Soul Catcher (26 page)

Below the waterfall, the rock barrier forced
him to cross the stream. He got wet to the waist doing it, almost
lost his footing. He floundered through a pool, frightened a big
trout from beneath a cutbank. The trout went arrowing downstream,
half of its back exposed across a rocky shallows before it plunged
into deeper water.

David followed the trout across the
shallows, the river loud in his ears, climbed into the forest on
the other side, and found a game trail there.

He estimated three hours to nightfall. The
stream down which he moved now was a wide and roaring river, its
edges lost in the shadows of steep banks. Hemlocks and cedars on
both banks hid the upper ridges. Vine maples bowered the water in
places.

For a time, he found relatively easy passage
along a dry slough back from the stream. Bleached-white alders
lined the slough, scrawling sharp lines against the evergreen
background. He came on a logjam at the lower end of the slough.
There were rough gray trunks of long-dead trees to cross, another
maple bottom on the far side of the jam.

Fatigue and hunger forced him to a stop
before crossing the logjam. He sat on a log. His chest heaved.
Beneath his fear and fatigue, he felt the growth of elation. All
during the night he had nurtured his hope as he nurtured the tiny
fire. All through this day, he had lived in the shadow of signs and
portents. But there had been no evidence of Katsuk except that
brief flurry of ravens, and even they were gone. The sounds all
around him were dominated by the river working its way under the
edge of the logjam.

Katsuk had said once that this river sound
was the voice of Water Baby, a monster who could take human form.
The man’s words had given a sense of reality to the monster which
David had found it hard to discount. Water Baby trapped your soul
by getting you to tell it your name. David shuddered at the memory,
listened to the water. There were voices in the water, but no
words.

David looked up at the sky. It was getting
darker. The light had dropped markedly and the wind possessed a new
chill. Rain began to fall—big drenching drops. David got up, looked
for shelter. There was only the steep hill beyond the maples, the
logs. He was soaked to the skin in a minute, shivering with
cold.

As swiftly as it had come, the rain
passed.

Blue patches could be seen in the scudding
gray clouds.

Once more, David set off downstream. He
longed for shelter, despaired of finding it. The river ran beside
him, flowing noisily in its canyon. There were more patches of blue
sky, but he felt no sunlight.

An osprey took off from a gray snag ahead of
him. It climbed out over the watercourse, circled. David stared up
at the bird, letting his mind fly high, but his feet still
blundered through the rocks beside the river.

Osprey.

David recalled Katsuk describing a tribal
chief of the old times: blanket of dog wool, raven’s beak
headdress, osprey feathers in his headband.

The river made a wide curve to the left,
debauched from a spruce copse into a meadow full of blue camas.

David stopped within the tree shadows.

The river grew wider out there, moved slow
and meandering through the meadow before it plunged into thick
green darkness of brush and trees at the far side. A flood-scoured
bar marked the nearest river bend. Milky wavelets clawed at sand
there.

David let his gaze traverse the meadow’s
rim, right to left, gasped as he saw a sign. He saw the park trail
then, off to the left. A small stream came down into the meadow
there, reaching out to the river. A man-made footbridge crossed the
small stream. Big letters on the sign beside the bridge read
KILKELLY SHELTER 2 MI.

Shelter!

David felt his heart beting faster. He and
Katsuk had stayed in shelters. One had been in a deep stand of
cedar, water running down the trail beside it. There had been a wet
smell of ashes, a fire pit under an overhanging porch. The
shelter’s lower logs had been rotten, chipped out at the bottom by
hikers in search of dry fuel.

The arrow on the sign pointed to the right,
downstream.

David thought:
There may be
hikers!

He stepped from the tree shadows, stopped in
confusion at a great flapping of wings and bird cries overhead. A
flock of ravens had leaped into the sky at sight of him, filling
the air with their uproar. David stared up at them, terrified.

Ravens! Hundreds of them!

They darkened the sky, wheeling and
calling.

As though the birds had summoned him, Katsuk
emerged from the trees across the meadow on the far side of the
river. He stood a moment beside a great spruce, his headband dull
red, a black feather in the back. He came straight then toward the
river, one arm brushing aside silken green leaves at the bank. He
stopped only when he was thigh deep in the water. The river around
him ran milky with snowmelt.

David stared at Katsuk, unable to move.

The ravens continued to wheel and call.

Katsuk waited in the water, holding his bow
and arrow high, staring up at the birds.

Why is he waiting?
David
wondered.

At the river’s near shore, David saw the
silvery white of raindrops on reeds, then gray rocks, then the
river, and Katsuk standing in the water like an animal startled
into stillness, undecided which way to turn, waiting.

Why?

The ravens whirled out over the trees beyond
the meadow, went away with diminishing noise, grew abruptly silent.
They had settled down.

As the birds fell silent, Katsuk plunged
into motion, crossed the river, climbed dripping into the meadow.
He came straight on to where David stood, walking with slow,
deliberate steps. The strung bow was carried in his left hand, a
single arrow clutched to it with two fingers. He wore the obsidian
knife in a loop of his rope belt near the pouch. His loincloth was
stained with brown earth. Water ran from it down his legs.

Katsuk stopped a pace from David, stood
staring into the boy’s face.

David trembled, not knowing what to do or
say. He knew he could not outrun Katsuk. And there was that bow
with an arrow ready for it.

“Raven told me where you would be,” Katsuk
said. “I came straight here after I had made my arrow. You followed
the river as Raven told me. That is the long way here.”

David’s teeth chattered with cold and fear.
There was an oddly deliberate pacing to Katsuk’s words.

Katsuk held up the bow and the arrow. “You
see—they are finished.” He nodded. “But I did not feel it when you
lured me to that arrow tree. I thought the arrow wood was a gift
and took it. I thanked Cedar. But you tricked me. It was a
trick.”

Katsuk coughed, deep and racking. When the
spasm passed, he stood trembling. The skin of his jaws and cheeks
was pale.

What’s wrong with him?
David
wondered.

“You have put the Cedar sickness upon me,”
Katsuk said. “You and Tskanay.”

David thought:
He really is sick.

Katsuk said: “I am cold. We must find a
place to be warm. Cedar takes the heat of my body and sends it to
the sky.”

David shook his head, tried to still the
chattering of his teeth. Katsuk had been waiting here at the meadow
with his birds. But he sounded so ... strange. The sickness had
changed him.

“Take this sickness from me,” Katsuk
said.

David bit his lip, seeking pain to help stop
the chattering of his teeth. He pointed to the sign. “There’s a
shelter. We could—”

“No! We cannot go that way. People come.”
Katsuk peered at the spruce copse from which David had emerged.
“There is a place ... in here.”

“I’ve just come that way,” David said.
“There’s no—”

“There is a place,” Katsuk said. “Come.”

Walking with that odd, stiff-legged stride,
Katsuk stepped past the boy, moved into the trees. David followed,
feeling that he had moved into Katsuk’s delirium.

Again, Katsuk coughed, deep and racking.

At the logjam where David had rested, Katsuk
paused. He studied the water hurtling against the logs: dark,
blue-gray river crossed by smoky driftwood. Yes, this was the
place.

He stepped up onto the jam, crossed the
river, jumping from log to log. David followed.

On the far shore, David saw what he had
missed earlier: an abandoned park shelter, part of its roof caved
in. The logs and shakes were mottled with moss and lichen. Katsuk
entered the shelter. David heard him digging in there.

David hesitated on the riverbank, looked
downstream.

People coming?
Kasuk had said it.

The air was cold. He felt an added chill of
madness. Katsuk is sick. I could run back to the meadow. But he
might catch me, or shoot me with that arrow.

The sky was dark over the trees downstream.
Rain walked on a black line up the river, that hard sky behind it,
clouds crouched over the sunset, the wind floating the leaves,
whipping night before it.

Katsuk called from the shelter. “Hurry up.
It is going to rain.”

Again, Katsuk coughed.

David entered the shelter, smelling raw
earth, the damp fungus odors of rot.

Katsuk had a hole dug in one corner. He
pulled a small metal drum from it. The lid popped with a rusty
creaking.

Katsuk extracted two blankets and a small,
tightly wrapped package.

“Fire tinder,” Katsuk said, tossing the
package to the boy.

Katsuk turned, moved toward the shelter’s
entrance. David saw that the man was almost staggering.

“You thought to kill me with Cedar
sickness,” Katsuk said. “I will yet do what I must do. Raven will
give me the power.”

***

Chief Park Ranger William Redek:

It’s cold in there for this time of year,
been more snow and rain than usual. Snow line’s lower than I can
remember for years. I hear Indian fakirs have a trick for keeping
warm without lots of clothes or fire, but this Hobuhet is a
different kind of Indian. Doubt if he knows that trick. If he and
that boy are in there, they have to be in shelter of some kind, and
with fire. That, or they’re dead. You lose enough body heat and
that country kills you.

***

Katsuk lay on moss between two logs, his
mind howling in a fevered nightmare. There was a wood path, an
arrow. The arrow must balance just right. He had found the wood for
the arrow in the avalanche scar of a tall cedar. It had been a
trick, all a trick. He held the arrow and the arrow held him. He
led a cortege up the wood path from the most ancient times to the
present. His mind was drunk with all the lives it held.

A spirit shouted in his mind: “The earth
does not know who owns it!”

Katsuk groaned.

Delirium moved his feet on the wood path. He
sang the names of his dead, but each new name brought a change in
the nightmare. When he sang Janiktaht’s name, he saw Hoquat
running, hair flying like a wind-whipped bush.

Another name:
Okhoots
.

He was in a field embroidered with yellow
flowers, a bubbling spring beside the field. He drank at the
spring, but the water failed to slake the dry burning of his
throat.

Another name:
Grandfather
Hobuhet.

He was confronted by wave tops blown white
in a gale, a sorrel weaving in green water. A dead whale rose out
of the water, said: “You dare disturb me!”

Another name:
Tskuldik.

Father ... father ... father!

He called a nameless name in a canyon, was
back on the nightmare trail of his ordeal. He heard the woods”
dirge, felt wet bracken at his waist. He was marching upcountry
from the hoquat places. There was a dirty yellow logging rig parked
beside the road, heavy green of second-growth fir behind it. Side
roads poked out into the tree wall. Dead snags thrust up through
the green.

There was an alder bottom, a stump ranch
glimpsed through the bleached-white maze of trunks. He saw platform
notches on old stumps, ragged bark dangling. There was a corrugated
culvert with arsenic-yellow skunk cabbages on one side of a rutted
road, water trickling out the other side. He saw the open scar of a
logged-off hillside, a sign: WARNING: UNDERGROUND POWER AND
TELEPHONE CABLES.

As he read the sign, Katsuk felt his mind
plunge into a cold river. He saw moss-covered boughs vibrating in
the water. He became one of the boughs.

He thought:
I have become a water
spirit.

In his delirium, he screamed for Raven to
save him. Raven swam by him under the water, became a fish,
kull
t’kope!

Katsuk awoke, trembling with terror. Cramps
contorted his body. He felt weak, drained. Dawnlight glared gray
through the shelter’s open entrance. Sweat bathed him. He shivered
with chill. Blankets had been tucked around him, but he had thrown
them off in his nightmare thrashing.

Painfully, his knees trembling with Cedar
sickness, he managed to stand, forced himself to the entrance. He
leaned against a log upright, shivered, half conscious of some
ultimate necessity which he could not name.

Where was Hoquat?

A piece of wood broke with a clear snapping
off to his right. The boy came around the shelter there, his arms
loaded with firewood. He dumped the wood beside the gray ashes of
the fire pit.

Katsuk stared at the boy, at the fire pit,
trying to put the two together in his thoughts.

David saw the weakness in Katsuk, said: “I
found a can of beans in that little barrel and heated them. I left
most of them for you.”

He used a split length of green wood to lift
the can from the ashes and place it at Katsuk’s feet. A flat piece
of wood for a spoon protruded from the can.

Katsuk squatted, ate greedily, hungry for
the warmth more than for the food. The beans tasted of ashes. They
burned his tongue, but he gulped them, felt heat radiate from his
stomach.