Prophecy (6 page)

They gazed at each other with frightened eyes, numbed by the near fatality.

“You all right?”

“I couldn’t get the release …”

“I’ve never seen them do that… .”

“Whatever they’re after is down in that gully.”

“If it’s down there, it’s a dead man.”

“They don’t bay like that for a dead man.”

“Let’s get the dog up.”

With shaking arms, they grabbed the taut leash, snaking their hands through it to get a firm grip.

“Heave!”

They pulled in unison, gaining three feet of slack. Then they grabbed hold again.

“Heave!”

They pulled again. But this time, to no avail. It was as though the dog’s weight had suddenly increased beyond their strength. Digging their heels into the dirt, they continued to pull, their teeth gritted with exer-

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tion, their eyes meeting in confusion. It was becoming a struggle, a test of strength, as though something were pulling from the other end.

“Oh, God …” one of them moaned as they were abruptly dragged forward.

“Hold me!” cried the leashman who was tied to it. “Help me!”

One of them thrust an arm into the dragged man’s belt, locking himself into the combat. The other man let go, but the dragged man grabbed onto him, clinging to him like a drowning man going under.

“No… I” one of them sobbed as they were dragged unstoppably forward. And with a sudden jerk their bodies left the ground, catapulting into the air, their screams echoing as they cartwheeled downward into the chasm.

Only one of them lived long enough after hitting the ground to see what it was that had pulled them. It stood over him, emitting a quiet squeal, and raised an arm that revealed a skinfold beneath it, with veins traced like tree branches, back lit by the moon. It was all the man saw before his head was severed from his body, the chemical reaction called memory quickly dissipating as the head smashed against a tree.

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5

As John Hawks sat in grim silence, gazing out the window of the train that took him from Washington, D.C., to Maine, he saw dawn breaking over the stately pinnacle of Mount Katahdin. It was a sight he had not seen for seven years.

That last visit to the place of his birth, when he was twenty-one, had been a profound disappointment. He had been seeking ancestral ties, re-immersion into a culture he had forsaken. But he found that the Masaquoddy people had fallen into cultural limbo. The village he remembered from childhood as beautiful and magical had become a garbage dump; a collection of huts made from cast-off materials, the ground littered with unusable machinery and the skeletons of defunct automobiles.

Proximity to the white man’s world had taken its toll. The incipient feeling of inferiority had created an appetite for mimicry. Washing machines were purchased even though the village had no electrical power source, transistor radios abounded even though nothing but static could be picked up because of the barriers of mountains. Automobiles were bought and junked there because no gasoline could be afforded. White Woolworth brassiers could be seen intruding between the earth colors of the women’s animal-hide jackets and their rich brown skin.

And yet, in spite of all this material weakness, the Masaquoddy still had their pride. Pride enough to

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avoid contact with the whites. Pride enough to resent John Hawks for having been a part of the white world.

It was likely that there was white blood in John Hawks. It was his blessing and his curse. It had entered too far back in his lineage for him to trace, but it was discernible on his face. His features were fine, his skin was light. He had once taken secret delight in the knowledge that he could pass for white. But now he hated that knowledge, for it had filled his life with confusion.

It was because of his looks that he had been selected by Mary Pitney when he was twelve to be taken from the Masaquoddy village and educated at a boarding school in Portland. As owners of the lumber company on the shores of the Espee River, the Pitneys considered themselves philanthropic people. They were in their seventies then, and wanted to make sure, before it was too late, that they earned their passports to Heaven. There were two other Indian children selected. One was from the Yurok tribe, one from the Ashinabeg; Hawks was the third. The Yurok killed himself when he was a teenager. The Ashinabeg died in Vietnam.

Hawks was the only one who survived the ordeal; he survived it by deception: losing his tribal accent, dressing as the white children dressed, and learning that it was better to be white than red. For many years he made a conscious effort to forget where he was born; he even invented a history of descendance from a wealthy Bostonian family, who, he said, were all deceased. The Pitneys had died by the time he was sixteen, leaving him an educational fund administered by a bank in Portland; he himself was an orphan. There was no one, except his inner self, to remind him of the truth.

But the lifetime of deception took its toll. Passing for white in a country heavily populated with Indians, he was often privileged to conversations normally reserved for whites only. The jokes were torturous, and he forced himself to laugh at them.

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After boarding school, he won a scholarship to the University of Maine in Orono. It was there that the truth came out and humiliated him. He had become enamored of a girl who was wealthy, well-bred, born and raised in Boston. Having heard his story about coming from a wealthy Bostonian family, she took it upon herself to research the facts. Hawks left college immediately after, with the sound of laughter ringing in his ears.

Angered and ashamed, Hawks went back to his village, but found that they would not accept him, either. He dressed in buckskins, and tried to reinterest them in living the way that Indians once lived, but they considered him a joke. Like a bird telling a wolf how a wolf should be. There was only one person who extended kindness to him. Her name was Romona Peters. She and her grandfather, among all the people in the village, were the only ones who tried to maintain a hold on Indian life.

To Romona, John Hawks represented everything that she herself was unable to be. He had education and a knowledge of the world outside of the forest. She, in turn, had a purity that he envied. She was Indian through and through, and had no desire to copy the ways of the white world.

The attraction between them was instant and, even though it was forbidden by Indian law, they became lovers. But the very differences that brought them together drove them apart. It was in 1971, and the Pitnev Paper Mill was sending out the first signal that it would one day make a claim to the entirety of the Indian land. Workmen were tearing down the old, outdated pulping mill and building a gigantic factory on the shores of the Espee River. John Hawks alone knew that it meant trouble. From his exposure to newsnnners and television, he was familiar with the land-grab that was going on in the Pacific Northwest, and saw that the new factory, when completed, would be capable of gobbling up the entire forest. He attempted to rally the Masaquoddy people behind him,

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but they resisted. Even Romona was against him. She was a pacifist, and claimed that confrontation would lead to their downfall. Beyond that, she felt that confrontation was premature. She believed it was Hawks’s anger at the Pitneys for disrupting his life, rather than the reality of a new factory, that was provoking his rage.

There were bitter words between them, and John Hawks left Manatee Forest, he thought forever.

He went to where the action was, observing other tribes who were battling industry for their land. As he witnessed successive battles and defeats, he learned that there was only one tactic that halted the momentum of land-grab. That tactic was violence. Not that there was victory in violence. There would never be victory, no matter what. But there was satisfaction in violence. As much as Hawks liked to trade verbiage with the industrialists and politicians and beat them at their own game, he knew that ultimately they considered him harmless. Like a dog that had been taught to walk on its hind legs, but would ultimately have to return to all four. It was only when the dog showed his teeth that he was respected.

Having followed the trail of destruction from forest to forest and tribe to tribe, Hawks had wound up in Washington, where demonstrators were finally massing, to join a chorus of protest against the theft of Indian land. To his surprise he found representatives there from his own part of the world eager to have someone unite them and act as their spokesman. It was the opportunity Hawks was waiting for. He had predicted what had come to pass; they looked to him now to save them.

It was not only that he was given the power to represent his peonle. He was, at last, given validity as an Tndian. In spite of some throwback genes and a vocabulary that sounded like the white man’s dictionary, he could now declare to the world that, in his heart, soul, and spirit, he was at one with his people.

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His three meetings with the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs were token gestures, both on his part and on theirs. The war of words was heavily loaded on the side of government. “Justice” had as much meaning as “tennis court.” A concept valid to only those who could afford it. It was plain that the industrial complex felt it could mow down the forest like grass beneath a lawnmower, with little or no resistance from the people who rightfully owned it. They were about to find out differently. For John Hawks was prepared to fight.

As the small train wound around the base of Mount Katahdin, Hawks thought about Romona. He wondered if she was still there, if she would welcome him. He had thought of Romona often over the years; for periods of time he’d thought of her constantly. He knew that if, as a child, he had not been taken from his village, he and Romona would have grown up together and been married. He would have been a fisherman, she the mother of several children. He cursed the Pitneys for the confusion they had caused him; he was glad for the opportunity to fight back.

He remembered a conversation he’d had with Romona’s grandfather seven years ago, when the old man gave him a stern warning about the forces of anger. “It is not the purpose of one family to vanquish another,” M’rai had said. “For one family to point the finger at another and say ‘This is the villain’ is as destructive as having that finger pointed at you yourself.” Hawks had replied that if a man refused to fight for what was his, he deserved to have it taken away from him.

“If it is truly yours,” the old man replied, “you do not have to fight for it.”

“No one’s going to help us, old man,” Hawks remembered saying.

“The forest will help us,” M’rai had replied. “Katahdin will help us.”

Hawks had been amazed at the old man’s childish-

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ness. But that was his beauty, too; his belief in the ancient legends.

Katahdin was perhaps the first legend that any Masaquoddy child ever learned: the mythical beast whose physical makeup was a mixture of every creature that God ever created. It was said that in times of need, Katahdin would awaken from his slumber to defend whichever of God’s creatures needed protecting.

Hawks closed his eyes and envisioned the old man standing in a desecrated wasteland where the trees once stood. He wondered if, finally, the old man would lose his childlike belief in Katahdin,

“It’s a *boreal forest,’ Maggie. You know what that means?”

Robert Vern stood in the bedroom of their small Georgetown apartment, packing a suitcase as he spoke, his voice raised over the sound of an orchestra coming from the living room. There, Maggie sat in a stiff-backed chair, playing a cello solo to an accompaniment that blared from the speakers of her portable tape recorder. It was Schumann’s Cello Concerto, a difficult selection that was to open the subscription season of the Washington Symphony. It was because she had been chosen to play the solo that she was unable to accompany Rob to Maine.

“Maggie? You hearing me?”

Rob waited for a response, but none came. His voice had been loud enough. She just wasn’t answering.

Her dark and silent mood had begun a week ago, and Rob was deeply troubled by it. It had apparently started the night he noticed her tears.

He had remained at home the following morning to speak to her about it, but she was uncommunicative, passing it off as nothing more than a bad dream. But he knew it was something more. On successive nights he had noticed a bottle of Valium on her bed table;

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she had never before used drugs to go to sleep. Twice he pressed her on the subject; both times she avoided it. It was as though she had become afraid of him. Sometimes when she watched him, there was accusation in her eyes.

He was frightened now of pressing too hard, for when he searched his mind for a possible answer, his stomach tightened with fear. With all the time they spent apart, it was possible that Maggie had become attracted to another man. It was something he couldn’t deal with. In the seven years of their marriage, he had remained faithful; he was deeply committed to her and could not bear to think that she was not the same. If, in fact, she had a lover, Rob knew it was his own fault. He had taken her for granted, just assumed she would always be there.

The thought of it caused him so much anguish that he pushed it from his mind, forcing his attention back to the job at hand. Picking up a stack of thick books, he placed it next to his medical kit. The titles of the books were Soil Erosion, Hydroculture, Industrial Hazards; just a few of the dozens he’d been poring over since he’d accepted Victor’s offer to go with the EPA. He was uneasy about the decision. It somehow didn’t seem right. He felt he was in over his head, in a field that didn’t really suit him. Nevertheless, he’d given his work, and was committed to no more than the two weeks ahead of him.

For the past six days, he’d immersed himself in research, getting special dispensation to stay in the Washington Library after closing hours, and had spent a weekend with a veteran field worker in the forests of New Jersey. He had learned how to collect soil samples and analyze them for water absorption and mineral content; he could identify over forty members of the Pinaceae genre of trees. He could even determine the age, health, and amount of waterfall over a ten-year period by examining the under bark of a tree.