The Dogs of Winter (32 page)

It took some moments for him to recognize it as such. At first glance, in the failing light, one might have taken the thing for a bundle of rags. Unhappily, the more one looked, the more one saw, and as Travis moved across the rocks, the thing lay revealed to him for what it was. The head was split and rested at an impossible angle to the neck, balanced upon the very edge of the stone shelf. One eye had been sprung from its socket to lay upon a sagging cheek, for there were no bones left to support it. The head’s contents had been spilled upon the stone. A gaudy, obscene paint, dark and shining in the half light.

Travis held to the rock, panting for air. The shelf where the body had landed was narrow, barely wide enough to accommodate what had fallen there, though beyond the body it appeared to widen out, ending in a cul de sac of stone. Travis had little choice but to go on. The climb had cost him dearly and there was really no question of inching his way back down. As a consequence, he was a long time at his perch, seeking handholds not fouled with blood, not wanting the dead body to touch his own, and yet finally, in spite of his contortions, pulling himself past it in such a way that his face came within inches of the dead man’s, and at just that point, his foot slipped beneath him so that it was the body he grabbed for support.

His hand seized upon a belt, his forearm pushed against broken ribs. An audible groan escaped. The body moved beneath him. The head twisted, the mouth sprung impossibly wide as if in death it might swallow the night. He saw at the same time a shank of white hair which, till this moment, had been pinned somehow beneath the body, saw it unfurl in the gray light, and in that moment knew it to be the Tolowan he had seen as a living man in the Moke’s home, at the bank of the river.

He moved quickly after that, pulling himself on his stomach across the shelf that did indeed grow wider before it ended. He moved as far as he could from the desecration he had crawled over until at last he found for himself a fissure of rock and squeezed himself into it, as if he too were something broken, then watched as the night closed in around him.

At some point, out of sheer exhaustion, no doubt, he managed a little sleep. He woke parched and in pain. He saw that the fog had lifted, or that he had crawled beyond it, for the sky was streaked with great billowing clouds. These were shown to him by a secretive, skulking moon that prowled in their midst, and his thoughts turned once more to his bedfellow upon the rock, wondering at how this man had come to be here, and at what this portent might mean.

I
t was late in the day when the Indians reached a spot where it was clear they intended to make camp. The big man went off once more with his rifle, returning to announce that the surfers had made camp on the beach. “Second time today,” he said. “ ’Cept the light was better before.”

Earlier that afternoon the big man had left and come back to report seeing the men in the water.

“Could’ve had ’em right there,” he’d said.

“Why didn’t you?” the boy had asked him.

“One of them saw me.”

“So what?”

“You’ve no mind for sport, Cousin.”

The men repeated a similar argument now. The boy, Bean Dip, was all for going after the men this night. The Hupa favored playing them a little, now that they had them. William Longtree had sided with the boy. “I say take them now,” he said.

The Hupa looked at his rifle laid crosswise upon his knees, patting the stock with his hand. “Just remember who’s mine,” he said.

Kendra thought they would go then, that it had begun. Instead they built a fire and began to drink, and it occurred to her that perhaps this was what came first. In any event, she thought, her time had come. In the morning someone would die, possibly sooner.

Eventually, after some time spent watching them about their fire, and in a voice clearer than any they had yet heard from her, she asked them if she might go some ways off to relieve herself.

“You want to piss, do it right there.”

Kendra was silent.

“Maybe she has to take a shit.”

“She can take a shit right there too.”

The conversation was between the boy and the Tolowan, but at last, the big man, who had been watching, stood up and walked over to where she sat. He shoved her on to her back and when her feet flew up into the air, he caught one of her ankles and pulled off the boot and threw it into the fire. He dropped that foot and picked up the other and did the same with it and when he had finished with the boots, he took a knife from his pocket, opened it with a flick of the wrist and cut her on the heel.

“She won’t go far on that,” he said. And he let her go.

She limped some ways from the camp, for she had seen a stand of coastal scrub and she passed behind it. One of the men called something after her and the others laughed. She could not make out what was said, but set about right away with what she had intended. For she knew that they would not give her long, and she meant to be found in a certain way.

She cleared a place in the dirt. She drew a circle with a stone, and nine was the number of wheel things she slew in that barren place, and nine was the number of the circle, set with sticks instead of candles because, like the book said, it was the thought that counted and at times one need improvise. She drew pentagrams in the dirt before each stick. She chose a flat rock for a makeshift altar. She tore the pocket from the shirt she wore and bound it around some dried grass and tied it with string as a kind of poppet. She took the driver’s license from the waistband of her trousers and tore
off the photograph of William Longtree, aged thirty-five, which she smeared with blood in a red pentagram and placed beside the poppet. When these things were done, she removed her clothes and sat naked on the ground, in the skull-and-crossbones position, and she waited for them to come.

Some time went by before she heard their voices and felt the fall of their footsteps. She lit the sticks with the matches she had pirated from the camper. For, as luck would have it, the sun had begun to decline and the moon to rise and already she had seen that it was a waning moon—coming empty of souls after some communion with the sun and best suited for the spell she intended to cast, and she set the poppet on fire, but just apart from the photograph, as she wanted to be sure they found it and when she was done, she commenced to speak. She said whatever came into her head. She spoke in bits and pieces. The pieces were from many places. Some came from Pam’s coven where she’d been made witness to aging flower children as they’d tried to erect a cone of power she’d never been able to see as anything more than wishful thinking. Some came from the reading she’d done as her father’s pupil, and some from that she’d done on her own. And all the while, as she said these things—for, in fact, one had to say something—other words ran unspoken beneath the cover of her impromptu incantations, a steady unbroken appeal to that thing she had picked up at some long-ago seance. For, if the truth were to be known—and why shouldn’t it, here at the end of things—it was what was most real in her life and always had been. There had been no cones of power for her. No blessed enchantments. No ecstasies of the goddess. For her in this life, there were really only two things that ever seemed to count, the dead father and the shadow she had breathed in as a child, and from which, for most of her life, she had recoiled in dread. But now it was the thing to which she appealed, with whatever words she could muster. Beneath this dark moon. And she held the burning poppet to her breast and said, “Blessed be thou creature made by art, by art made, by art changed. Thou art not cloth and grass, but flesh and blood. I name thee William Longtree, and thou art between the worlds, in all worlds so mote it be . . .”

And that was how they found her—naked, before the
pentagrams with the burning poppet which had already scorched the skin between her breasts, with her hair all wild and dark and her pale skin streaked with dirt and blood and ash. And they stopped, all three, cold in their tracks, just as she threw the poppet away from her, and one of them swore and stamped on it to put out the fire, and the big man came forward and snatched her by the arm, jerking her to her feet, then finding the blood-smeared photograph and picking that up as well and looking at it.

“Look here, Longtree,” the man said. “It’s you she cursed.”

“Must be that three-inch dick,” the boy said.

Kendra looked the big man squarely in the eye. For it seemed to her as if some moment of reckoning had arrived. “It’s all of you,” she said. “I have cut your lifelines . . .” but was unable to say more because the man slapped her and she went limp in his hand.

It was only for a moment, and then she righted herself with great effort and spoke to him once more. “By air and earth. By water and fire so be you bound as I desire, by three and nine your power I bind . . .”

At which point, the man slapped her once more and dragged her back toward the firelight by one arm, where the man whose image she had smeared with blood was in favor of killing her right then.

The other two laughed at him, but when they brought her near, he backed away, closer to the edge of the cliff, where he began to shout and pace, his thin arms swinging at his sides, his white hair held out before the moon. He went right up to the edge, and she saw him look over it, as if looking for a good place to drop her, and was in just this act when a chunk of ground gave way beneath his feet. He vanished without a sound and the big man let go her arm as if he had been burned.

W
hen the Indian dropped her, Kendra ran. She went in the direction of her fire though with no particular sense of purpose. It took the men about two minutes to find her. The boy was all for killing her on the spot and had, in fact, drawn a handgun she had not seen till that moment, when the big man backhanded him. The man had hands like ham butts and the blow broke the boy’s nose.

He sat on the dirt, holding his face with his hand. He appeared to be crying. The big man took the gun and stuffed it into his own jeans.

“She’s a witch,” the boy said. He was still wearing his rifle. It was attached to a strap slung over his chest, and when he hit the ground, she saw the barrel bang him in the back of the head. “She’ll kill us all,” he said.

The big man kicked him in the chest.

The boy rolled across the ashes of the fire, got to all fours, and, without looking back, staggered off into the night in the general
direction of the campground from which they had come, though the place was a day’s hike away and the night was young.

The big man watched as the boy disappeared. He looked at Kendra. “Useless little fuck,” he said.

Kendra looked up at the man, holding his eye, though he was hard to see in the poor light.

“Is that right?” he asked her. “Are you a witch?”

Kendra did not answer right away. Her head seemed to be throbbing in time to her foot and leg. Thinking was made difficult. Fortunately the man went on without her. “Like to dance in the woods maybe. Eat mushrooms. I bet you got a cat named Morning Glory.”

His mode of speech just now surprised her. She had thought him frightened. Maybe she had been wrong. But then he had left her alone on the preceding night, when the others had not.

“We caught some witches out in the woods one night, me and a couple of my cousins. Only these were just a bunch of middle-aged
wagays
running around barefoot. Maybe you’d like to hear what we did with them.”

She was trying once more to get her head to work. The only thing that came to mind was what Travis had told her about making them think your magic was stronger than theirs. But it seemed to her as if her magic had just about run its course. At which point, she thought of something else Travis had said. It was a name.

The man had drawn his knife and was standing above her.

She needed the name.

The man touched the blade with his thumb. “You want to hear about the barbeque?” he asked.

“You’ve got one chance,” she told him. “You have one chance to live. You have to leave. Now. You do that, I can take away the curse.”

He laughed at her.

“You think it’s a joke?” she asked him.

He looked at her for a moment. “I think you’ve got some guts. I’ll give you that. I think you’re lucky too.”

“What if it’s more than that?”

He shrugged. “I guess I’ll take my chances. You think I’m really gonna run away like that little shit?” He gestured into the night with a nod of his head.

“You could find out,” she said.

He just looked at her now.

“You’re Hupa.”

“What of it?”

“There’s an old woman. A Hupa. Rose Hudson. She lives along a little river. Not far from here.”

It seemed to her that his expression changed just a bit at the mention of this name. She was going on intuition now. It was strictly a high-wire act. She had no idea if Ruth Hudson was a Hupa or not, but she seemed to have guessed correctly on that one. If he knew the old woman was dead, she would be finished.

“She can see it,” she said. “She can see what I’ve put on you. She can tell you what it is.”

The man looked at her for some time. “I’ve heard of Rose Hudson . . .”

“Then you know what I’m saying is true.”

“I thought she lived in town.”

“She lives on the Temple. It’s not six miles from here.”

The man looked into the night.

She was nearly giddy with pain, with lack of food, with what she was about.

The man squatted suddenly on his haunches, bringing his face close to hers, looking her in the eye. “I don’t know the coast,” he said. “But I know the valley, further up. I know there’s a couple of meth labs up there.”

“I’ve heard that. Rose lives just up from the beach. It’s the first house in the valley. Go by yourself, if you want to.”

He smiled at her. He was younger than she had thought. She noticed this just now. He was her age. At last, he looked away from her. He hissed then, and shook his head. Finally, he stood once more and walked away. She watched him. She could feel the sweat on the nape of her neck, along her rib cage, in spite of the cold.