Soul Catcher (7 page)

Anger and shame tore at Katsuk. “Shut up!”
he shouted.

“You are! You’re lying—you’re lying.” The
boy was sobbing now.

“Shut up or I’ll kill you right now,” Katsuk
growled.

The sobs were choked off, but the wide-open
eyes continued to stare up at him.

Katsuk found his anger gone. Only shame
remained.
I did lie.

He realised how undignified he had become.
To allow his own emotion such wild expression! He felt shattered,
seduced into the word ways of the hoquat, isolated by words,
miserable and lonely.

What men gave me this misery?
he
wondered.

Barren sorrow permeated him. He sighed. Soul
Catcher gave him no choice. The decision had been made. There could
be no reprieve. But the boy had learned to detect lies.

Speaking as reasonably as he could, Katsuk
said: “You need sleep.”

“How can I sleep when you’re going to kill
me?”

A reasonable question,
Katsuk
thought.

He said: “I will not kill you while you
sleep.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I swear it by my spirits, by the name I
gave you, by my own name.”

“Why should I believe that crazy stuff about
spirits?” Katsuk pulled the knife partly from its sheath, said:
“Close your eyes and you live.” The boy’s eyes blinked shut,
snapped open.

Katsuk found this vaguely amusing but
wondered how he could convince Hoquat. Every word scattered what it
touched.

He asked: “If I go outside, will you
sleep?”

“I’ll try.”

“I will go outside then.”

“My hands hurt.”

Katsuk took a deep breath of resignation,
bent to examine the bindings. They were tight but did not
completely shut off circulation. He released the knots, chafed the
boy’s wrists. Presently, he restored the bindings, added a slip
noose to each arm above the elbows.

He said: “If you struggle to escape now,
these new knots will pull tight and shut off the circulation of
blood to your arms. If that happens, I will not help you. I’ll just
let your arms drop off.”

“Will you go outside now?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to eat?”

“No.”

“I’m hungry.”

“We will eat when you waken.”

“What will we eat?”

“There are many things to eat here: roots,
grubs ...”

“You’ll stay outside?”

“Yes. Go to sleep. We face a long night. You
will have to keep up with me then. If you cannot keep up, I will be
forced to kill you.”

“Why’re you doing this?”

“I told you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Shut up and go to sleep.”

“I’ll wake up if you come back.”

Katsuk could not suppress a grin. “Good. I
know what to do when I want to awaken you.”

He stood up, went down to the spring pool,
pushed his face into the water. It felt cold and fresh against his
skin. He squatted back on his heels, allowed his senses to test the
silences of this place. When he was sure of his surroundings, he
made his way out to the edge of the trees where the shale slope
began. He sat there for a time, quiet as a grouse crouching in its
own shadow. He could see the trail his people had beaten down for
centuries. It skirted the trees far down below the slide. The trail
remained quite visible from this height, although forest and
bracken had reclaimed it.

He told himself:
I must be strong now. My
people have need of me. Our trails are eaten by the forest. Our
children are cursed and slaughtered. Our old men do not speak to us
anymore in words we can understand. We have withstood evil heaped
upon evil but we are dying. We are landless in our own
land.

Quietly, to himself, Katsuk began singing
the names of his dead:
Janiktaht ... Kipskiltch ...
As he
sang, he thought how all of the past had been woven into the spirit
of his people’s songs and now the songs, too, were dying.

A black bear came out of the trees far below
him, skirted the slide, and went up the fireweed slope eating
kinnikinnick. It gave the shale a wide berth.

We need not hurry here,
Katsuk
thought.

Presently, he crept under the wide skirt of
a fat spruce, deep into the shadows of the low boughs. He lay down
facing the shale slope and prepared to sleep with the smell of the
forest floor in his nostrils.

Soon
, he thought,
I must replace
the hoquat knife with a proper blade, one that is fit to touch the
bow and arrow I will make.

***

From a letter to his parents by David
Marshall:

Dear Mother and Dad: I am having a lot of
fun. The airplane was early in Seattle. A man from camp met me
there. We got on a small bus. The bus drove for a long time. It
rained. It took us to a thing they call a cogwheel train. The train
comes up the mountain to the camp. They chased a bear off the
tracks. My counselor is a Indian, not like Mrs. Parma. He was born
by the ocean he said. His name is Charles something. We call him
Chief. We do not have tents to sleep in. Instead, we sleep in
cabins. The cabins have names. I am in Cedar Cabin. When you write,
put Cedar Cabin on the letter. One of the guys in my cabin was here
last year. He says the Chief is the best counselor. Mr. Clark is
the camp director. He took our picture with the Chief. I will send
you one when he gets them. Eight of us sleep in our cabin. The
Chief has his own room at the back near the toilet. Please send me
six rolls of film and some insect repellent. I need a new
flashlight. My other one got broken. A boy cut his hand on the
train. There are lots of trees here. They have good sunsets. We
will go on a two day hike Sunday. Thanks for the package of
goodies. I found them on the train. After I passed my cookies
around to all my friends half of them were gone. I haven’t opened
the peanuts yet. We are waiting for diner right now. They are
making us write before we eat.

***

David awakened.

For a moment his only awareness was of
hunger cramps and the dry, hot thirst rasping his throat. Then he
felt the thongs around his wrists and arms. He experienced surprise
that he had slept. His eyes felt rough and heavy. Katsuk’s warning
against fighting the thongs came back to him. The cave light was a
green grayness. He had scattered the cushioning moss. Coldness from
the rock beneath him chilled his flesh. A moment of shivering
overcame him. When it passed, his gaze went up the thong to the
loop secured around the rock spur. It was much too high.

Where was that crazy Katsuk?

David struggled to a sitting position. As he
moved, he heard a helicopter pass across the rock slope directly
opposite the cave’s mouth.

He recognized the sound immediately and hope
surged through him. Nothing else made quite that sound:
Helicopter!

David held his breath. He remembered the
handkerchief he had dropped below the slide. He had carried the
handkerchief for miles during the nightmare journey, wondering
where to drop it. The handkerchief carried his monogrammed
initials—a distinctive
DMM
.

He had wormed the handkerchief from his
pocket soon after thinking about it, wadded the cloth into a ball,
and held it—waiting ... waiting. There had been no sense dropping
it too soon. Katsuk had led them up and down streams, confusing
their trail. David had thought of tearing the cloth into bits,
dropping the pieces like a paper chase, but the monogram occupied
only one corner and he had felt certain Katsuk would hear cloth
ripping.

At the rock slope, David had been moved as
much by fatigue and desperation as any other motive. Katsuk was
sure to hide them during daylight. The ground below the slope was
open to the sky. No trail crossed that area. A handkerchief in an
unusual place
could
attract attention. And Katsuk had been
so intent on the slide, so confident, he had not been watching his
back trail.

Surely, the men in the helicopter out there
now had seen the handkerchief.

Again, the noisy racket of rotors swept
across the mouth of the notch and its concealed cave. What were
they doing? Would they land?

David wished he could see the slope.

Where was that crazy Katsuk? Had he been
seen?

David’s throat burned with thirst.

Again, the helicopter passed the notch.
David strained to hear any telltale variation in sound. Was rescue
at hand?

He thought of the long night’s march, the
fears which had blocked his thoughts, the dark paths full of root
stumbles. Hunger and terror cramped him now, doubled him over. He
stared down at the cave’s rock floor. The bear smell of the place
came thickly into his nostrils.

Again, the machine sound flooded the
cave.

David tried to recall the appearance of the
slope. Was there a place for a helicopter to land? He had been so
tired when they had emerged from the trees, so thirsty and hungry,
so filled with desperation about where to leave the telltale
handkerchief, he had not really seen the area. The blind feelings
of the night with its stars cold and staring clogged his memory. He
recalled only the confused surge of bird cries at dawn, falling
upon senses amplified by hunger and thirst.

What were they doing in that helicopter?
Where was Katsuk?

David tried to recall riding in a
helicopter. He had traveled with his parents to and from airports
in helicopters. That sound had to be a helicopter. But he had never
paid much attention to what landing place a helicopter required,
except to know it could land on a small space. Could it land on a
slope? He didn’t know.

Perhaps the rockslide kept the machine from
landing. Katsuk had warned about that danger. Maybe Katsuk had a
gun now. He could have hidden one here and recovered it. He could
be out there waiting to shoot down the helicopter.

David shook his head from side to side in
desperation.

He thought of shouting. No one in the
helicopter would hear him above that engine noise. And Katsuk had
warned that death would follow any outcry.

David recalled his own knife in its sheath
at Katsuk’s waist—the Russell knife from Canada. He imagined that
knife being pulled from its sheath by Katsuk’s dark hand—one hard
thrust ...

He’ll kill me sure if I shout.

The clatter of the machine circling in and
out of the clearing around the rockslide confused David. The cave
and its masking trees baffled the sound. He could not tell when the
helicopter flew low into the slope or when it hovered above the
cliff—only that it was out there, louder sometimes than at other
times.

Where was Katsuk?

David’s teeth chattered with cold and
terror. Hunger and thirst chopped time into uneven bits. The dusty
yellow light outside the cave told him nothing. No matter how hard
he listened, straining to identify what was happening, he could not
interpret the sounds into meaning.

There was only the single fact of the
helicopter. The sound of it filled the cave once more. This time it
came as an oddly distorted noise building slowly into a rumbling
roar louder than thunder. The cave trembled around him.

Had they crashed?

He held his breath as the terrifying noise
went on and on and on ... louder, louder. It built to a climax,
subsided. The noise of a raven flock became audible. The helicopter
had faded to a distant background throbbing.

He could still hear the machine, though. The
rotors’
beat-beat-beat
mingled with drifts of cold green
light within the cave to dominate David’s awareness. He swallowed
dry terror, listened with an intensity which began in the middle of
his back. The sound of the helicopter faded ... faded ... vanished.
He heard ravens calling and the dull clap of their wings.

The arch of the cave mouth was filled by
Katsuk’s black silhouette, its edges blurred by dusty light from
outside.

Katsuk advanced without a word, removed the
thongs from the rock, untied the boy’s wrists and arms.

David wondered:
Why doesn’t he say
something? What happened out there?

Katsuk felt David’s hip pocket.

David thought:
The handkerchief!
He
tried to swallow, stared at his captor, begging for a clue to what
was happening.

“That was very clever,” Katsuk said, his
voice conversational. He began massaging the boy’s wrists. “Very,
very clever; so very clever.”

The sound of Katsuk speaking low, a voice
like smoke in the cave, filled David with more fear than if the man
had betrayed rage.

If he calls me Hoquat,
David thought,
I must remember to answer and not anger him.

Katsuk released David’s wrists, sat down
facing the boy. He said: “You will want to know what happened. I
will tell it.”

I am Hoquat,
David reminded himself.
I must keep him calm.

David watched Katsuk’s lips, eyes, listened
for any change of tone, any sign of emotion. Words came in a slow
cadence from Katsuk’s mouth: “Raven ... giant bird ... devil
machine ...”

The words carried odd half-meanings. David
felt he was hearing some fanciful story, not about a helicopter but
about a giant bird called Raven and Raven’s victory over evil.

Katsuk said: “You know, when Raven was
young, he was the father of my people. He brought us the sun and
the moon and the stars. He brought us fire. He was white then, like
you, but fire smoke blackened his feathers. It was that Raven who
came back today and hid me from your devil machine—black Raven. He
saved me. Do you understand?”

David trembled, unable to comprehend or to
answer.

Katsuk’s eyes reflected cobalt glints in the
cave’s half-light. The sunlight pouring in the entrance behind him
put a honey glow on his skin, made him appear larger.

“Why are you trembling?” Katsuk asked. “I
... I’m cold.”