Soul Catcher (5 page)

“What if I don’t?”

“You will anger the spirits.” Something in
the man’s tone dried David’s mouth. He said: “I want to go back
now.”

“First, you must stand and face the
moon.”

“Then can we go back?”

“Then we can go.”

“Well ... okay. But I think this is kind of
dumb.”

David stood. He felt the wind, a forboding
of rain in it. His mind was filled suddenly with memories of a
childish game he and his friends had played among the creekside
trees near his home:
Cowboys and Indians
. What would that
game mean to his man?

Scenes and words tumbled through David’s
mind:
Bang! Bang! You’re dead! Dead injun cowboy injun dead.
And Mrs. Parma calling him to lunch. But he and his friends had
scratched out a cave in the creek bank and had hidden there,
suppressing giggles in the mildew smell of cave dirt and the voice
of Mrs. Parma calling and everything stirring in his head—memory
and this moment in the wilderness, all become one—moon, dark trees
moved by the wind, moonlit clouds beyond a distant hill, the damp
odor of earth ...

The man spoke close behind him: “You can
hear the river down there. We are near water. Spirits gather near
water. Once, long ago, we hunted spirit power as children seek a
toy. But you hoquat came and you changed that. I was a grown man
before I felt Tamanawis within me.”

David trembled. He had not expected words of
such odd beauty. They were like prayer.

He felt the warmth of the man’s body behind
him, the breath touching his head.

The voice continued in a harsh tone:

“We ruined it, you know. We distrusted and
hated each other instead of our common foe. Foreign ideas and words
clotted our minds with illusion, stole our flesh from us. The white
man came upon us with a face like a golden mask with pits for eyes.
We were frozen before him. Shapes came out of the darkness. They
were part of darkness and against it—flesh and antiflesh—and we had
no ritual for this. We mistook immobility for peace and we were
punished.”

David tried to swallow in a dry throat. This
did not have the sound of ritual. The man spoke with an accent of
education and knowledge. His words conveyed a sense of
accusation.

“Do you hear me?” Katsuk asked.

For a moment, David failed to realize the
question had been directed at him. The man’s voice had carried such
a feeling of speaking to spirits.

Katsuk raised his voice: “Do you hear
me?”

David jumped. “Yes.”

“Now, repeat after me exactly what I
say.”

David nodded.

Katsuk said: “I am Hoquat.”

“What?”

“I am Hoquat!”

“I am Hoquat?” David could not keep a
questioning inflection from his voice.

“I am the message from Soul Catcher,” Katsuk
said.

In a flat voice, David repeated it: “I am
the message from Soul Catcher.”

“It is done,” Katsuk said. “You have
repeated the ritual correctly. From this moment, your name is
Hoquat.”

“Does it mean something?” David asked. He
started to turn, but a hand on his shoulder restrained him.

“It is the name my people gave to something
that floats far out on the water, something strange that cannot be
identified. It is the name we gave to your people because you came
that way to us from the water.”

David did not like the hand on his shoulder,
but feared saying anything about it. He felt that his being, his
private flesh, had been offended. Opposing forces struggled in him.
He had been prepared for an event which he could almost see, and
this ritual failed to satisfy him.

He asked: “Is that all there is to it?”

“No. It is time for you to learn my
name.”

“You said we could go.”

“We will go soon.”

“Well ... what’s your name?”

“Katsuk.”

David fought down a shudder. “What’s that
mean?”

“Many, many things. It is the center of the
universe.”

“Is it an Indian word?”

“Indian! I am sick with being Indian, with
living out a five-hundred-year-old mistake!”

The hand on David’s shoulder gripped him
hard, shook him with each word. David went very still. Suddenly, he
knew for the first time he was in danger.
Katsuk
. It had an
ugly sound. He could not understand why, but the name suggested
deadly peril. He whispered: “Can we go now?”

Katsuk said: “Mamook memaloost! Kechgi tsuk
achat kamooks ...”

In the old tongue, he promised it all:
I
will sacrifice this Innocent. I will give him to the spirits who
protect me. I will send him into the underplaces and his eyes will
be the two eyes of the worm. His heart will not beat. His mouth
...

“What’re you saying?” David demanded. But
Katsuk ignored him, went on to the end of it.
“Katsuk makes this
promise in the name of Soul Catcher.”
David said: “I don’t
understand you. What was all that?”

“You are the Innocent,” Katsuk said. “But I
am Katsuk. I am the middle of every thing. I live everywhere. I see
you hoquat all around. You live like dogs. You are great liars. You
see the moon and call it a moon. You think that makes it a moon.
But I have seen it all with my good eye and recognize without words
when a thing exists.”

“I want to go back now.”

Katsuk shook his head. “We all want to go
back, Innocent Hoquat. We want the place where we can deal with our
revelation and weep and punish our senses uselessly. You talk and
your world sours me. You have only words that tell me of the world
you would have if I permitted you to have it. But I have brought
you here. I will give you back your own knowledge of what the
universe knows. I will make you know and feel. You really will
understand. You will be surprised. What you learn will be what you
thought you already knew.”

“Please, can’t we go now?”

“You wish to run away. You think there is no
place within you to receive what I will give you. But it will be
driven into your heart by the thing itself. What folly you have
learned! You think you can ignore such things as I will teach. You
think your senses cannot accept the universe without compromise.
Hoquat, I promise you this: you will see directly through to the
thing at its beginning. You will hear the wilderness without names.
You will feel colors and shapes and the temper of this world. You
will see the tyranny. It will fill you with awe and fear.”

Gently, David tried to pull away from the
restraining hand, to put distance between himself and these
terrifying words of almost-meaning. Indians should not speak this
way!

But the hand shifted down to his left arm,
held it painfully.

No longer trying to conceal his fear, David
said: “You’re hurting me!” The pressure eased, but not enough to
release him.

Katsuk said: “We have shared names. You will
stay.”

David held himself motionless. Confusion
filled his mind. He felt that he had been kicked, injured in a way
that locked all his muscles. Katsuk released his arm. Still David
remained fixed in that position.

Fighting dryness in his mouth, David said:
“You’re trying to scare me. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the
initiation. The other guys are out there waiting to laugh.”

Katsuk ignored the words. He felt the spirit
power grow and grow.
“I am Tamanawis speaking to you ...”
With slow, deliberate movements, he took an elkhide thong from his
pouch, whipped it over the boy’s shoulders, bound his arms tightly
to his body.

David began twisting, struggling to escape.
“Hey! Stop that! You’re hurting me!”

Katsuk grabbed the twisting hands, pinioned
the wrists in a loop of the thong.

David struggled with the strength of terror,
but the hands tying him could not be resisted. The thong bit
painfully into his flesh.

“Please stop it,” David pleaded. “What’re
you doing?”

“Shut up, Hoquat!”

This was a new and savage voice, as powerful
as the hands which held him.

Chest heaving, David fell silent. He was wet
with perspiration and the moment he stopped struggling, the wind
chilled him. He felt his captor remove the knife and sheath,
working the belt out with harsh, jerking motions, then reclasping
the belt without putting it into its loops.

Katsuk bent close to the boy, face demoniac
in the moonlight. His voice was a blare of passion: “Hoquat! Do
what I tell you to do, or I will kill you immediately.” He
brandished David’s knife.

David nodded without control of the motion,
unable to speak. A tide of bitter acid came into his throat. He
continued to nod until Katsuk shook him.

“Hoquat, do you understand me?”

He could barely manage the word: “Yes.”

And David thought:
I’m being kidnapped!
It was all a trick.

All the horror stories he’d heard about
murdered kidnap victims flooded into his mind, set his body jerking
with terror. He felt betrayed, shamed at his own stupidity for
falling into such a trap.

Katsuk produced another thong, passed it
beneath David’s arms, around his chest, knotted it, and took the
free end in one hand. He said: “We have a long way to go before
daylight. Follow me swiftly or I will bury your body beside the
trail and go on alone.”

Turning, Katsuk jerked the rope, headed at a
trot toward the dark wall of trees across the bracken clearing.

David, the stench of his own fear in his
nostrils, stumbled into motion to keep from being pulled off his
feet.

***

Statement of Bruce Clark, chief counselor at
Six Rivers Camp:

Well, the first night we make the boys write
a letter home. We don’t give them any dinner until they’ve written.
We hand them paper and pencil there in the rec room and we tell
them they have to write the letter before they can eat. They get
their meal cards when they hand in the letter. The Marshall boy, I
remember him well. He was on the six-o “clock news and there was a
kind of hooraw about it when his father’s picture came on and it
was announced that the father was the new Undersecretary of State.
The Marshall boy wrote a nice long letter, both sides of the paper.
We only give them one sheet. I remember thinking: There’s probably
a good letter. His folks’ll enjoy getting that.

***

About an hour after sunrise, Katsuk led
Hoquat at a shambling trot to the foot of the shale slope he had
set as his first night’s goal. The instant they stopped, the boy
collapsed on the ground. Katsuk ignored this and concentrated on
studying the slope, noting the marks of a recent slide.

At the top of the slope a stand of spruce
and willow concealed a notch in the cliff. The trees masked a cave
and the spring which fed the trees. The cliff loomed as a gray
eminence behind the trees. The slide made it appear no one could
climb to the notch.

Katsuk felt his heart beating strongly.
Vapor formed at his mouth when he breathed. The morning was cold,
although there would be sunlight here below the cliff later. The
sharp smell of mint scratched at his awareness. Mint fed by the
runoff of the spring protruded from rocks at the bottom of the
slide. The odor reminded Katsuk that he was hungry and thirsty.

That would pass, he knew.

Even if the searchers used dogs, Katsuk did
not believe they would get this far. He had used a scent-killer of
his own making many times during the night, had broken trail four
times by wading into streams, starting one way, killing the scent,
then doubling back.

The low light of morning set the world into
sharp relief. Off to his right at the edge of the rockslide red
fireweed plumes swayed on the slope. A flying squirrel glided down
the slope into the trees. Katsuk felt the flow of life all around
him, glanced down at Hoquat sprawled in a bracken clump, a picture
of complete fatigue.

What a hue and cry would be raised for this
one. What a prize! What headlines! A message that could not be
denied.

Katsuk glanced up at the pale sky. The
pursuers would use helicopters and other aircraft, of course. They
would be starting out soon. Just about now, they would be
discovering at the camp what had been done to them. The serious,
futile hoquat with their ready-made lives, their plastic
justifications for existence, would come upon something new and
terrifying: a note from Katsuk. They would know that the
place
of safety
in which their spirits cowered had been breached.

He tugged at the thong that linked him to
Hoquat, got only a lifted head and questioning stare from eyes
bright with fear and fatigue. Tear streaks lined the boy’s
face.

Katsuk steeled himself against sympathy. His
thoughts went to all the innocents of his own people who had died
beneath guns and sabers, died of starvation, of germ-laden blankets
deliberately sold to the tribes to kill them off.

“Get up,” Katsuk said.

Hoquat struggled to his feet, stood swaying,
shivering. His clothes were wet with trail dew.

Katsuk said: “We are going to climb this
rock slope. It is a dangerous climb. Watch where I put my feet. Put
your feet exactly where I have. If you make a mistake, you will
start a slide. I will save myself. You will be buried in the slide.
Is this understood?”

Hoquat nodded. Katsuk hesitated. Did the boy
have sufficient reserves of strength to do this? The nod of
agreement could have been fearful obedience without
understanding.

But what did it matter? The spirits would
preserve this innocent for the consecrated arrow, or they would
take him. Either way, the message would be heard. There was no
reprieve.

The boy stood waiting for the nightmare
journey to continue. A dangerous climb? All right. What difference
did it make? Except that he must survive this, must live to escape.
The madman had called him Hoquat, had forced him to answer to that
name. More than anything else, this concentrated a core of fury in
the boy.