The Purification Ceremony (22 page)

    Arnie nodded. “Hold him while I cut away his clothes.”

    The cedar shaft and the exquisite turkey-feather fletching jutted from Earl’s parka low in the center of his back, just above his pelvis. Arnie drew out his hunting knife and sliced at the clothing around the shaft. The fabric tugged at the arrow once and a shudder went up through Earl and he screamed and then retched. I held Earl tighter while Arnie trimmed away the last of the wool shirt. The arrow was exposed now, and from the length of the shaft showing above his flesh, the broadhead had not penetrated deeply. There was very little blood, but it had obviously struck spine and done its work.

    “Earl,” Arnie said after a few minutes of palpating the area. “You’ve been hit bad, but not as bad as it could have been. The arrow looks to be just above the first lumbar vertebra, which means your legs may not move right now, but, depending on the damage, they may in time. And you won’t lose your bowel or bladder control. The important thing right now is to get you stabilized and back to the camp. Do you understand?”

    Earl let out a muffled “yes.” By then, Cantrell, Butch and Sheila, and Theresa and Nelson had come into the burn.

    Cantrell took one look and cried: “I knew this was a dumb idea. I knew it.”

    “It’s my fault,” Lenore whimpered.

    “What happened?” Kurant asked. He had a notebook out of his pocket.

    “Can’t you give it a rest?” I asked. “Her husband’s wounded.”

    “No!” Lenore said. “I want to tell him… I want to tell him what I did. There’s a big knob back there in the woods and we were coming up to it when we heard the shot… and Diana said she’d lost the track. But then we jumped this deer on the face of the knob and I knew it was a record-book buck, what Earl’s been after his whole life. I told him we’d have to split up, and I’d try to drive the deer to him.”

    “I wanted to, sweet thing,” Earl whispered. “Not your fault. I wanted to.”

    “I cut to my right about seventy-five yards and let him out of my sight,” she continued. “I found the deer’s tracks again about a hundred yards further on. He was trying to circle the far end of the knob, pushing crosswind toward Earl. I’d gone only another fifty feet when I came on a man’s footprints alongside the buck’s. I guess he’d seen the deer, too, and decided to run with it. I sprinted, trying to find Earl… to warn him… but before I could yell, he shot. And I thought, It’s all right. Earl’s shot the killer. It’s all right…”

    She paused, her lower lip quivering. “And then Earl, he screamed that awful scream. And when I could see through the brush into this opening, Earl was facedown next to the deer and that bastard was running toward him with a knife out, the wolf skin trailing off his shoulders like wings. I knew what he wanted and I was not going to let him have it. I went right at him. He heard me breaking branches coming in and he changed directions so fast, you know… going inside out on himself like he wasn’t human, but… I don’t know… an animal or something… I got one shot at him and I missed… I… I never miss.”

    She broke down and sobbed. Theresa went and put her arms around Lenore’s quaking shoulders. Earl’s gloved hand stroked at her leg.

    Lenore, I — ”

    “Clippers,” Arnie said, interrupting him. “Anybody got pruning clippers in their packs?”

    “My leatherman tool’s got a little saw,” Nelson offered.

    “It’ll have to do,” Arnie said. He took the tool from the guide and opened it to the saw. He got some alcohol from a first-aid kit in his pack and drenched the saw and the wound.

    Cantrell and Nelson held Earl’s legs. Kurant and Griff got him by the shoulders. Lenore cradled her husband’s head. Phil walked to the west fifty yards or so, unable to watch. Butch looked off into the snowflakes falling. Sheila knelt next to me and at Arnie’s direction helped pack snow around the wound. I gripped the shaft. I tried to let my hand float with Earl’s breath. When he was convinced the flesh was numb, Arnie set the saw’s teeth into the arrow about a half inch above Earl’s back. The saw made a grinding noise at the first bite. Earl went white, dry-heaved, then passed out.

    Arnie worked in time with Earl’s breathing, too. He let the teeth bite on the exhale and free on the inhale. Bits of red wood flared into the air.

    I watched the saw work in a failed attempt to keep my mind off the fact that I hadn’t read the sign clearly. We’d had our best chance and one of us had been crippled. The killer was putting ground between us. If we were to go after him, it would have to be soon, or the wind and snow would obliterate his tracks and leave us as ignorant and as vulnerable as we’d been setting out this morning. In any case, he knew clearly he was being hunted now. And he’d tell his partner. And that made them even more dangerous than before.

    The shaft broke free. Now there was just a nub of wood showing from Earl’s back. The snow had reduced the swelling. The three blades of the broadhead were visible against the purpling flesh.

    I stared at the blades and the way they formed a Y under Earl’s skin. An intersection of pain and mad purpose that I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

    Arnie had Phil and Butch cut saplings to form the braces and support limbs for the ribwork of a stretcher. Cantrell took drag ropes and articles of clothing from each of us. He lashed the limbs to the saplings, then cut holes in the clothes and tied them in the gaps. Arnie got smaller saplings and strapped them lengthwise along Earl’s body to keep it ridged, to minimize the damage.

    When the litter was complete, we all slid our hands under Earl and lifted him onto the stretcher.

    “We’re going to have to hurry,” Arnie said. “He’s going into shock.”

    “Can that broadhead stay in there until the plane comes?” Sheila asked.

    Arnie didn’t respond.

    “Arnie?” Butch said. “That’s six days.”

    “Operating could open him to more infection,” Arnie said, “but depending on how he responds to the medicine, we might have to.”

    “You gonna cut him out here?” Phil cried. “Damn.”

    Lenore crossed her arms across her chest. “You’re no surgeon. I want a second opinion.”

    Arnie shook his head. “There are no second opinions here. Just me. And I’m not going to do it unless I have to.”

    “Arnie, you can’t…” Butch began.

    “Shut up, Butch.” Arnie cut him off. “I may be a smalltime pediatrician to you, but I’m the only doctor you got. I’ll make the call on this one.”

    We all looked at Earl for a moment.

    “Well, what about the mother who did this?” Phil demanded. “We’ve got to go after him now, before he gets away.”

    “No!” Cantrell said. “We tried that and look what’s happened.”

    Kurant said, “We probably would have had him if Earl hadn’t gotten horny to kill some innocent animal and forgotten we were out here to capture a murderer.”

    “You asshole!” Lenore screamed. She raced at the journalist and pummeled at his head.

    Nelson grabbed her and pulled her away. Cantrell got in the writer’s face. “I’ve had enough of you and your smartguy remarks. All you’ve done since you’ve been here is do your best to stir up trouble.”

    Kurant sort of smirked. “Am I wrong? If I’m getting the facts wrong, tell me.”

    Cantrell gritted his teeth so hard I thought he’d break enamel. “Fuck you!”

    “Anybody ever compliment you on your agile command of the language?”

    The outfitter’s punch caught Kurant square in the solar plexus. He made an ooomph noise in disbelief, then reared backward into the snow. No one moved to help him.

    “C’mon!” Arnie cried. “We need to get Earl back to the lodge. He’s going into shock.”

    Cantrell was all business now. He pointed at Phil and Butch. “You guys get the front. Griff and Nelson are at the back.”

    Nelson cleared his throat. “Mike… Phil’s got a point, eh? Now, hold on before you get crazy on me. This killer has made big mistakes the last couple days, missing Phil and wounding Earl. He’s losing control. He’ll make more mistakes. I want to take Diana and track him out of here.”

    “No way,” Cantrell said. “I can’t have any more clients wounded or dead.”

    I stepped forward. “We won’t try to close in on him, Mike. It’s only a scouting mission, try to figure out where he goes when he leaves. If we don’t go after him now, the snow’s going to fill his tracks and we’ll be right back where we were.”

    Phil nodded. “Even if we don’t go after him again, we can tell the Mounties where to start looking.”

    “Mike!” Arnie pleaded. “Earl’s fading.”

    Cantrell threw his arm at me and Nelson. “You’ve got three hours,” he said. “Then you turn back.”

    Nelson was a hunter my father would have respected. He moved surefooted, steady and aware through the tangle beyond the beaver pond. He’d taken Kurant’s 12-gauge in case we jumped the killer at short range. Though it was unsaid, I understood capture was no longer an option.

    We each took one side of the sign and worked it north. The killer had gone out from the burn in sprinting strides; the toes of his boots dug troughs as they exited each print; his knees dragged out hollows between the tracks. Incredibly, he’d kept this pace up for almost a half mile, then slowed and leaned against a tree and urinated. I found more wolf hairs clinging to the branch above his spoor. A quarter mile later, Nelson found a place where he’d stooped. A linear slash in the snow marked where he’d rested his bow.

    Beside it was a clear print of his bare hand. Seeing it, strangely, I could see him, checking his back trail, plotting his escape. My own right hand seemed to tingle. The tingle turned to the stinging of snow robbing flesh of warmth. And that degenerated into the itch of gradual numbness and the trickle of melting snow on my wrist. I stared at my hand, not quite believing. It occurred to me that had this happened a few days before — before Patterson, Grover, Pawlett and now Earl — if it had happened when I’d been tracking a deer and not a man, I would have taken heart from the sensation; it marked, in no insignificant way, that my skills were returning to that level at which I’d abandoned them in my late teens. But I was scared of the feeling.

    “You don’t look so good, eh?” Nelson said.

    I looked at him dumbly, then stammered, “I-I haven’t eaten or h-had anything t-to drink since before dawn.”

    He fished in his pack and brought out a peanut butter sandwich and a water bottle. We split the sandwich and shared the bottle. He got out a cigarette.

    “Can’t shake the habit,” he apologized. “And this doesn’t seem the time to quit.”

    I blurted, “I know. I… I can feel him all around me sometimes.”

    Nelson gave me a queer look. “I guess.”

    I decided not to mention it again. We moved on. The tracks went almost due north. We climbed with them two thousand vertical feet up the central ridge. Every few hundred yards he’d loop and watch his back trail, then loop again and set out. I figured we were half an hour behind him. On the ridge top he took to the dense softwood thickets. He coursed through the jade maze with the fluid purpose of a bear that has scented dogs.

    The more we followed the track, the more I found myself able to predict where he would turn, where he would circle, where he would flank and where he would run. For a while there, I thought I understood him.

    “He’s going to break through that saddle up ahead, then angle back about a quarter of the way down the slope on the other side,” I announced.

    Nelson grinned sourly. “Thinks he’s a deer, eh?”

    “At times he acts that way.”

    But when we got in the saddle, he had not crossed through. Halfway between the two knobs, he’d walked backward in his tracks, then jumped west and accelerated uphill for thirty-five yards. There he’d tucked himself inside a large blowdown spruce, then bolted, cutting cross-grain to the slope almost to the break-off point before weaving down through the saddle and up the other side. I felt sick.

    Nelson scratched his head. “Guy doesn’t know where he’s going or why, eh? I think he’s losing his marbles, that’s what that shows.”

    I shook my head, trying to quell the nausea. “I wish it did.”

    I explained that I believed he was jeering at us, showing us that we could not predict his moves, that, in fact, he was predicting ours. He’d crouched in the blowdown to demonstrate he could have killed us as we advanced on the false trail.

    “But one of us would have gotten him, eh?”

    “Maybe,” I said. “If we’d gotten over the shock.’’

    “I don’t get shocked so easy,” Nelson said. “I say we push him some more.”

    The tracks took us to the very top of the eastern knob. He’d trotted to the edge of a rimrock, then taken a narrow game trail off the rock that forced us to face the cliff, use our hands for support and edge our way down. The sign suggested that he’d used his hands very little in his descent, which made me wonder whether he was more animal than man.

    By the time I reached the bottom, I was soaked from the effort. It was nearly two-thirty. We’d been on his track almost three hours. “Cantrell said…”

    “I know what he said,” Nelson said testily. “But we’re gonna give it another half hour. Up till now he’s been running wild. He’s got to do something we can pattern sooner or later.”

    We continued to drop in altitude in an easterly direction. The eerie blue sky of the morning was but memory. Clouds had returned, cold steel in color and pregnant with new moisture. The first snowflakes of the week’s fourth storm fell.

    “We’re going to lose him if this keeps up,” I said.

    “Not if I can help it, eh?” Nelson snapped.

    He lengthened his stride and I struggled to keep pace. On the downslope the killer’s gait opened as well. I imagined him loping, a rising sea of powder snow billowing behind him. His irises were jaundiced, his pupils diamond in shape. With my gathering fatigue came questions: did his tongue ever loll from the corner of his mouth? Did his belly ever bark in emptiness? Did his throat parch? Or did he defy such human conditions?