The Purification Ceremony (27 page)

    I remembered some of the words and closed my eyes and sang them. The more I sang, the more I could smell the succulent new grass and the peeper frogs calling from the river’s edge; and I found myself comforted by the idea that even though my kids might have to endure the winter of my passing, they would endure and find spring again.

    When I stopped singing, I opened my eyes to find him squatting at the tunnel entrance watching me. He had my gun. “We’re leaving now, Little Crow,” he said.

    “Where?” I asked, encouraged that I was not to remain behind in the cave.

    “Not far,” he said.

    I hummed the spring song to myself. It was a good way to prepare to die.

    He came behind me with that Stone Age knife and cut away the lashes at my wrists and then again at my ankles. As the blood returned to my feet and hands, it made my skin itch painfully. He told me to get my waders on. My limbs had gone numb from so many hours of inactivity and I had to wriggle my entire body to get my legs down into the rubber sheaths. He handed me my gloves and hat. When I put them on, I saw by my watch that it was a quarter to eleven in the evening; I’d been in the cave almost an entire day. He motioned with the gun toward the tunnel and I crawled through the passageway. I emerged into a stiff wind under a sky where clouds fractured the moonlight.

    “Move away from the tunnel entrance and face downhill,” he commanded.

    I took two gingerly steps away from the tunnel. He scrambled out immediately and nudged me down the hill with the gun barrel. I grasped at tree branches to help me slide on wobbly legs down the rock face until I’d reached the maze of poplars I’d passed through that morning.

    He flashed the light so I might see his path. We walked together until we got to the bank of the Dream, on the far side of which I could see the faint glow of a fire burning. He motioned to me to move into the water and raise my hands. He gave me a piece of rope to loop around the one that stretched back to land. Before I went out onto the sandbar, he loosened the strap around my chest, making sure that if I let go of the rope and tried to float away, the waders would fill quickly and take me to the bottom.

    Then he slung the gun across his chest, shoved the thin flashlight between his teeth and looped his own safety line around the cable. “Go,” he ordered.

    A cloud passed in front of the moon just as I entered the water, immediately spurring in me the memory of the river of odors in my hallucination. His flashlight flickered like a strobe on the white water, chopping everything into rapid snapshots of information: the raging ice water buffeting me, my slithering movements across the submerged boulders, the dim outline of the far shore and the possibility of living a little while longer. Twice I came off the boulders and was suspended nearly horizontal by the current, only to have him pull me back to the center. I finally staggered into the shallows and fell on the bank, panting.

    He drew that ugly knife again. He cut the rope that had linked him to his sanctuary, then ordered me to move. About fifty yards back from the bank, he’d erected a shelter of sorts by lashing the deer hides between several saplings to form rear and side walls as well as a shallow roof, and more hides on the ground for a floor. The fire burned brightly in front of the shelter. I knelt next to it and warmed my hands.

    “Take off the wader and the rest of your clothes,” he commanded.

    “M-my clothes?” I stammered.

    “All of them,” he said and he pointed the rifle at me.

    “Why?”

    “It’s not what you think,” he replied.

    “Then why?” I insisted. From his expression I could tell he was within another level of existence, in the world of hallucinogens and visions. I fought against a rising hysteria. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

    “No, I have more respect for you than that.”

    “Then what — ” I began.

    He cut me off. “Don’t talk. Just do it.”

    My eyes watered as I lay down on my back on the deer hides and wrenched myself free of the waders. He took them and walked back toward the river and flung them into the darkness.

    He returned and watched without emotion as I stripped off my jacket, pants, vest, shirt and long underwear. I placed each article in front of me until there was a pile.

    “Finish,” he said.

    I slipped out of my panties and bra, but did not remove the leather-and-quillwork pouch around my neck.

    “Finish,” he said.

    “It’s the only thing I have of my family,” I said, shivering despite the intense heat coming from the fire. “I won’t take it off.”

    He threatened to explode, then went the other way and grinned. “You are very much like her,” he said.

    ‘‘Like who?” I asked, knowing already. “Was she your wife?”

    He stiffened. “She was more than my wife, she was my mate.” He walked around behind me, knelt and put his hands on my shoulders.

    I said nothing. I looked into the fire, tensing, waiting for the assault to begin. Instead, he bound my hands behind me with a thong of deer hide.

    “Do not fret,” he said. “During sacred rituals, the Mara’a-kame is forbidden from any sexual act, though I long to.”

    He crawled in front of me and looked at my body with obvious hunger. I glanced away, humiliated, as he tied my ankles together. When he was positive I couldn’t escape, he draped a hide around my shoulders and another over my legs.

    He stood back to admire his handiwork, then picked up the pile of my clothing and threw it into the fire. The gun was thrown in the river. Coming back, he turned over the charred remains of my clothes so they would burn completely, then added more wood until it sparked and shot flames toward the branches above. I turned my face away from the heat. There, protruding from the snow five feet from the edge of my shelter, was the broken femur bone of a deer. This must have been where he butchered the deer he had killed before taking the meat and the hides to the island, I thought.

    Meanwhile, he was fishing in his pack. He turned around with a smaller pipe than before, a second leather pouch with a strange blue design on it and three feathers: one black, one whitish, one copper. These he tucked into my hair.

    He sat next to me and watched the fire as he packed the pipe bowl. “This is a different mixture, Little Crow,” he announced, taking a burning stick from the fire and applying it to the bowl. “No visions. But all your senses will become razor-sharp, like a mirror reflecting perfectly all that is around you. The breath of the wolf, the hunting smoke.”

    I knew from past experience there was no fighting him, so I took the stem in my mouth and drew in a deep inhalation of the concoction.

    Inside, the smoke expanded and pressed out hot against my lungs. I coughed and hacked and teared, but took a second drag of it at his command. As he had predicted, there were none of the overpowering sensations I’d experienced earlier in the day, but the smoke had an almost immediate effect: my ears, eyes, nose, tongue and skin hummed. I could smell the river beyond the fire, and the poplar saplings on the island beyond that. I could see the shapes of trees out in what had been darkness. And then, to the west, I could hear the faint howling of wolves.

    He seemed to hear it, too, for he stood and crossed straight to his backpack. He brought out two more sacs of the deer blood. He bit at one with his teeth, then dripped some of it on the deer hide that covered my lap and continued dripping it in a diagonal line to a point about forty feet beyond the fire ring. He did the same thing in a second direction with the other sac. He threw the sacs into the fire, then hoisted the pack on his shoulder, picked up his bow and tied his quiver to his hip and leg. Even from twenty feet away I could hear his breath, shallow and quick now, the kind of breath you get when you have sighted game you wish to take.

    “You said you would not kill me.”

    “And I will not,” he answered, jerking his head west toward the Sticks River. “They will. They are my allies. They come every night and I feed them deer meat. Now they will feed on you, a sacrifice to my allies.”

    I struggled against the lashes. “You are crazy! She would think so, too!”

    Two huge strides and he was before me, his knife raised over my head. I bowed, awaiting the inevitable, preferring it to the prospect of the wolf pack.

    Instead, he knelt and said earnestly, as if he had to make me understand, as if I was the only one capable of understanding, “She loves me for what I am doing. For us the hunt was a divine ritual, a way of meeting God through the pattern of life and death that makes up this life. I am making the ritual clean again, as it was before her loss.”

    “No, you’re making it evil.”

    His expression hardened. “You don’t see, then, do you?” “I see a man gone mad from his wounds.”

    “Well, so be it,” he grunted. He stood. “I misjudged you. They are coming now. I must go to the camp of my enemy to complete the purification ceremony.”

    And then he was a form flowing into the shadow world beyond the fire and gone. The flames, leaping and sawing at the night sky just minutes ago, had waned, leaving just a crackling fire. Within minutes it would linger to embers. I twisted my arms and legs against the knots he had tied. But all I achieved was a dislodging of the deer robe from my shoulders; it sloughed off and settled around my waist. I gazed down at the ivory-and-black quills so tightly woven on the surface of my pouch and I wanted to cry.

    The wind picked up and clawed at my breasts like icy, sharp fingernails. I looked down at them in the firelight and was overcome with the vision of those late nights at home in Boston when I had held my babies and felt them draw milk from me; and all had been right and good and possible. I closed my eyes and let that sensation calm me for a few precious moments.

    I heard the first one padding toward me from my left. She traversed the drifts like coiled force, panting and lolling her tongue in anticipation. The thick hollow hairs of her winter coat caressed the willow whips along the riverbank. I smelled the blood he had dripped on me and the snow and the different, almost copper smell of the dried blood around the wolf’s muzzle from an earlier hunt. She did not come in close enough for me to see her at first.

    She waited until five others had joined her.

    A chunk of wood on the fire burned through and collapsed and the circle of light diminished. I sensed her advance, the others fanning out behind her. The clouds overhead broke and the moon shone through, bathing the crescent of land around me in a pale light.

    Two of the wolves growled and nosed the blood trail to my right. The other three sat on stumps about forty yards away, their topaz eyes reflecting the dying flames that offered my only protection.

    

    

    A strange quiet swept over the midnight woods. It settled around me, raising bumps on my flesh, made me understand it was not a true quiet, more a white noise composed of monotonous rhythms, like chants or drumbeats heard from afar. The gentle din became the veil through which I watched the wolf closest to me drop its head and its center so its shoulder blades spiked above its spine, tail out straight. A hunting posture.

    I dug my heels into the deer skin and kicked back toward the rear wall of the shelter.

    The wolf growled and took two quick steps forward. The second wolf trailed the scout and stood at its hip, intent on me. Another step and suddenly a gust of wind bellowed the fire until it popped and sparked with renewed life. The smoke billowed out along the ground, grating at the eyes of the hunters. They sneezed, choked and retreated toward the rest of the pack. They would wait until the fire died before they attacked.

    I was suddenly weaker than I’d ever been in my life, surprised I could even remain sitting upright. The vague forms watched me and I wondered if I’d have the will to die with dignity. Mitchell always maintained that death was just a passage to one of the other worlds, and what we leave behind becomes a new source of life. He buried the bones of his deer because he believed the animals would reenflesh themselves for future hunters. Would my flesh give Power to these wolves and so to the killer?

    The fire ebbed again. And in the shadows the she-wolf took a cautious stride to the right. I knew what she was doing from a story my father had told me years ago, after he’d witnessed a wolf pack take down a cow moose during a hunt he was on in northern Minnesota. She and her pack would try to flank me, to get behind me so they could tear at my back before going for my throat.

    She took another step and I flashed on my father’s body worried by scavengers and then on the bloody snow where this pack had torn at what was left of Patterson.

    The quiet started to envelop me again. Only to change its shape into seething anger when I thought of Patrick and Emily. I would not pass from this world meekly.

    I wrenched my arms and legs against the lashes, but they did not budge. The pack leader took three more steps, sinking into herself even as she moved. And the rest of them began to slowly fan out around me.

    The fire was perishing. I rolled to my side and got my feet under one of the deer hides and kicked it into the flames. The tallow and the hair sizzled, flared and sent forth an acrid, sickening smoke that forced the animals back several yards. I rolled around some more and tried to get my hands into the fire, to burn away the knots. The flames seared my palms. I screamed and threw myself forward away from the fire, facedown in the deer skins, sweating with effort despite my nakedness.

    The wolves growled behind me. My back was exposed. They wanted to attack, but the fire and the horrible smoke kept them at bay. I was struggling to get myself turned around when I saw the sharp femur bone sticking out of the snow five feet from my sanctuary.