Soul Catcher (27 page)

The boy, working to restore the fire, said:
“You had a nightmare. You yelled and tossed around all night. I
kept the fire going most of the night.”

Flame began to climb through the wood the
boy had placed in the coals beneath the ashes.

Katsuk nodded dumbly. He heard water dashing
on stones only a few steps from the shelter but could not find the
strength to go to it. A burning dryness filled his throat.

“Wa-ter,” he croaked.

The boy stood up from the fire, took the
empty bean can to the river.

The way the leaf-broken sunlight dappled the
boy’s hair made Katsuk think of a lion he had seen in a zoo: a lion
draped in sunlight and shadows. The memory caged him. He thought:
Does Hoquat have a new spirit? Is it Lion? I do not know that
spirit.

David returned from the river with the can
slopping icy water. He saw the glazed look in Katsuk’s eyes. Katsuk
clutched the can with both hands, drained it, said: “More.”

The boy brought another can of water. Katsuk
drank it.

A distant engine sound came into the valley,
rising above the noise of the river. It grew louder: a plane flying
low over the ridge above them. The sound went away up-country.

David stood, stared through the trees,
hoping for a glimpse of the aircraft. He failed to see it.

Katsuk ignored the sound. He seemed to have
lapsed back into his dream-sleep, squatting in the shelter’s
doorway, occasionally shuddering.

David put more wood on the fire, piled rocks
around the flames to heat them. He said: “It’s going to rain
again.”

Katsuk stared through slitted eyes at the
boy. He thought:
The victim is here, but he must desire my
arrow. The Innocent must ask for death.

Low-voiced in the ancient tongue, Katsuk
began chanting:

“
Your body will accept the consecrated
arrow. Pride will fill your soul at the touch of my sharp and
biting point. Your soul will turn toward the sun and people will
say to one another: “How proudly he died!” Ravens will alight
beside your body, but they will not touch your flesh. Your pride
will send you outward from your body. You will become a great bird
and fly from one end of the world to the other. This is how you
will accept the arrow.”

David listened until the low chanting
stopped, said: “There are more beans in that barrel. Do you want
some?”

“Why do you not run away?” Katsuk asked.
“You have given me the Cedar sickness. I could not stop you.”

The boy shrugged, said: “You’re sick.”

Katsuk felt at his waist for the obsidian
knife. It was gone! He stared around him, wild-eyed. His pouch with
the consecrated down to place on the sacrificed body—that, too, was
gone. Katsuk lurched to his feet, clutching at the boy, fell
heavily beside the fire pit.

David jumped up, then hurried to kneel
beside Katsuk.

“Knife,” Katsuk whispered.

“Your knife? I was afraid you’d cut yourself
tossing around on it. I hung the knife and your pouch in the corner
back there where you put the bow and arrow.” He gestured into the
shelter.

Katsuk tried to turn his head, but his neck
ached.

David put an arm under Katsuk’s shoulders,
said: “You should be in the bed. I’m heating rocks. Come on.” He
helped Katsuk back to the moss between the logs, pulled the
blankets over him.

Katsuk allowed himself to be tucked into the
blankets, asked: “Why do you help me? It was you who put the
sickness on me.”

“That’s crazy!”

“It is not! I know you did it. I saw you in
my dream. You put it into these blankets.”

“Those are
your
blankets! You took
them out of that barrel!”

“You could have changed the blankets. You
hoquat have used sickness blankets on us before. You gave us the
smallpox with your blankets. You killed us with hoquat sickness.
Why do you do this to me?”

“Do you want more beans or don’t you?”

“Hoquat, I have had my death dream. I have
dreamed the way it will be.”

“That’s crazy talk.”

“No! I have dreamed it. I will go into the
sea and become a fish. You hoquat will catch me.”

The boy shook his head, went back to the
fire. He put more wood on it, felt the outsides of the rocks around
the flames.

It grew suddenly dark under the trees and
began to rain. Cold wind blew up the river canyon. It drove big wet
droplets before it, drummed rain into the trees and onto the mossy
roof of the shelter. Water ran from the eaves and blew in across
the fire. It hissed on the rocks.

Katsuk felt a nightmare take him. He tried
to scream but could make no sound.
Water Baby has me!
he
thought
. How did it learn my name?

After what seemed only a few seconds, Katsuk
awoke to find warm stones piled on the blankets around his feet. A
smell of scorched wool drifted on the damp air. Rain still fell
from a dark sky.

The boy came then, replaced a stone on the
blankets. He used a bent green limb of alder to handle the stone.
Katsuk felt the warmth.

“You’ve been asleep all day,” the boy said.
“Are you hungry? I heated more beans.”

Katsuk’s head felt light. His throat was a
dry patch of sand. He could only nod and croak.

The boy brought him a can of water. Katsuk
drank it greedily, then permitted himself to be fed. He opened his
mouth like a bird for each bite.

“More water?”

“Yes.” The boy brought it. Katsuk drank,
fell back. “More?”

“No.”

Katsuk felt himself returning to the middle
of his own being, but it was all wrong. It was himself where he had
come into this primitive world, but pieces had been snipped way,
the lines changed. If he could see his own face in a mirror, he
knew it would be unfamiliar. He might reject that face. The eyes
would be those of a stranger. He longed for restful sleep but felt
nightmares lurking. The spirits waited with their willy-nilly
purpose, unreasonable and demanding. He tipped his head back,
stretching his neck. His mind rang like a bell.

He thought:
I am being overwhelmed by the
spirits!

The boy came with a can of water. Katsuk
lifted his head to drink. Part of the water spilled down his chin.
He lay back. The drink weighed on him, made his body torpid.

Katsuk thought:
He has poisoned
me!

The rain beat on the roof over him, a drum
sound, whispering at first, then louder. He thought he heard a
flute with the drum: pitiful music but marvellous. His life danced
on the flute song, a summer moth, about to die.

I have become the soul of this place,
he thought.
Why has Soul Catcher brought me here?

He awoke in darkness. The silence was
resonant, the silence after a drum. The rain has stopped. Faint,
unrhythmic drips came from the eaves. The fire had burned low. A
shadow near the fire revealed itself as the boy asleep curled up
beside the warm rocks. As Katsuk stirred, the boy sat up, stared
into the shelter’s darkness.

“Katsuk?”

“I am here.”

“How do you feel?”

Katsuk felt the clarity in his head. Cedar
sickness had left him. He sensed his weakness, but the dry juice of
his fear had been squeezed into oblivion.

“The sickness has gone from me,” Katsuk
said. “Are you thirsty?”

“Yes.” The boy brought a can of water.
Katsuk drank it, his hand steady. “More?”

“No.”

Katsuk sensed the multiplicity of his
universe, knew the spirits remained within him. He said: “You drove
the sickness from my body, Hoquat. Why?”

“I couldn’t just leave you. You were
sick.”

“I was sick, yes.”

“May I come in there now and sleep under the
blankets?”

“You are cold?”

“Yes.”

“It is warm here.” Katsuk opened the
blankets.

The boy scrambled over the logs that
contained the moss bed, crawled under the blankets. Katsuk felt the
thin body trembling.

Presently, Katsuk said: “Nothing has
changed, Hoquat.”

“What?”

“I still must create a holy obscenity.”

“Go to sleep, Katsuk.” The boy sounded
exhausted.

“We have been gone thirteen nights,” Katsuk
said.

The boy made no response. His trembling had
stilled. Soft, even breathing betrayed sleep.

Katsuk thought:
Nothing has changed. I
must produce for this world a nightmare they will dream while
awake.

***

Sheriff Pallatt:

They only give me thirty-five men and one
helicopter to cover the whole goddamned Wilderness Area. It’s a
goddamned mess. My feet hurt. Look how swollen they are! But I’m
gonna find that pair. They’re in there and I’m gonna find ‘em.

***

David opened his eyes into white darkness, a
collision of sight. It was several heartbeats before he realised he
was staring at the moon, another arc of it eaten away by Beaver. It
was cold. A moon river glowed through the trees outside the
shelter. The river whispered to him, reminding him of rain and
silence. A mountain slowly revealed itself through the trees. It
had been there all along, but now it showed itself to him:
moon-drenched, awash with snow. A star mantle wound through the sky
beyond the mountain.

With sudden shock, David realised Katsuk was
not beside him. “Katsuk?” he ventured, voice low. No answer. Katsuk
had added more wood to the fire. Coals glowed brightly in the fire
pit.

David pulled the blankets more tightly
around himself. Smoke from the fire pit blurred the moon’s pale
witchery. The sky was full of stars! He recalled Katsuk saying the
stars were holes in a black deerhide. Crazy Katsuk! Where was
he?

Katsuk had prayed:
Net of stars, Deer and
Bear in the sky—I take care for thee!

“
The moon is the eye of
Kwahoutze!”

Again, David called: “Katsuk?”

But there was no answer to the call—only the
wind in the trees, the voices of the river.

David peered into the darkness, searching.
Where was Katsuk?

In the remembered green of the night, a
shadow moved. Katsuk stood beside the fire pit, flung there by his
own movement.

“I am here, Hoquat.”

Katsuk stared into the shelter’s blackness,
seeing the boy there and not seeing him. It was as though he stared
at the boy’s dream and the spirit talking:

“
You are not yet ready. When you are
ready, I will come for you. Pray then, and a wish will be granted
you.”

Those were the spirit’s words.

David asked: “Where have you been?” He said
it accusingly, aware of a change in Katsuk’s manner, but unable to
identify that change.

Katsuk heard the question like a voice
calling within his skull and wondered:
Should I tell him where
I’ve been? Is that what the spirit demands of me now?

The question disturbed Katsuk, setting up
currents within him that left his mind in turmoil. He recalled how
Raven had awakened him in the night, speaking from a dream that
bridged the two worlds. Raven had ordered him to go downstream to
the big meadow, warning him of danger there. Searchers were camped
there now, a big party of them with tents and rifles and
radios.

Katsuk recalled his stalking approach to the
camp. He had crawled through the tall grass to within a few yards
of the searchers, close enough to hear the men awakening in the
dark and preparing for their day of hunting for human quarry. Their
mouths full of sleep, the men had talked. Their words had revealed
much. The smoke from the fire in the abandoned shelter on Sam’s
River had been seen by an aircraft searcher just before dark last
night. Could Hoquat be blamed for building up that fire? Had it
been a breach of innocence? Katsuk thought not. The boy had been
concerned with his captor’s illness and with the need for
warmth.

With that fire as their goal, though, the
men from the meadow would be here soon. Even now, they could be in
the hills around the shelter, waiting for dawn before moving.

“Where were you?” the boy pressed.

“I’ve been walking in my forest.”

David sensed the evasion in the answer,
asked: “Will it be dawn soon?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you go walking, Katsuk?”

“Raven called me.”

David heard the remoteness in Katsuk’s
voice, realized the man stood half in the spirit world, in the
place of his dreams and his visions.

“Are we going to stay here today?” David
asked.

“We are going to stay.”

“Good. You should rest after your
sickness.”

And David thought:
Maybe if I just talk
to him calmly he’ll come out of it and be all right.

Katsuk sensed then that the boy had also
developed another self which must be reasoned with, influenced, and
understood. The immobility in the surface of this youth was not to
be mistaken for peace. Hoquat’s spirit was no longer hiding. And
Katsuk asked himself:
Why shouldn’t this happen to Hoquat as it
happened to me?

Why else had Hoquat nursed his captor
through the Cedar sickness? Logic said the boy should flee while
Katsuk was weak, yet he stayed.

David felt the pressure of Katsuk’s silence,
asked; “Do you need anything? Shall I get up now?”

Katsuk hesitated, then: “There is no need
for you to get up. We have a little time left us yet.”

Katsuk thought then of the bow and its
single arrow hidden in a tree behind him. The past and the present
were tied together, but the great circle had yet to be completed.
He felt the pouch at his waist, the packet with the down from sea
ducks in it to scatter on the slain victim as it had been done
through all time. He knew his mind grazed above its old levels. He
sensed Soul Catcher speaking to him and through him. The passionate
simplicity of Bee had caught him up in full awareness of death and
world-silence. The spirit power of his realization reached all
through him. He felt death not as negation but as the assignment of
his life. It was why he stood in this place. It was why he had made
the bow, touching the wood only with a stone knife. It was why he
had fitted the old arrow-head from the ocean beach into its new
wooden pocket, preparing it for the death to come.