Prophecy (5 page)

When the once benign temperament of these Indians began undergoing an insidious psychological change,

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they still failed to make the connection. The Indians were confused by it and feared that if it became known that violence was beginning to sweep through their ranks, they would be accused of drunkenness: the historical verdict of the white world, used to avoid any responsibility for Indian outrage.

It was true that the growing aberration in behavior, which they called katahnas (seizures), resembled the effects of intoxication. Dizziness, hallucination, loss of coordination and, often, unexplainable outbursts of rage. One man turned on his own wife and children, another ran into Mary’s Lake and drowned. At first the incidents were isolated and infrequent, vaguely explicable in terms of the movement of the stars and the personalities of the men whom these katahnas struck. But now it was becoming more generalized-and more frightening because it was harder to recognize. The once dramatic symptoms were becoming muted, the entire community falling under a kind of lethargy and haze that would lift for periods of time and then descend again like a cloud of smoldering gloom.

There was another secret kept by the Masaquoddy, too; unspoken because it brought shame to those who had suffered it. A growing rate of stillbirths and deformed children. By tradition the Indian women bore their children in the forest alone, and thus for a long time maintained the awful secret even from each other. The evidence of their changing chemistry was buried in shallow graves throughout the Manatee Forest.

The first member of the tribe to gather enough evidence to become alarmed was Romona Peters, a full-blooded Masaquoddy woman, twenty-eight years of age, who bore the Indian name Oliana. It meant Spring Fawn. With her light skin and doelike eyes, she was given this name by her grandfather, Hector M’rai, the former chief and now oldest living member of the tribe. But Romona’s fawnlike appearance was misleading. She had the courage of a vixen. At the age of twelve she was raped by a lumberjack

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in the forest and, by herself, went into the town of Manatee to report him to the sheriff. It was her first lesson that the word “justice” had little application to the American Indian.

From then on, she strove to accumulate enough knowledge to become a force of change. But the goal remained elusive. Having to leave school at the age of thirteen, which was customary for Indian women whose labor was needed in the village, she used the Androscoggin Public Library as her school, spending every available moment there, poring over books that she rarely understood, attempting to grasp as much of the vocabulary and ways of the white world as possible. As she passed through her teens, the library was the focal point of her life, her heaven and her hell. She was often taunted by her white contemporaries there, snickered at as she trod a continual path from the reading room to the big dictionary on the pedestal, trying to understand what she was reading. The carpet was worn thin there and she was blamed for it, finally forbidden by the librarian to use the dictionary more than once a night. This random quirk of cruelty, more than any other factor, curtailed her one opportunity for progress. Eventually she gave up. The frustration and humiliation were just too painful.

But now, as a result of recent events, she had gone back to the library. Having seen a woman return from childbearing in the forest in a state of near shock, with her arms empty and her stomach flat, Romona questioned her until the woman brought her to the grotesque remains. It was a stillborn fetus, almost full term. But it looked more like the product of a whelping than a human birth. The head was outsized, the eyes large and flat, without lids. The fingers were long and tapered, resembling claws; the legs were like hindquarters, rounded and much shorter than the arms.

The woman begged Romona not to reveal her secret, and Romona agreed. But she persuaded the next woman who was about to go into labor to let her serve as a midwife to the birth. It happened again.

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A different variation this time, not so severe. But once again, the stillborn fetus had animalistic qualities. At the same time there were successful births; natural, normal children. But like a discordant tune played softly beneath an orchestration, the stillbirths and deformed fetuses continued to appear; occasionally some were born alive, their first outcries quickly muted by frightened mothers in the forest.

It was Romona’s instinct to seek help, but her experience with the official white world was sufficiently frightening to make her hesitate. She did not want to go there until she was fully armed with as much knowledge as possible. It was for that reason that she returned to the library, certain that the answer to the changes in he physiology of her people could be found somewhere in that vast storehouse of information.

It was difficult now, even more so than when she was a child, for Romona to steal time for her forays to the library. She had the full care and charge of her aging grandfather, Hector M’rai, who was also suffering from the crippling effects of the katahnas. In the last six months his mind had gone dim and his hands had begun to tremble. It was not merely the product of his age. From spending a lifetime at his knee and under his tutelage, Romona Peters knew that her grandfather was not a man destined for senility.

Among the Masaquoddy people, Hector M’rai was a legend. He had lived through six incarnations, still spoke the ancient language, and was a storehouse of Indian lore.

He lived apart from the rest, in a compound he’d built with his own hands, following construction designs that he alone remembered. He called his camp-side M’ay-an-dan’ta. The Garden of Eden. It consisted of three tenee-like shelters, built of rough-hewn logs and animal skins; they were as different from the falling-down corrugated-board shanties that his people lived in as night is from day. In the midst of this changing forest the camp was an oasis where time

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stood still. A kind of museum. A shrine to a life that no longer existed.

it was uuiicult for Romona to tear herself away from M’rai, for she feared each time she left that it might be the last time she would see him alive. But each night before sundown, she journeyed into town to pore through the encyclopedias and medical pamphlets at the public libary. She knew that the katahnas and the stillbirths were somehow linked together, and she sought always to find that link.

It was in the preface to a book on nutrition that she caught her first clue. It said that food intake was the single most causative factor in both human health and behavior. Beyond that, it said that the actual cultural characteristics of an entire community of people could be influenced by what, as a group, they ingested. It described a tribe in Africa, called the El Molo, who had, in recent years, become aggressive and given to epileptic seizures when frightened, due to protein starvation in a land that had been poached of wild game. Protein, it said, bridged the synaptic gap in the command-chain of neuromuscular response.

She cooied down every word she didn’t understand. On a single page there were sixty-seven of them. Some of them, like “synaptic gap,” weren’t even in the dictionary .

The book also had a section on prenatal care. Once again there was a mention of protein, this time as a prime factor in the development of a healthy human fetus. Romona went to the card catalog that she had used as a child and found that there was an entire book on the subject of protein. At the back of the book there was a table of protein-enriched foods. Sud-denlv she was confused-highest on the list of protein-enriched foods was fish. There could not be a lack of protein in the Indians’ diet, for they were fishermen. E’fVitv oerrent of what they ate was fish. She struggled, with everv b’t of logic she could summon, to make sense of it. Diet was the key. But what, in their diet, was causing the biological havoc?

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She knew that the diet of the Masaquoddy people had remained for centuries virtually unchanged, with the exception of canned goods, which were new to this generation. The canned goods were all bought from the same store, the only one in Manatee that catered to Indians. Was it possible that the Masaquoddy were being poisoned? No. The cans were sealed.

She never knew how close she had come to making the connection when her quest for knowledge was suddenly cut short. Overnight a sudden storm of violence had erupted between the Indians and the townspeople; it became dangerous for Romona Peters to venture into town.

A group of lumberjacks had happened upon an Indian in the forest whose behavior was stuporous and disoriented. He was somehow lost in the midst of everything familiar to him, literally turning in circles, bumping into trees. They had laughed at him and taunted him, provoking a rage. He attacked them and they beat him within an inch of his life. The beating led to a reprisal. Ten days later, the body of a lumberjack was found, in similar condition, beaten by a group of Indians. The word spread quickly: the Indians were drunk and spoiling for a fight. The lumberjacks were only too happy to give it to them. In retaliation, they raided a small Indian fishing village. Shortly after that, two lumberjacks failed to return from a night crew. They had vanished in the forest. And it was said that the Indians had killed them.

After thousands of years of living in peace with their environment, the Indians now lived in a state of fear; afraid to go to their nets in the morning, dousing their fires at night, listening to the wail of two bloodhounds that searched the Manatee Forest for some sign of the missing lumberjacks.

As Romona Peters sat in the darkened silence of her grandfather’s encampment, she listened to the

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cacophonous duet of the bloodhounds and watched the three searchlights of the rescuers who followed them. They looked like tiny fireflies on the distant mountain, dancing and darting through the trees. Every night for a week she and her grandfather had followed the progress of the rescue team. They knew tonight that something was different. There was an urgency in the sound and movement that had not been there before.

From the Indian village two miles away, the entire population of the Masaquoddy people also watched, sensing, as Romona and M’rai did, the sudden build-up of tempo. In fact, the movements of the rescuers were being monitored by thousands of pairs of eyes. The animals of the night, predator and prey, huddled in silence, tensing with the increasing crescendo.

The rescuers themselves felt it, too. After a week of listless wandering, the dogs had suddenly been seized with the kind of hysteria that meant their goal was near. A scent had wafted by them at sundown and they had taken off like cannon-shot, their voices shrieking with eagerness, their massive bodies straining against the harnesses that linked each to a human rescuer, tied to it at the end of a forty-foot leash.

When excited by scent, the bloodhounds were hard to control: their two-hundred-pound bodies functioned as mindless extensions of the nose. The eyes ceased to function, the mind ceased to work; the animals were enslaved, seeking union with the source of the scent like drug addicts following the lure of opiate. In their frenzy, darkness had no meaning, nor did obstacles. Were thev not literally tied to human masters, they would have smacked blindly into barriers or sailed off cliffs.

As the dogs’ voices now rose with heightening urgency, the men behind them lurched and staggered, branches lashing at their faces as they were dragged across the perilous terrain. They were on unfamiliar territory hP—a M-rV. m the mountains and moving dangerously fast; but they were unwilling to slow the

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dogs for fear of their losing the scent. Behind the two leashmen, each tied to a dog, ran a third man, struggling beneath the weight of a two-way radio strapped to his back.

“Slow them down!” he gasped.

“They’re hot!” one of the leashmen shouted back. “It’s got to be close!”

The dogs came to an incline and their movement slowed. But when they reached the crest and started down, gravity abetted their eagerness, pulling them with the speed of roller coasters. The men were now running full-tilt, swept with a momentum they were helpless to stop. And then they saw it. An angular path of white water roaring through the forest and coming to an abrupt end in the darkness just ahead.

“Water. It’s a waterfall!”

“It’s a drop-off!”

“Stop them!”

The leashmen heaved backwards, digging their heels into earth. But the dogs refused to be stopped, pulling even harder against the resistance, coming closer with each moment to the gaping chasm that loomed in the moonlight ahead.

“JESUS … !”

“I can’t … I”

“Help me!”

One of the men grabbed a tree trunk and managed to hold firm, snapping his bloodhound backwards, jolting it into a daze. But the other leashman stumbled and fell, clinging to the leash as he was dragged forward, helpless to do anything but cry out as his dog hurtled toward the ledge.

In a sudden, breathless moment, the radioman took flight, leaping directly atop the dragged man. At the same moment, the bloodhound sailed off the edge of the cliff.

His flight lasted but an instant before it was halted. On top of the cliff, the human anchor had held.

Just five feet from the cliffs edge, the radioman

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clung tightly to the man beneath him. The dog swung silently in midair.

“Help us!” the radioman shouted. They were slipping, inch by inch, toward the ledge, the leash vibrating as the dog beneath them struggled in fear. The second leashman fumbled with his belt, quickly unhitching it and tying it to a tree. His dog was lying on the ground, dazed from the jolt, its eyes staring upward at the moon.

“Help us, goddammit!”

The second leashman ran from the trees, falling across his companions and grabbing the taut leash, heaving back on it with all his weight. Clinging desperately to one another, they inched back like a six-legged crab, until they had put ten feet between themselves and the cliff, and stabilized themselves behind the stump of tree. The man who had been dragged was cut and bruised; the other two clung tightly to him, for the two-hundred-pound dog was still suspended from the end of the leash that was connected to his belt.