Soul Catcher (10 page)

David felt the words burn into his
consciousness. Grass grew from the rock near his head. He yanked a
stem. It came up by its roots.

Katsuk chuckled, selected a supple young
shoot, showed how to draw out the tender stem—slowly,
firmly—without disturbing the roots.

David chewed the grass, experimentally at
first. Finding it sweet, he ground the stem in his teeth. Hunger
knotted his stomach. He pulled another stem, another ...

Katsuk interrupted. “You’ve learned one
lesson. Come. We will go now.”

“You’re afraid your raven can’t hide
us.”

“You want a conclusive scientific test, eh?
Very well, just stay where you are.”

Katsuk turned away, cocked his head to one
side, listening.

The pose primed David’s senses. He felt the
sound of an engine in the air, realised Katsuk must have been
hearing it for some time. So that was why he’d wanted to go!

Katsuk said: “You hear it?”

David held his breath. The sound grew
louder. He felt his heart beating wildly.

Katsuk lay back without moving.

David thought:
If I jump up and wave,
he’ll kill me.

Katsuk closed his eyes. He felt sheet
lightning in his brain, an inner sky filled with fire. This was an
ultimate test. He prayed for the inner sense of power.
This is
Katsuk
... The sound of the helicopter weighed upon his
senses.

David stared southwest across the aspen
which shaded their rock. The sound was coming from there. It grew
louder ... louder.

Katsuk lay motionless, with his eyes
closed.

David wanted to shout: “Run!” It was insane.
But Katsuk would be caught if he stayed there. Why didn’t he get up
and run into the trees?

A fit of trembling overcame David. Movement
flickered in the sky above the aspen. David stared, frozen.

The helicopter was high but in plain sight.
His gaze followed its passage: a big helicopter flying through a
patch of blue sky between clouds. It flew from right to left in the
open sky perhaps a mile away. An occupant would only have to glance
this way to see two figures on the high rock escarpment.

The big machine crossed the far ridge of the
river valley.

High trees there gradually concealed it. The
sound diminished.

As it disappeared, a single raven flew over
the rock where David lay, then another, another ...

The birds flew silently, intent upon some
private destination.

Katsuk opened his eyes in time to see the
last of them. The sound of the helicopter was gone. He looked at
the boy. “You did not try to attract their attention. Why? I would
not have stopped you.”

David’s glance flicked across the knife at
Katsuk’s waist. “Yes, you would.”

“I would not.”

David sensed an impulse in the words, a
confidence that spoke of truth. He reacted with bitter frustration.
It made him want to run and cry.

Katsuk said: “Raven hides us.”

David thought of the birds which had flown
overhead. They had arrived after the helicopter was gone. It made
no real sense to him, but David felt the flight of birds had been a
signal. He had the eerie sensation that the birds had spoken to
Katsuk in some private way.

Katsuk said: “I don’t have to kill you while
Raven protects us. Without Raven’s protection ... well ...”

David whirled away. Tears stung his eyes.
I should’ve jumped up and waved! I should’ve tried!

In one supple motion, Katsuk arose, said:
“We go now.”

Without a backward glance to see if the boy
followed, Katsuk crossed the open rock, plunged into the trees on
the next slope. He sensed rain in that southwest wind. Tonight it
would rain.

***

From an editorial submitted to the
University of Washington
Daily
by Charles Hobuhet:

In terms of the flesh, you whites act upon
fragmented beliefs. You fall therefrom into loneliness and
violence. You do not support your fellows, yet complain of being
unsupported. You scream for freedom while rationalizing your own
self-imposed limitations. You exist in constant tension between
tyranny and victimization. Through all your fraudulent pretensions
and roundabout self-trickery, you say you would risk anything to
achieve equal happiness for all. But your words risk nothing.

***

David fingered the two small pebbles in his
pocket—one for each day. The second day with this madman. They had
slept and dozed through the night beneath a ledge which sheltered
them from the rain. Katsuk had refused to build a fire, but he had
gone alone into the forest and returned with food: a gray mush in a
bark bowl. David had wolfed it, savoring an acrid sweetness. Katsuk
had explained then that it was lily roots chopped with grubs and
sweet red ants.

At the look of revulsion on David’s face,
Katsuk had laughed, said: “Squeamishness can kill you out here as
fast as anything else. That is good food. It has everything in it
that you need.”

The laughter had silenced David’s objections
more than any other argument. He had eaten the gray mush again as
dawn glared over the trees.

He had been following Katsuk two hours this
morning before his clothes dried.

There were hemlocks overhead now. Ancient
blaze marks formed pitch-ringed scars on some of the tree trunks.
Katsuk had recognized the marks and explained them: This was a way
his ancestors had traveled. Ferns and moss lay in a tangled
miniature wilderness under the trees, obscuring the ancient track,
but Katsuk said this was the way.

The sky darkened. David wondered if it was
going to rain again.

Up ahead, Katsuk paused, studied his
surroundings. He turned, watched the boy plunging along behind—over
mossy logs, around great clumps of fern.

Katsuk stared down the slope ahead of him.
The ancient elk trail his people had used ran somewhere down there.
He would cross it soon and follow the path of his wild
brethren.

The boy came up to him, stood panting.

Katsuk said: “Stay closer to me.”

He set out once more, skirted a mossy log,
noted beneath it a tiny dewed spiderweb. All around him lay a
forest of mossy limbs—every limb draped with moss like green wool
hung out to dry. The light, now bright and now dull as clouds
concealed the sun, alternately flattened the colors and then filled
the world with green jeweled glowing. At one passage of muted
green, the sun suddenly emerged and sent a rope of light plunging
through the trees to the forest floor.

Katsuk walked through the light, then ducked
under dark boughs. He heard limbs catching at the boy behind him,
scratching, slithering.

Beyond the dark passage, Katsuk stopped,
reached out a hand, and caught the boy from stepping past. The
trail was directly in front of them about two feet down a steep
bank. It sloped down to the left. Tracks of hiking boots marked the
soft earth.

David saw the tension in Katsuk, listened
for the sound of the hikers. The tracks appeared fresh. Water
trickled down the trail but had not yet filled the tracks.

Katsuk turned, glanced at the boy, motioned
flatly with one hand—back up the way they had come.

David shook his head. “What?”

Katsuk stared up the hill behind them, said:
“That big log we came over. Go back there and hide behind it. If I
hear or see any sign of your presence, I will kill you.”

David stepped backward, turned, and climbed
back to the log. It was a cedar, its bark hidden beneath moss, but
live limbs climbed skyward along its length. Katsuk had pointed out
another such fallen tree, calling it a nurse log.

The limbs would be trees some day. David
climbed back over the nurse log.

He sank to his heels there, stared through
the shadows. His eyes looked for color, for movement. In his own
silence, he grew aware of the constant sound of water dripping all
around. He felt the dampness of this place. His feet were sopping
and his trousers were dark with water almost to the waist. It was
cold.

Katsuk stepped down to the trail, turned
left in the direction of the hikers’ tracks. He glided down the
trail, moving with a wraith quality—brown skin, the white loincloth
tugging at David’s gaze.

The trail switched back to the right. Katsuk
turned with it. Only his head and shoulders remained visible to the
watching boy.

Abruptly, far down the hillside David saw
color and movement—a group of hikers. As though vision opened the
air to sound, he heard their voices then: no distinguishable words,
but sudden laughter and a shout.

David sank farther down behind the log,
peered out between a tangle of dead limbs. As he did it, he
wondered:
Why am I hiding? Why don’t I sneak around Katsuk and
get to those hikers? They’d protect me from him.

But he sensed his own destruction in any
movement. Part of Katsuk remained focused on his captive, some
inner sense. There might even be ravens around.

David crouched, tense and quivering.

Katsuk had stopped, head and shoulders
visible above the trail embankment. He stared up toward David, then
looked up the trail.

David heard noise up the trail then, tried
to swallow in a dry throat. More hikers?

He thought:
I could shout.

But he knew any outcry would bring Katsuk
and the knife. Slogging, heavy footsteps became audible.

A bearded young man came down the trail. A
green pack rode high on his shoulders. His long hair was bound at
the forehead by a red bandanna. It gave him a curiously aboriginal
look. The hiker glanced neither right nor left but kept his
attention on the trail. He walked with a stiff, heel-first stride
that jarred the ground.

David felt giddy with fear. He no longer
could see Katsuk but knew the man lay in wait down there somewhere.
He would be watching the hiker from some hidden spot below.

David thought:
All I have to do is stand
up and shout.

The other hikers might not hear it, but this
one would. He was just passing David’s hiding place. The other
hikers were a long way down there though. There was a stream down
in that canyon. Its noise would hide any sound from up here.

David thought:
Katsuk would kill this guy
... and then me. He told me what he’d do ... and he meant
it.

The bearded hiker was at the switchback. He
would see Katsuk momentarily, or pass right by without noticing
anything.

What was Katsuk doing?

For several minutes, Katsuk had felt a test
of purpose building to a climax. In that dark passage before he had
reached the trail, he had felt an odd fear that he would find his
secret name carved some place—on a tree or stump or log.

At the few open places, he had stared up at
the sky—now gray, now bright as blue-green glass. It was a crystal
without form, but ready to take any shape. Perhaps his name would
be written there.

A bulbous gray quinine canker on an old
stump had filled him with foreboding. He had thought of Hoquat
following him like a pet on a leash. Then, wonderingly:
Soul
Catcher has given me power over Raven, but that is not
enough.

He wondered if there were any
thing
in these mountains with the power to set his universe in perfect
order once more. A vision of Janiktaht filled his mind: a head with
sand on its cheeks, a head turned to seaweed shadows, the face
broken upon its imperfections. The ghost of Janiktaht could not set
things right.

Now he heard the voices and laughter of the
hikers below and thought it was people taunting him. He heard the
lone straggler coming.

The forest was a dull green-gray world
suddenly, lidded by a lead sky. The wind had gone down under the
trees, and in that new silence of birds and a storm building,
Katsuk thought he heard his own heart beating only when he moved,
that it stopped when he stopped.

Hatred formed in him then. What right had
these hoquat to play in his forest? He felt all the defeats of his
people. Their sobs and oaths and lamenting echoed within him, a
swarm of unavenged shadows.

The bearded hiker came around the
switchback, his head down, the many signs of fatigue in his stride.
The pack was too heavy, of course, filled with things he did not
need here.

With a dull shock, Katsuk realized he had
seen that bearded face before—on the university campus. He could
put no name to the face, only a vague recognition that this was a
student he had seen. It bothered him that he could not name the
face.

In that instant, the hiker saw Katsuk
crouched on the trail and jarred to a stop.

“Wha ...” The young man shook his head,
then: “Hey! It’s Charlie the Chief! Hey, man, what’re y’ doing out
here in that getup? You playing Indians and settlers?”

Katsuk straightened, thinking:
The fool
doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t. He’s been in my forest without
a radio.

The hiker said: “I’m Vince Debay, remember?
We were in that Anthro 300 class together.”

Katsuk said: “Hello, Vince.”

Vince leaned his pack against the trail’s
uphill embankment, took a deep breath. His face betrayed the
questions in his mind. He could not help but recognise the
strangeness of this encounter. He might recognise the face, but he
must know this was not the same Charlie the Chief of that Anthro
300 class. He must know it! Katsuk felt hate covering his face with
a stale mask as dry and wrinkled as a discarded snakeskin. Surely,
Vince could see it.

Vince said: “Man, am I tired. We’ve been all
morning coming from the Kimta. We were hoping to make it to Finley
Shelter by tonight, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to make
it.” He waved a hand. “Hey, I was just joking, you know—about
Indians and settlers. No offense.”

Katsuk nodded.

“You see the other guys?” Vince asked.