The Purification Ceremony (17 page)

    In one motion, I swung the .257 off my shoulder, dropped to one knee, sighted in on a bird feeder barely visible through the storm on the farthest edge of the compound’s clearing, perhaps one hundred and twenty-five yards away, and touched off. The bottom of the feeder shattered.

    I ran the bolt, sighted and fired again, taking away the top: all in five seconds. I stood, glanced at Phil, whose mouth hung limply open. “Maine high school biathlon champion. Two years running. Your turn, Supply Sergeant.”

    Phil looked from me to the feeder and back to me again. “Shit.”

    I slung the gun and walked by Cantrell toward the snowmobiles. “Shall we go?”

    By the maps, Logging Camp Four was about twenty-seven miles away, a two-hour ride if the trails were clear. But to Nelson’s knowledge, no one had maintained the trails in several years. It would be a slower trek.

    I sat backward on the machine against Griff. We rode out of the lodge yard, uneasy at the vacuum created by the speed of the machine and of the storm, a vacuum swallowing the familiarity of the estate in gaping chunks of white and wind, casting us in fits and starts deep into the forest, deep into the unknown. Pucker brush, hawthorn and other dull-colored thorn vegetation clawed at us. I had trouble keeping my balance as Griff wrestled the snowmobile through drifts and under overhanging limbs.

    For a while, however, we maintained a steady clip. I tucked my chin inside the lapels of the heavy fleece parka I’d gotten out for the trip. The straight trunks of the pines and the larch became blips in my side vision. The snowmobile treads kicked spinning clouds of snow behind us. The clouds eddied and ran and came back on themselves. This motion, which seemed foreign one moment and familiar the next, reminded me of Mitchell watching the night clouds against the full moon.

    I decided that the movements of snow in the wind were probably about as close as I would ever come to an appreciation of the cosmic vision my ancestors had of this world. And yet, watching the swirls in the snow, I had the idea that I was in danger, that the invisible clouds around and within me were rotating on themselves, threatening me with a descent into the eye of a storm.

    My father liked to say that understanding is the unsteady child of confusion. Whether that was something he came up with or another of Mitchell’s sayings, I couldn’t tell you. But at the time, it seemed as fitting a thing to dwell on as any. My father’s point being, I suppose, that chaos reduces us to the instinctual rather than to the patterned. Groping for purchase, relying on our most primitive skills, we find new handholds to who we are and what we are capable of.

    A mile out from camp, the windshield touched a branch, sending a shower of icy snow down my back. I shook it off and told myself to stop the introspection, to do my job and protect Griff. I gripped the gun tighter. At every curve and streambed, whenever the white-on-white landscape forced us to slow, I’d scrutinize the woods. Like that of a little girl out in dim light for the first time, my imagination played tricks on me: rocks became human backs, tree limbs turned to arms, and logs mutated into the prone forms of waiting archers. Mitchell used to tell me that the forest was filled with shape-changers who could manipulate the form of Power for their own ends. I’d never believed that was true. Now I didn’t know what to believe in.

    It struck me then that no matter what shape the killers appeared in, I was unlikely to see them at ground level. They were bow hunters by training; they would wait from above. I was about to tap Griff, to tell him to stop so I could turn around to watch over his shoulder for danger above and ahead, when the snowmobile lurched and slowed.

    Cantrell and Arnie were already off their machine. I went forward in front of Griff. A tree trunk blocked the trail. Off to the left, the yellow of a newly hewn stump showed through the snow.

    “That didn’t come down in a wind,” the pediatrician said anxiously. “It’s been dropped.”

    “Fuck it all to hell,” Cantrell growled.

    “I don’t like this,” Arnie said. His cheek twitched. His gun barrel began a tight little dance in the air. “I don’t like this at all. They’re trying to trap us in here. That’s what they’re doing, you know. They’re trying to trap us in here!”

    Griff came by me unhurriedly and slipped the gun from the young doctor’s hands before he knew it had happened. Griff clicked the safety back on. “It’s time to be straight now, Doc. We don’t want to hurt each other accidentally.”

    Arnie gazed at him blankly. Then he dropped onto the tree trunk. He kneaded his knee with his left hand. He cleared his throat, then did it again. When he raised his head, he had come back from inside. “It won’t happen again.”

    There was no chance of moving the tree and no chance of going forward the way things stood. I crossed through the deep snow to the stump. No new tracks around it. Weather had discolored the wood. I figured it was at least a week or two since the tree had been felled. It bore the chip and gouge marks of an ax. “They don’t believe in chain saws,” I remarked.

    Cantrell, who had been sitting on the angular hood of the snowmobile, brightened. “But we do!”

    Cantrell insisted he’d make better time alone returning the six miles to the lodge for the chain saw and left before we could stop him. Griff, Arnie and I waited by the downed tree. We said nothing to each other for several minutes. Then Griff handed Arnie back his rifle.

    “Thanks,” the doctor said.

    “Don’t mention it,” Griff replied.

    We took positions with our backs to one another, blinking away the driving snow, watching the woods for movement, telling each other stories to keep the worry at bay.

    Arnie had met his wife in high school. She had supported him through medical school by working as a court reporter. They had three girls. The oldest, Michelle, was nine and had asked him to take her hunting sometime. He’d been considering it, but now he didn’t know if he would. Griff’s son, Jack, was a graduate student in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. He rarely hunted anymore. “His generation doesn’t have the attention span for it,” Griff said sadly. “It’s all quick images and information digested and spit out.”

    I told them how Kevin had tried to keep Patrick sheltered from the idea of hunting after my interest had been reawakened. Even after I’d left the house, Patrick was pretending his crutch was a gun. Much to Kevin’s dismay.

    Griff laughed. “Doesn’t your husband know it’s in the genes? Something that goes back tens of thousands of years? You can’t wash away the innate desire to hunt in a generation or two.”

    “People who live in cities are disconnected,” I agreed.

    “Yeah,” said Arnie miserably. “Well, at least people in the cities aren’t being hunted.”

    “Do we watch the same evening news?” Griff asked.

    Before Arnie could respond, we heard the distant pule of Cantrell’s snowmobile returning and then, through the driving snow, saw the headlight. With the long-bladed chain saw, the outfitter made short work of the trunk.

    When we got on our way again, it was ten o’clock. We would not reach Logging Camp Four until nearly two. Over the course of the next seventeen miles, we encountered eight dropped trees. And the planks on the rude bridge that spanned the Sticks had been hacked away.

    In silence, we cut young aspens to lay across the bridge supports that remained. But I could tell that the level of effort the killers had gone to in order to trap us inside the estate was on our minds, fragmenting our concentration. The ninth tree blocked the trail about a mile and a half from the logging camp.

    “I’m beat,” Arnie complained. “I don’t know if I can move another log.”

    “We can’t,” Cantrell said. “We’re out of chain saw fuel. We’ll walk it from here.”

    “I can’t,” the pediatrician whined.

    “You have to,” Griff said. “It’s all of us or none of us.”

    My back ached. My long underwear was chilly and clammy against my skin from wrestling the logs free of the trail. I was fighting off the chatters. But I had come this far. I wasn’t turning back. “I want to use that phone.”

    “Me, too,” Griff said.

    Arnie surrendered. “All right, let’s get it over with.”

    Cantrell broke trail. I followed, with Arnie and Griff bringing up the rear. There was now eight new inches of fluffy snow on top of the fifteen inches that had fallen since our arrival three days ago. I tried to focus on what was ahead of me, not behind, to embrace the idea that the future was still a possibility and the past a ballast to be dropped. But as we marched through that chalky world, I found myself unable to shake the memories that the storm had spurred.

    My father lived in two worlds, maybe more. He was a physician in public. But his private life was dominated by the teachings he’d learned as a boy from Mitchell. He did not consider himself a full-fledged Puoin, or Micmac shaman, as Mitchell did. But my father was, in every sense of the word, a medicine man.

    I was probably twelve when that fact fully struck home, when I realized how well he managed to bridge the worlds of traditional and modern medicine man. It was two days before Thanksgiving. We were at the cabin outside Baxter. Katherine was due to arrive for the holiday the next afternoon. It had been snowing on and off for several days — good tracking conditions — and we had had a run on one nice deer that left me nodding off at the dinner table. There was a knock at the door. A man from a camp about two miles from ours. His son was running a high fever and complained of stomach pain.

    Their tar-papered cabin was a single-room affair with a potbellied stove in the center. Kerosene lanterns hung from nails in the rafters. A half-dozen men milled about. The tops of their union suits ballooned out from green wool pants. They regarded me as if I were some kind of invader in their inner sanctum. Which I was. I could tell some of them looked at my father the same way. He was a doctor, but he was also an Indian. If my father sensed their prejudice, he did not show it. He went straight to the boy, curled up on one of the lower bunks sweating and groaning.

    Frank was three years older than I, beautiful really, with reddish hair, freckles and thick hands. But the fever had washed out his skin and made it claylike.

    I stood near the door with my hands behind my back, breathing through my mouth so I would not have to smell the thick odor of men who had not bathed in more than a week. My father knelt by Frank and examined him for several minutes. The boy kept moaning. I remember his moans. Thinking about them while I was walking into Logging Camp Four reminded me of my own moans when Patrick and Emily were born. I’ve come to believe that the threat of entering this world and the threat of going out elicits the same response, a gibberish spoken in some primordial language we all understand yet loathe.

    Anyway, my father stood up suddenly and said, “Frank needs a hospital, but it’s too far in this storm. We’ll have to do it here.”

    He motioned to Frank’s father and a couple of the other men to clear off the wooden picnic table. They found a sheet that wasn’t badly soiled and they stripped Frank, which made me stare; I was twelve, after all. They laid him on the sheet on the table. My father called me forward and told me I’d help. I shook my head no, but he had a way about him that let me know that I would have to do it. I helped him boil the instruments. He put some liquid on a gauze and told Frank’s father to hold it over his boy’s mouth. Frank stopped moaning.

    As my father worked, I watched his face for signs. He offered none save a wink toward me now and hen, and a word of support to Frank’s father, who was sweating profusely. I handed my father the instruments he called for. I did not want to look down. When I had to hold gauze on the wound, I looked away quickly and studied Frank’s penis for want of anything else to focus on. It was all over in an hour. The appendix had been minutes from rupturing. We stayed all night until the boy’s fever ebbed. At dawn, my father told them they should get Frank to a hospital as soon as they could, but that he would be fine with rest.

    It takes a crisis to question the characteristics of our lives. On the drive back to our camp I drowsed, watching the truck’s windshield wipers slap at the thick, falling flakes in the early-morning light. In that hypnotic state, it was suddenly important to know why my father had become a doctor, and I asked him. He didn’t say anything for a long time, then told me it was probably for a lot of reasons, but only one stood out: he had been taught from an early age that to live a full and truthful life, one must achieve balance.

    “It is said that if you would be a hunter, a taker of life, you must also be a healer, a giver of life,” he said. “There are many kinds of people who can manipulate Power. In the old stories there are the Kinapaq, who use Power for their own ends, to run fast as the wind, to dive deep into water, to carry trees on their backs. But we are descended from Puoins, who use Power to cure. I saw becoming a doctor as a way to be modern and yet be whole.”

    An ironic response, of course, when you consider what happened six years later. But I get ahead of myself, because at that moment in my reverie, we spooked a bull elk from its bed not twenty-five yards off the trail to Logging Camp Four. If you have never heard a frightened elk sprint away through the woods — and until then, I never had — think of the skittering crash of football linemen. Think of that unexpected din in a silent forest.

    It was a full five minutes before any of us could take another step. And another five before the adrenaline drained from the back of my throat. We were all that way in the last part of the hike: jagged and raw from hours under the pressure, real or imagined, of being toyed with, of being game.

    Suddenly, when even I was beginning to think it might be better to turn back, the woods broke into a slash of whip trees I could not identify, but wondered at; they were blood-red and thorned and rimmed the clearing and the snow-buried buildings of Logging Camp Four. Cantrell waved us all into a crouch behind a large boulder. He brought out his binoculars and swept them back and forth across the clearing. After several moments, he whispered to me to stay there and cover the clearing while he, Arnie and Griff went for the phone. I started to protest, but then stopped; I had set myself up as the markswoman. I would act the part.