointed to the ground beside Ish. “But
you bring a flute and that wood rattle dressed with eagle feathers.
Why?”

“Some of the old ways work,” Ish said. “But
those tribes were wild.”