Back | Next
Contents

Soul Catcher

He was Katsuk, the core from which all perception radiates. And his victim was David Marshall, the 13 year old son of an Undersecretary of State, an innocent chosen from the white world for an ancient sacrifice of vengeance.

When the boy’s father arrived at Six Rivers Camp, they showed him a number of things which they might not have revealed to a lesser person. But the father, as you know, was Howard Marshall and that meant State Department and VIP connections in Washington, D.C.; so they showed him the statement from the professor and the interviews with the camp counselors, that sort of thing. Of course, Marshall saw the so-called kidnap note and the newspaper clippings which some of the FBI men had brought up to the camp that morning.

Marshall lived up to expectations. He spoke with the measured clarity of someone to whom crises and decisions were a way of life. In response to a question, he said:

“I know this Northwest Coast country very well, you understand. My father was in lumber here. I spent many happy days in this region as a child and young man. My father hired Indians whenever he could find ones who would work. He paid them the same wages as anyone else. Our Indians were well treated. I really don’t see how this kidnapping could be aimed at me personally or at my family. The man who took David must be insane.”

* * *

Statement of Dr. Tilman Barth, University of Washington Anthropology Department:

I find this whole thing incredible. Charles Hobuhet cannot be the mad killer you make him out to be. It’s impossible. He could not have kidnapped that boy. You must not think of him as criminal, or as Indian. Charles is a unique intellect, one of the finest students I’ve ever had. He’s essentially gentle and with a profoundly subtle sense of humor. You know, that could just be our situation here. This could be a monstrous joke. Here, let me show you some of his work. I’ve saved copies of everything Charles has written for me. The world’s going to know about him someday….

* * *

From a news story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The most intensive manhunt in Washington history centered today on the tangled rain forest and virtually untouched wilderness area of the Olympic National Park.

Law enforcement officials said they still believe Charles Hobuhet, the Indian militant, is somewhere in that region with his kidnap victim, David Marshall, 13, son of the new United States Undersecretary of State.

Searchers were not discounting, however, the reports that the two have been seen in other areas. Part of the investigation focused on Indian lands in the state’s far northwest corner. Indian trackers were being enlisted to assist in the search and bloodhounds were being brought from Walla Walla.

The manhunt began yesterday with discovery at the exclusive Six Rivers boys’ camp that young Marshall was missing and that a so-called kidnap note had been left behind. The note reportedly was signed by Hobuhet with his pseudonym “Katsuk” and threatened to sacrifice the boy in an ancient Indian ceremony.

* * *

The note left at Cedar Cabin, Six Rivers, by Charles Hobuhet-Katsuk:

I take an innocent of your people to sacrifice for all of the innocents you have murdered. The Innocent will go with all of those other innocents into the spirit place. Thus will sky and earth balance.

I am Katsuk who does this to you. Think of me only as Katsuk, not as Charles Hobuhet. I am something far more than a sensory system and its appetites. I am evolved far beyond you who are called hoquat. I look backward to see you. I see your lives based on cowardice. Your judgments arise from illusions. You tell me unlimited growth and consumption are good. Then your biologists tell me this is cancerous and lethal. To which hoquat should I listen? You do not listen. You think you are free to do anything that comes into your minds. Thinking this, you remain afraid to liberate your spirits from restraint.

Katsuk will tell you why this is. You fear to create because your creations mirror your true selves. You believe your power resides in an ultimate knowledge which you forever seek as children seek parental wisdom. I learned this while watching you in your hoquat schools. But now I am Katsuk, a greater power. I will sacrifice your flesh. I will strike through to your spirit. I have the root of your tree in my power.

* * *

On the day he was to leave for camp, David Marshall had awakened early. It was two weeks after his thirteenth birthday. David thought about being thirteen as he stretched out in the morning warmth of his bed. There was some internal difference that came with being thirteen. It was not the same as twelve, but he couldn’t pin down the precise difference.

For a time he played with the sensation that the ceiling above his bed actually fluttered as his eyelids resisted opening to the day. There was sunshine out in that day, a light broken by its passage through the big-leaf maple which shaded the window of his upstairs bedroom.

Without opening his eyes, he could sense the world around his home—the long, sloping lawns, the carefully tended shrubs and flowers. It was a world full of slow calm. Thinking about it sometimes, he felt a soft drumbeat of exaltation.

David opened his eyes. For a moment, he pretended the faint shadow marks in the ceiling’s white plaster were a horizon: range upon range of mountains dropping down to drift-piled beaches.

Mountains … beaches—he’d see such things tomorrow when he went to camp.

David turned, focused on the camp gear piled across chair and floor where he and his father had arranged the things last night: sleeping bag, pack, clothing, boots …

There was the knife.

The knife stimulated a feeling of excitement. That was a genuine Russell belt knife made in Canada. It had been a birthday gift from his father just two weeks ago.

A bass hum of wilderness radiated into his imagination from the knife in its deer-brown scabbard. It was a man’s tool, a man’s weapon. It stood for blood and darkness and independence.

His father’s words had put magic in the knife:

“That’s no toy, Dave. Learn how to use it safely. Treat it with respect.”

His father’s voice had carried subdued tensions. The adult eyes had looked at him with calculated intensity and there had been a waiting silence after each phrase.

Fingernails made a brief scratching signal on his bed-room door, breaking his reverie. The door opened. Mrs. Parma slid into the room. She wore a long blue and black sari with faint red lines in it. She moved with silent effacement, an effect as attention-demanding as a gong.

David’s gaze followed her. She always made him feel uneasy.

Mrs. Parma glided across to the window that framed the maple, closed the window firmly.

David peered over the edge of the blankets at her as she turned from the window and nodded her awareness of him.

“Good morning, young sir.”

The clipped British accent never sounded right to him coming from a mouth with purple lips. And her eyes bothered him. They were too big, as though stretched by the way her glossy hair was pulled back into a bun. Her name wasn’t really Parma. It began with Parma, but it was much longer and ended with a strange clicking sound that David could not make.

He pulled the blankets below his chin, said: “Did my father leave yet?”

“Before dawn, young sir. It is a long way to the capital of your nation.”

David frowned and waited for her to leave. Strange woman. His parents had brought her back from New Delhi, where his father had been political adviser to the embassy.

In those years, David had stayed with Granny in San Francisco. He had been surrounded by old people with snowy hair, diffident servants, and low, cool voices. It had been a drifting time with diffused stimulations. “Your grandmother is napping. One would not want to disturb her, would one?” It had worn on him the way dripping water wears a rock. His memory of the period retained most strongly the whirlwind visits of his parents. They had descended upon the insulated quiet of the house, breathless, laughing, tanned, and romantic, arms loaded with exotic gifts.

But the chest-shaking joy of being with such people had always ended, leaving him with a sense of frustration amidst the smells of dusty perfumes and tea and the black feeling that he had been abandoned.

Mrs. Parma checked the clothing laid out for him on the dresser. Knowing he wanted her to leave, she delayed. Her body conveyed a stately swaying within the sari. Her fingernails were bright pink.

She had shown him a map once with a town marked on it, the place where she had been born. She had a brown photograph: mud-walled houses and leafless trees, a man all in white standing beside a bicycle, a violin case under his arm. Her father.

Mrs. Parma turned, looked at David with her startling eyes. She said: “Your father asked me to remind you when you awoke that the car will depart precisely on time. You have one hour .”

She lowered her gaze, went to the door. The sari betrayed only a faint suggestion of moving legs. The red lines in the fabric danced like sparks from a fire.

David wondered what she thought. Her slow, calm way revealed nothing he could decipher. Was she laughing at him? Did she think going to camp was a foolishness? Did she even have a geographical understanding of where he would go, the Olympic Mountains?

He had a last glimpse of the bright fingernails as she went out, closed the door.

David bounced from bed, began dressing. When he came to the belt, he slipped the sheathed knife onto it, cinched the buckle. The blade remained a heavy presence at his hip while he brushed his teeth and combed his blond hair straight back. When he leaned close to the mirror, he could see the knife’s dark handle with the initials burned into it: DMM, David Morgenstern Marshall.

Presently, he went down to breakfast.

* * *

Statement of Dr. Tilman Earth, University of Washington Anthropology Department:

The word katsuk is very explicit in Hobuhet’s native tongue. It means “the center” or the core from which all perception radiates. It’s the center of the world or of the universe. It’s where an aware individual stands. There has never been any doubt in my mind that Charles is aware. I can understand his assuming this pseudonym.

You’ve seen those papers he wrote. That one where he compares the Raven myth of his people to the Genesis myth of Western civilization is very disturbing. He has perceived the link between dream and reality—how we seek to win a place in destiny through rebellion, the evil forces we build up only to destroy, the Great Conquests and Great Causes to which we cling long after they’ve been exposed as empty glitter. Here … notice his simile for such lost perceptions:

“… the fish eyes like gray skimmed milk that stare at you out of things which are alive when they shouldn’t be.”

This is the observation of someone who is capable of great things, as great as any achievements in our Western mythology.

* * *

It had begun when his name still was Charles Hobuhet, a good Indian name for a Good Indian.

The bee had alighted, after all, on the back of Charles Hobulet’s left hand. There had been no one named Katsuk then. He had been reaching up to grasp a vine maple limb, climbing from a creek bottom in the stillness of midday.

The bee was black and gold, a bee from the forest, a bumblebee of the family Apidae. It’s name fled buzzing through his mind, a memory from days in the white school.

Somewhere above him, a ridge came down toward the Pacific out of the Olympic Mountains like the gnarled root of an ancient spruce clutching the earth for support.

The sun would be warm up there, but winter’s chill in the creek bottom slid its icy way down the watercourse from the mountains to these spring-burgeoning foothills.

Cold came with the bee, too. It was a special cold that put ice in the soul.

Still Charles Hobuhet’s soul then.

But he had performed the ancient ritual with twigs and string and bits of bone. The ice from the bee told him he must take a name. Unless he took a name immediately, he stood in peril of losing both souls, the soul in his body and the soul that went high or low with his true being.

The stillness of the bee on his hand made this obvious. He sensed urgent ghosts: people, animals, birds, all with him in this bee.

He whispered: “Alkuntam, help me.” The supreme god of his people made no reply. Shiny green of the vine maple trunk directly in front of him dominated his eyes. Ferns beneath it splayed out fronds. Condensation fell like rain on the damp earth. He forced himself to turn away, stared across the creek at a stand of alders bleached white against heavy green of cedar and fir on the stream’s far slope.

A quaking aspen, its leaves adither among the alders, dazzled his awareness, pulled his mind. He felt abruptly that he had found another self which must be reasoned with, influenced, and understood. He lost clarity of mind and sensed both selves straining toward some pure essence. All sense of self slipped from his body, searched outward into the dazzling aspen.

He thought: I am in the center of the universe! Bee spoke to him then: “I am Tamanawis speaking, to you …” The words boomed in his awareness, telling him his name. He spoke it aloud: “Katsuk! I am Katsuk.”

Katsuk.

It was a seminal name, one with potency.

Now, being Katsuk, he knew all its meanings. He was Ka-, the prefix for everything human. He was Ka-tsuk, the bird of myth. A human bird! He possessed roots in many meanings: bone, the color blue, a serving dish, smoke … brother and soul.

Once more, he said it: “I am Katsuk.”

Both selves flowed home to the body.

He stared at the miraculous bee on his hand. A bee had been the farthest thing from his expectations. He had been climbing, just climbing.

If there were thoughts in his mind, they were thoughts of his ordeal. It was the ordeal he had set for himself out of grief, out of the intellectual delight in walking through ancient ideas, out of the fear that he had lost his way in the white world. His native soul had rotted while living in that white world. But a spirit had spoken to him.

A true and ancient spirit.

Deep within his innermost being he knew that intellect and education, even the white education, had been his first guides on this ordeal.

He thought how, as Charles Hobuhet, he had begun this thing. He had waited for the full moon and cleansed his intestines by drinking seawater. He had found a land otter and cut out its tongue.

Kuschtaliute—the symbol tongue!

His grandfather had explained the way of it long ago, describing the ancient lore. Grandfather had said: “The shaman becomes the spirit-animal-man. God won’t let animals make the mistakes men make.”

That was the way of it.

He had carried Kuschtaliute in a deer scrotum pouch around his neck. He had come into these mountains. He had followed an old elk trail grown over with alder and fir and cotton wood. The setting sun had been at his back when he had buried Kuschtaliute beneath a rotten log. He had buried Kuschtaliute in a place he never again could find, there to become the symbol tongue.

All of this in anguish of spirit.

He thought: It began because of the rape and pointless death of my sister. The death of Janiktaht … little Jan.

He shook his head, confused by an onslaught of memories. Somewhere a gang of drunken loggers had found Janiktaht walking alone, her teenaged body full of spring happiness, and they had raped her and changed her and she had killed herself.

And her brother had become a walker-in-the-mountains.

The other self within him, the one which must be reasoned with and understood, sneered at him and said: “Rape and suicide are as old as mankind. Besides, that was Charles Hobuhet’s sister. You are Katsuk.”

He thought then as Katsuk: Lucretius was a liar! Science doesn’t liberate man from the terror of the gods!

Everything around him revealed this truth—the sun moving across the ridges, the ranges of drifting clouds, the rank vegetation.

White science had begun with magic and never moved far from it. Science continually failed to learn from lack of results. The ancient ways retained their potency. Despite sneers and calumny, the old ways achieved what the legends said they would.

His grandmother had been of the Eagle Phratry. And a bee had spoken to him. He had scrubbed his body with hemlock twigs until the skin was raw. He had caught his hair in a headband of red cedar bark. He had eaten only the roots of devil’s club until the ribs poked from his flesh.

How long had he been walking in these mountains?

He thought back to all the distance he had covered: ground so sodden that water oozed up at each step, heavy branches overhead that shut out the sun, undergrowth so thick he could see only a few body lengths in any direction. Somewhere, he had come through a tangled salmonberry thicket to a stream flowing in a canyon, deep and silent. He had followed that stream upward to vaporous heights … upward … upward. The stream had become a creek, this creek below him.

This place.

Something real was living in him now.

Abruptly, he sensed all of his dead ancestors lusting after this living experience. His mind lay pierced by sudden belief, by unending movement beneath the common places of life, by an alertness which never varied, night or day. He knew this bee!

He said: “You are Kwatee, the Changer.”

“And what are you?”

“I am Katsuk.”

“What are you?” The question thundered at him.

He put down terror, thought: Thunder is not angry. What frightens animals need not frighten a man. What am I?

The answer came to him as one of his ancestors would have known it. He said: “I am one who followed the ritual with care. I am one who did not really expect to find the spirit power.”

“Now you know.”

All of his thinking turned over, became as unsettled as a pool muddied by a big fish. What do I know?

The air around him continued full of dappled sunlight and the noise and spray from the creek. The mushroom-punk smell of a rotten log filled his nostrils. A stately, swaying leaf shadow brushed purple across the bee on his hand, withdrew.

He emptied his mind of everything except what he needed to know from the spirit poised upon his hand. He lay frozen in the-moment-of-the-bee. Bee was graceful, fat, and funny. Bee aroused a qualm of restless memories, rendered his senses abnormally acute. Bee …

An image of Janiktaht overcame his mind. Misery filled him right out to the skin. Janiktaht—sixty nights dead. Sixty nights since she had ended her shame and hopelessness in the sea.

He had a vision of himself moaning besides Janiktaht’s open grave, drunk with anguish, the swaying wind of the forest all through his flesh.

Awareness recoiled. He thought of himself as he had been once, as a boy heedlessly happy on the beach, following the tide mark. He remembered a piece of driftwood like a dead hand outspread on the sand.

Had that been driftwood?

He felt the peril of letting his thoughts flow. Who knew where they might go? Janiktaht’s image faded, vanished as though of its own accord. He tried to recall her face. It fled him through a blurred vision of young hemlocks … a moss-floored stand of trees where nine drunken loggers had dragged her to … one after another, to …

Something had happened to flesh which his mind no longer could contemplate without being scoured out, denuded of everything except a misshapen object that the ocean had cast up on a curve of beach where once he had played.

He felt like an old pot, all emotion scraped out. Everything eluded him except the spirit on the back of his hand. He thought:

We are like bees, my people—broken into many pieces, but the pieces remain dangerous.

In that instant, he realized that this creature on his hand must be much more than Changer—far, far more than Kwatee.

It is Soul Catcher!

Terror and elation warred within him. This was the greatest of the spirits. It had only to sting him and he would be invaded by a terrible thing. He would become the bee of his people. He would do a terrifying thing, a dangerous thing, a deadly thing.

Hardly daring to breathe, he waited.

Would Bee never move? Would they remain this way for all eternity? His mind felt drawn tight, as tense as a bow pulled to its utmost breaking point. All of his emotions lay closed up in blackness without inner light or outer light—a sky of nothingness within him.

He thought: How strange for a creature so tiny to exist as such spirit power, to be such spirit power—Soul Catcher!

One moment there had been no bee on his flesh. Now, it stood there as though flung into creation by a spray of sunlight, brushed by leaf shadow, the shape of it across a vein, darkness of the spirit against dark skin.

A shadow across his being.

He saw Bee with intense clarity: the swollen abdomen, the stretched gossamer of wings, the pollen dust on the legs, the barbed arrow of the stinger.

The message of this moment floated through his awareness, a clear flute sound. If the spirit went away peacefully, that would signal reprieve. He could return to the university. Another year, in the week of his twenty-sixth birthday, he would take his doctorate in anthropology. He would shake off this terrifying wildness which had invaded him at Janiktaht’s death. He would become the imitation white man, lost to these mountains and the needs of his people.

This thought saddened him. If the spirit left him, it would take both of his souls. Without souls, he would die. He could not outlast the sorrows which engulfed him.

Slowly, with ancient deliberation, Bee turned short of his knuckles. It was the movement of an orator gauging his audience. Faceted eyes included the human in their focus. Bee’s thorax arched, abdomen tipped, and he knew a surge of terror in the realization that he had been chosen …

The stinger slipped casually into his nerves, drawing his thoughts, inward, inward …

He heard the message of Tamanawis, the greatest of spirits, as a drumbeat matching the beat of his heart: “You must find a white. You must find a total innocent. You must kill an innocent of the whites. Let your deed fall upon this world. Let your deed be a single, heavy hand which clutches the heart. The whites must feel it. They must hear it. An innocent for all of our innocents.”

Having told him what he must do, Bee took flight.

His gaze followed the flight, lost it in the leafery of the vine maple copse far upslope. He sensed then a procession of ancestral ghosts insatiate in their demands. All of those who had gone before him remained an unchanging field locked immovably into his past, a field against which he could see himself change.

Kill an innocent!

Sorrow and confusion dried his mouth. He felt parched in his innermost being, withered.

The sun crossing over the high ridge to keep its appointment with the leaves in the canyon touched his shoulders, his eyes. He knew he had been tempted and had gone through a locked door into a region of terrifying power. To hold this power he would have to come to terms with that other self inside him. He could be only one person—Katsuk.

He said: “I am Katsuk.”

The words brought calm. Spirits of air and earth were with him as they had been for his ancestors. He resumed climbing the slope. His movements aroused a flying squirrel. It glided from a high limb to a low one far below. He felt the life all around him then: brown movements hidden in greenery, life caught suddenly in stop-motion by his presence.

He thought: Remember me, creatures of this forest. Remember Katsuk as the whole world will remember him. I am Katsuk. Ten thousand nights from now, ten thousand seasons from now, this world still will remember Katsuk and his meaning.

* * *

From a wire story, Seattle dateline:

The mother of the kidnap victim arrived at Six Rivers Camp about 3:30 P.M. yesterday. She was brought in by one of the four executive helicopters released for the search by lumber and plywood corporations of the northwest. There were tearstains on her cheeks as she stepped from the helicopter to be greeted by her husband.

She said: “Any mother can understand how I feel. Please, let me be alone with my husband.”

* * *

An irritant whine edged his mother’s voice as David sat down across from her in the sunny breakfast room that overlooked their back lawn and private stream. The scowl which accompanied the whine drew sharp lines down her forehead toward her nose. A vein on her left hand had taken on the hue of rusty iron. She wore something pink and lacy, her yellow hair fluffed up. Her lavender perfume enveloped the table.

She said: “I wish you wouldn’t take that awful knife to camp, Davey. What in heaven’s name will you do with such a thing? I think your father was quite mad to give you such a dangerous instrument.”

Her left hand jingled the little bell to summon the cook with David’s cereal.

David stared down at the table while cook’s pink hand put a bowl there. The cream in the bowl was almost the same yellow as the tablecloth. The bowl gave off the odor of the fresh strawberries sliced into the cereal. David adjusted his napkin.

His mother said: “Well?” Sometimes her questions were not meant to be answered, but “Well?” signaled pressure. He sighed. “Mother, everyone at camp has a knife.”

“Why?”

“To cut things, carve wood, stuff like that.” He began eating. One hour. That could be endured. “To cut your fingers off!” she said. “I simply refuse to let you take such a dangerous thing.”

He swallowed a mouthful of cereal while he studied her the way he had seen his father do it, letting his mind sort out the possible countermoves. A breeze shook the trees bordering the lawn behind her.

“Well?” she insisted.

“What do I do?” he asked. “Every time I need a knife I’ll have to borrow one from one of the other guys.”

He took another mouthful of cereal, savoring the acid of the strawberries while he waited for her to assess the impossibility of keeping him knifeless at camp. David knew how her mind worked. She had been Prosper Morgenstern before she had married Dad. The Morgensterns always had the best. If he was going to have a knife anyway …

She put flame to a cigarette, her hand jerking. The smoke emerged from her mouth in spurts.

David went on eating. She put the cigarette aside, said: “Oh, very well. But you must be extremely careful.”

“Just like Dad showed me,” he said.

She stared at him, a finger of her left hand tapping a soft drumbeat on the table. The movement set the diamonds on her wristwatch clasp aflame. She said: “I don’t know what I’ll do with both of my men gone.”

“Dad’ll be halfway to Washington by now.”

“And you in that awful camp.”

“It’s the best camp there is.”

“I guess so. You know, Davey, we all may have to move to the East.” David nodded. His father had moved them to the Carmel Valley and gone back into private practice after the last election. He commuted up the Peninsula to the city three days a week. Sometimes Prosper joined him there for a weekend. They kept an apartment in the city and a maid-caretaker.

But yesterday his father had received a telephone call from someone important in the government. There had been other calls and a sense of excitement in the house. Howard Marshall had been offered an important position in the State Department.

David said: “It’s funny, y’know?”

“What is, dear?”

“Dad’s going to Washington and so am I.”

She smiled. “Different Washingtons.”

“Both named for the same man.”

“Indeed they were.”

Mrs. Parma glided into the breakfast room, said: “Excuse me, madam. I have had Peter put the young sir’s equipage into the car. Will there be anything else?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Parma. That will be all.”

David waited until Mrs. Parma had gone, said: “That book about the camp said they have some Indian counselors. Will they look like Mrs. Parma?”

“Davey! Don’t they teach you anything in that school?”

“I know they’re different Indians. I just wondered if they, you know, looked like her, if that’s why we called our Indians …”

“What a strange idea.” She shook her head, arose. “There are times when you remind me of your grandfather Morgenstern. He used to insist the Indians were the lost tribe of Israel.” She hesitated, one hand lingering on the table, her gaze focused on the knife at David’s waist. “You will be careful with that awful knife?”

“I’ll do just like Dad said. Don’t worry.”

* * *

Special Agent Norman Hosbig, Seattle Office, FBI:

Yes, in answer to that, I believe I can say that we do have some indications that the Indian may be mentally deranged. Let me emphasize that this is only a possibility which we are not excluding in our assessment of the problem. There’s the equal possibility that he’s pretending insanity.

* * *

Hands clasped behind his head, Katsuk had stretched out in the darkness of his bunk in Cedar Cabin. Water dripped in the washbasin of the toilet across the hall. The sound filled him with a sense of rhythmic drifting. He closed his eyes tightly and saw a purple glow behind his eyelids. It was the spirit flame, the sign of his determination. This room, the cabin with its sleeping boys, the camp all around—everything went out from the center, which was the spirit flame of Katsuk.

He drew in the shallow breaths of expectation, thought of his charges asleep in the long barracks room down the hall outside his closed door: eight sleeping boys. Only one of the boys concerned Katsuk. The spirits had sent him another sign: the perfect victim, the Innocent.

The son of an important man slept out there, a person to command the widest attention.

No one would escape Katsuk’s message.

To prepare for this time, he had clothed himself in a loincloth woven of white dog hair and mountain goat wool. A belt of red cedar bark bound the waist. The belt held a soft deerhide pouch which contained the few things he needed: a sacred twig and bone bound with cedar string, an ancient stone arrowhead from the beach at Ozette, raven feathers to fletch a consecrated arrow, a bowstring of twisted walrus gut, elkhide thongs to bind the victim, a leaf packet of spruce gum … down from sea ducks … a flute …

A great aunt had made the fabric of his loincloth many years ago, squatting at a flat loom in the smoky shadows of her house at the river mouth. The pouch and the bit of down had been blessed by a shaman of his people before the coming of the whites.

Elkhide moccasins covered his feet. They were decorated with beads and porcupine quills. Janiktaht had made them for him two summers ago.

A lifetime past.

He could feel slow tension spreading upward from those moccasins. Janiktaht was here with him in this room, her hands reaching out from the elk leather she had shaped. Her voice filled the darkness with the final screech of her anguish.

Katsuk took a deep, calming breath. It was not yet time.

There had been fog in the evening, but it had cleared at nightfall on a wind blowing strongly from the southwest. The wind sang to Katsuk in the voice of his grandfather’s flute, the flute in the pouch. Katsuk thought of his grand-father: a beaten man, thick of face, who would have been a shaman in another time. A beaten man, without congregation or mystery, a shadow shaman because he remembered all the old ways.

Katsuk whispered: “I do this for you, grandfather.”

Each thing in its own time. The cycle had come around once more to restore the old balance.

His grandfather had built a medicine fire once. As the blaze leaped, the old man had played a low, thin tune on his flute. The song of his grandfather’s flute wove in and out of Katsuk’s mind. He thought of the boy sleeping out there in the cabin—David Marshall.

You will be snared in the song of this flute, white innocent. I have the root of your tree in my power. Your people will know destruction!

He opened his eyes to moonlight. The light came through the room’s one window, drew a gnarled tree shadow on the wall to his left. He watched the undulant shadow, swaying darkness, a visual echo of wind in trees.

The water continued its drip-drip-drip across the hall. Unpleasant odors drifted on the room’s air. Antiseptic place! Poisonous! The cabin had been scoured out with strong soap by the advance work crew.

I am Katsuk.

The odors in the room exhausted him. Everything of the whites did that. They weakened him, removed him from contact with his past and the powers that were his by right of inheritance.

I am Katsuk.

He quested outward in his mind, sensed the camp and its surroundings. A trail curved through a thick stand of fir beyond the cabin’s south porch. Five hundred and twenty-eight paces it went, over the roots and boggy places to the ancient elk trace which climbed into the park.

He thought: That is my land! My land! These white thieves stole my land. These hoquat! Their park it my land!

Hoquat! Hoquat!

He mouthed the word without sound. His ancestors had applied that name to the first whites arriving off these shores in their tall ships. Hoquat—something that floated far out on the water, something unfamiliar and mysterious.

The hoquat had been like the green waves of winter that grew and grew and grew until they smashed upon the land.

Bruce Clark, director of Six Rivers Camp, had taken photographs that day—the publicity pictures he took every year to help lure the children of the rich. It had amused Katsuk to obey in the guise of Charles Hobuhet.

Eyes open wide, body sweating with anticipation, Katsuk had obeyed Clark’s directions.

“Move a little farther left, Chief.”

Chief!

“That’s good. Now, shield your eyes with your hand as though you were staring out at the forest. No, the right hand.”

Katsuk had obeyed.

The photographs pleased him. Nothing could steal a soul which Soul Catcher already possessed. The photographs were a spirit omen. The charges of Cedar Cabin had clustered around him, their faces toward the camera.

Newspapers and magazines would reproduce those pictures. An arrow would point to one face among the boys—David Marshall, son of the new Undersecretary of State.

The announcement will come on the six-o “clock news over the rec room’s one television. There,will be pictures of the Marshall boy and his mother at the San Francisco airport, the father at a press conference in Washington, B.C.

Many hoquat would stare at the pictures Clark had taken. Let them stare at a person they thought was Charles Hobuhet. The Soul Catcher had yet to reveal Katsuk hidden in that flesh.

By the moon shadow on the wall, he knew it was almost midnight. Time. With a single motion, he arose from the bunk, glanced to the note he had left on the room’s tiny desk.

“I take an innocent of your people to sacrifice for all the innocents you have murdered, an innocent to go with all of those other innocents into the spirit place.”

Ahhh, the words they would pour upon this message! All the ravings and analysis, the hoquat logic …

The light of the full moon coming through the window penetrated his body. He could feel the weighted silence of it all along his spine. It made his hand tingle where Bee had left the message of its stinger. The odor of resin from the rough boards of the walls made him calm. Without guilt.

The breath of his passion came from his lips like smoke: “I am Katsuk, the center of the universe.”

He turned and, in a noiseless glide, took the center of the universe out the door, down the short hall into the bunk room.

The Marshall boy slept in the nearest cot. Moonlight lay across the lower half of the cot in a pattern of hills and valleys, undulant with the soft movement of the boy’s breathing. His clothing lay on a locker at the foot of the cot: whipcord trousers, a T-shirt, light sweater and jacket, socks, tennis shoes. The boy was sleeping in his shorts.

Katsuk rolled the clothing into a bundle around the shoes. The alien fabric sent a message into his nerves, telling of that mechanical giant the hoquat called civilization. The message dried his tongue. Momentarily, he sensed the many resources the hoquat possessed to hunt down those who wounded them.

Alien guns and aircraft and electronic devices. And he must fight back without such things. Everything hoquat must become alien and denied to him.

An owl cried outside the cabin.

Katsuk pressed the clothing bundle tightly to his chest. The owl had spoken to him. In this land, Katsuk would have other powers, older and stronger and more enduring than those of the hoquat.

He listened to the room: eight boys asleep. The sweat of their excitement dominated this place. They had been slow settling into sleep. But now they slept even deeper because of that slowness.

Katsuk moved to the head of the boy’s cot, put a hand lightly over the sleeping mouth, ready to press down and prevent an outcry. The lips twisted under his hand. He saw the eyes open, stare. He felt the altered pulse, the change in breathing.

Softly, Katsuk bent close, whispered: “Don’t waken the others. Get up and come with me. I have something special for you. Quiet now.”

Hesitant thoughts fleeing through the boy’s mind could be felt under Katsuk’s hand. Once more, Katsuk whispered, letting his words flow through his spirit powers: “I must make you my spirit brother because of the photographs.” Then: “I have your clothes. I’ll wait in the hall.”

He felt the words take effect, removed his hand from the boy’s mouth. Tension subsided.

Katsuk went into the hallway. Presently, the boy joined him, a thin figure whose shorts gleamed whitely in the gloom. Katsuk thrust the clothing into his hands, led the way outside, waiting for the boy at the door, then closing it softly.

Grandfather, I do this for you!

* * *

Fragment of a note by Charles Hobuhet found at Cedar Cabin:

Hoquat, I give you what you prayed for, this good arrow made clean and straight by my hands. When I give you this arrow, please hold it in your body with pride. Let this arrow take you to the land of Alkuntam. Our brothers will welcome you there, saying: “What a beautiful youth has come to us! What a beautiful hoquat!” They will say to one another: “How strong he is, this beautiful hoquat who carries the arrow of Katsuk in his flesh.” And you will be proud when you hear them speak of your greatness and your beauty. Do not run away, hoquat. Come toward my good arrow. Accept it. Our brothers will sing of this. I will cover your body with white feathers from the breasts of ducks. Our maidens will sing your beauty. This is what you have prayed for from one end of the world to the other every day of your life. I, Katsuk, give you your wish because I have become Soul Catcher.

* * *

David, his mind still drugged with sleep, came wide awake as he stepped out the door into the cold night. Shivering, he stared at the man who had awakened him—the Chief.

“What is it, Chief?”

“Shhhh.” Katsuk touched the roll of clothing. “Get dressed.”

More from the cold than any other reason, David obeyed. Tree branches whipped in the wind above the cabin, filled the night with fearful shapes.

“Is it an initiation, Chief?”

“Shhh, be very quiet.”

“Why?”

“We were photographed together. We must become spirit brothers. There is a ceremony.”

“What about the other guys?”

“You have been chosen.”

Katsuk fought down sudden pity for this boy, this Innocent. Why pity anyone? He realised the moonlight had cut at his heart. For some reason, it made him think of the Shaker Church where his relatives had taken him as a child—hoquat church! He heard the voices chanting in his memory: “Begat, begat, begat …”

David whispered: “I don’t understand. What’re we doing?”

The stars staring down at him, the wind in the trees, all carried forboding. He felt frightened. A gap in the trees beyond the porch revealed a great bush of stars standing out against the night. David stared into the shadows of the porch. Why wasn’t the Chief answering?

David tightened his belt, felt the knife in its sheath at his waist. If the Chief were planning something bad, he’d have removed the knife. That was a real weapon. Daniel Boone had killed a bear with a blade no bigger than this one. “What’re we going to do?” David pressed.

“A ceremony of spirit brotherhood,” Katsuk said. He felt the truth in his words. There would be a ceremony and a joining, a shape that occurred out of darkness, a mark on the earth and an incantation to the real spirits.

David still hesitated, thinking this was an Indian. They were strange people. He thought of Mrs. Parma. Different Indian, but both mysterious.

David pulled his jacket close around him. The cold air had raised goose pimples on his skin. He felt both frightened and excited. An Indian.

He said: “You’re not dressed.”

“I am dressed for the ceremony.”

Silently, Katsuk prayed: “O Life Giver, now that you have seen the way a part of your all-powerful being goes …”

David sensed the man’s tensions, the air of secrecy. But no place could be safer than this wilderness camp with that cog railroad the only way to get here.

He asked: “Aren’t you cold?”

“I am used to this. You must hurry after me now. We haven’t much time.” Katsuk stepped down off the porch. The boy followed. “Where are we going?”

“To the top of the ridge.” David hurried to keep in step. “Why?”

“I have prepared a place there for you to be initiated into a very old ceremony of my people.”

“Because of the photographs?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think Indians believed in that stuff anymore.”

“Even you will believe.”

David tucked his shirt more firmly into his belt, felt the knife. The knife gave him a feeling of confidence. He stumbled in his hurry to keep up.

Without looking back, Katsuk felt the boy’s tensions relax. There had been a moment back on the porch when rebellion had radiated from the Innocent. The boy’s eyes had been uncertain, wet and smooth in their darkness. The bitter acid of fear had been in the air. But now the boy would follow. He was enthralled. The center of the universe carried the power of a magnet for that Innocent.

David felt his heart beating rapidly from exertion. He smelled rancid oil from the Chief. The man’s skin glistened when moonlight touched it, as though he had greased his body.

“How far is it?” David asked.

“Three thousand and eighty-one paces.”

“How far is that?”

“A bit over a mile.”

“Did you have to dress like that?”

“Yes.”

“What if it rains?”

“I will not notice.”

“Why’re we going so fast?”

“We need the moonlight for the ceremony. Be silent now and stay close.”

Katsuk felt brass laughter in his chest, picked up the pace. The smell of newly cut cedar drifted on the air. The rich odor of cedar oils carried an omen message from the days when that tree had sheltered his people.

David stumbled over a root, regained his balance.

The trail pushed through mottled darkness—black broken by sharp slashes of moonlight. The bobbing patch of loincloth ahead of him carried a strange dream quality to David. When moonlight reached it, the man’s skin glistened, but his black hair drank the light, was one with the shadows.

“Will the other guys be initiated?” David asked.

“I told you that you are the only one.”

“Why?”

“You will understand soon. Do not talk.”

Katsuk hoped the silence brought by that rebuke would endure. Like all hoquat, the boy talked too much. There would be no reprieve for such a one.

“I keep stumbling,” David muttered. “Walk as I walk.” Katsuk measured the trail by the “feeling of it underfoot: soft earth, a dampness where a spring surfaced, spruce cones, the hard lacery of roots polished by many feet …

He began to think of his sister and of his former life before Katsuk. He felt the spirits of air and earth draw close, riding this moonlight, bringing the memory of all the lost tribes.

David thought: Walk as he walks?

The man moved with sliding panther grace, almost noiseless. The trail grew steep, tangled with more roots, slippery underfoot, but still the man moved as though he saw every surface change, every rock and root.

David became aware of the wet odors all around: rotting wood, musks, bitter acridity of ferns. Wet leaves brushed his cheeks. Limbs and vines dragged at him. He heard falling water, louder and louder—a river cascading in its gorge off to the right. He hoped the sound covered his clumsiness but feared the Chief could hear him and was laughing.

Walk as I walk!

How could the Chief even see anything in this dark?

The trail entered a bracken clearing. David saw peaks directly ahead, snow on them streaked by moonlight, a bright sieve of stars close overhead.

Katsuk stared upward as he walked. The peaks appeared to be stitched upon the sky by the stars. He allowed this moment its time to flow through him, renewing the spirit message: “I am Tamanawis speaking to you …”

He began to sing the names of his dead, sent the names outward into Sky World. A falling star swept over the clearing—another, then another and another until the sky flamed with them.

Katsuk fell silent in wonder. This was no astronomical display to be explained by the hoquat magic science; this was a message from the past.

The boy spoke close behind: “Wow! Look at the falling stars. Did you make a wish?”

“I made a wish.”

“What were you singing?”

“A song of my people.”

Katsuk, the omen of the stars strong within him, saw the charcoal slash of path and the clearing as an arena within which he would begin creating a memory maker, a death song for the ways of the past, a holy obscenity to awe the hoquat world.

“Skagajek!” he shouted. “I am the shaman spirit come to drive the sickness from this world!”

David, hearing the strange words, lost his footing, almost fell, and was once again afraid.

* * *

From Katsuk’s announcement to his people:

I have done all the things correctly. I used string, twigs, and bits of bone to cast the oracle. I tied the red cedar band around my head. I prayed to Kwahoutze, the god in the water, and to Alkuntam. I carried the consecrated down of a sea duck to scatter upon the sacrificial victim. It was all done in the proper way.

* * *

The immensity of the wilderness universe around David, the mystery of this midnight hike to some strange ritual, began to tell on him. His body was wet with perspiration, chilled in every breeze. His feet were sopping with trail dew. The Chief, an awesome figure in this setting, had taken on a new character. He walked with such steady confidence that David sensed all the accumulated woods knowledge compressed into each movement. The man was Deerstalker. He was Ultimate Woodsman. He was a person who could survive in this wilderness.

David began dropping farther and farther behind. The Chief became a gray blur ahead. Without turning, Katsuk called: “Keep up.” David quickened his steps.

Something barked. “Yap-yap!” in the trees off to his right. A sudden motion of smoky wings glided across him, almost touched his head. David ducked, hurried to close the gap between himself and that bobbing white loincloth.

Abruptly, Katsuk stopped. David almost ran into him.

Katsuk looked at the moon. It moved over the trees, illuminating crags and rock spurs on the far slope. His feet had measured out the distance. This was the place.

David asked: “Why’d we stop?”

“This is the place.”

“Here? What’s here?”

Katsuk thought: How is it the hoquat all do this? They always prefer mouth-talk to body-talk.

He ignored the boy’s question. What answer could there be? This ignorant Innocent had failed to read the signs.

Katsuk squatted, faced the trail’s downhill side. This had been an elk trail for centuries, the route between salt water and high meadows. The earth had been cut out deeply by the hooves. Ferns and moss grew from the side of the trail. Katsuk felt into the growth. His fingers went as surely as though guided by sight. Gently, gently, he pulled the fronds aside. Yes! This was the place he had marked out.

He began chanting, low-voiced in the ancient tongue:

“Hoquat, let your body accept the consecrated arrow. Let pride fill your soul at the touch of my sharp and biting point. Your soul will turn toward the sky …”

David listened to the unintelligible words. He could not see the man’s hands in the fern shadows, but the movements bothered him and he could not identify the reason. He wanted to ask what was happening but felt an odd constraint. The chanted words were full of clickings and gruntings.

The man fell silent.

Katsuk opened the pouch at his waist, removed a pinch of the consecrated white duck down. His fingers trembled. It must be done correctly. Any mistake would bring disaster.

David, his eyes adjusting to the gloom, began to make out the shadowy movement of hands in the ferns. Something white reflected moonlight there. He squatted beside the man, cleared his throat.

“What’re you doing?”

“I am writing my name upon the earth. I must do that before you can learn my name.”

“Isn’t your name Charlie something?”

“That is not my name.”

“Oh?” David thought about this. Not his name? Then: “Were you singing just now?”

“Yes.”

“What were you singing?”

“A song for you—to give you a name.”

“I already have a name.”

“You do not have a secret name given between us, the most powerful name a person can have.”

Katsuk smoothed dirt over the pinch of down. He sensed Kuschtaliute, the hidden tongue of the land otter, working through his hand upon the dirt, guiding each movement. The power grew in him.

David shivered in the cold, said: “This isn’t much fun. Is this all there is to it?”

“It is important if we are to share our names.”

“Am I supposed to do something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

Katsuk arose. He sensed tensions in his fingers where Kuschtaliute still controlled his muscles. Bits of dirt clung to his skin. The spirit power of this moment went all through his flesh. “I am Tamanawis speaking to you …”

He said: “You will stand now and face the moon.”

“Why?”

“Do it.”

“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.

He thought: My name is David. David, not Hoquat. David-not-Hoquat.

His legs ached. His feet were wet and sore. He felt that if he could just close his eyes right here he could sleep standing up. When he blinked, his eyelids felt rough against his eyes. His left arm was sore where a long red abrasion had been dragged across his skin by the rough bark of a tree. It had torn both his jacket and shirt. The madman had cursed him then: a savage voice out of darkness.

The night had been a cold nightmare in a black pit of trees. Now he saw morning’s rose vapors on the peaks, but the nightmare continued.

Katsuk gave a commanding tug on the thong, studied the boy’s response. Too slow. The fool would kill them both on that slide.

“What is your name?” Katsuk asked.

The voice was low, defiant: “David Marshall.”

Without change of expression, Katsuk delivered a sharp backhand blow to the boy’s cheek, measuring it to sting but not injure. “What is your name?”

“You know my name!”

“Say your name.”

“It’s Dav—” Again, Katsuk struck him. The boy stared at him, defiant, fighting back tears. Katsuk thought: No reprieve … no reprieve …

“I know what you want me to say,” the boy muttered. His jaws pulsed with the effort of holding back tears.

No reprieve.

“Your name,” Katsuk insisted, touching the knife at his waist. The boy’s eyes followed the movement.

“Hoquat.” It was muttered, almost unintelligible. “Louder .” The boy opened his mouth, screamed: “Hoquat!” Katsuk said: “Now, we will climb.”

He turned, went up the shale slope. He placed each foot with care: now on a flat slab jutting from the slide, now on a sloping buttress which seemed anchored in the mountain. Once, a rock shifted under his testing foot. Pebbles bounded down into the trees while he waited, poised to jump if the slope went. The rocks remained in place, but he sensed the trembling uncertainty of the whole structure. Cautiously, he went on up.

At the beginning of the climb, he watched to see that

Hoquat made each step correctly, found the boy occupied with bent-head concentration, step for step, a precise imitation.

Good.

Katsuk concentrated on his own climbing then.

At the top, he grasped a willow bough, pulled them both into the shelter of the trees.

In the shaded yellow silence there, Katsuk allowed the oil-smooth flow of elation to fill him. He had done this thing! He had taken the Innocent and was safe for the moment. He had all the survival seasons before him: the season of the midge, of the cattail flowering, of salal ripening, of salmonberries, the season of grubs and ants—a season for each food.

Finally, there would be a season for the vision he must dream before he could leave the Innocent’s flesh to be swallowed by the spirits underground.

Hoquat had collapsed to the ground once more, unaware of what waited him.

Abruptly, a thunderous flapping of wings brought Katsuk whirling to the left. The boy sat up, trembling. Katsuk peered upward between the willow branches at a flight of ravens. They circled the lower slopes, then climbed into the sunlight. Katsuk’s gaze followed the birds as they swam in the sky sea. A smile of satisfaction curved his lips.

An omen! Surely an omen!

Deerflies sang in the shadows behind him. He heard water dripping at the spring. Katsuk turned.

At the sound of the ravens, the boy had retreated into the tree shadows as far as the thong would allow. He sat there now, staring at Katsuk, and his forehead and hair caught the first sunlight in the gloom like a trout flashing in a pool.

The Innocent must be hidden before the searchers took to the sky, Katsuk thought. He pushed past the boy, found the game trail which his people had known here for centuries.

“Come,” he said, tugging at the thong.

Katsuk felt the boy get up and follow.

At the rock pool where the spring bubbled from the cliff, Katsuk dropped the thong, stretched out, and buried his face in the cold water. He drank deeply.

The boy sprawled beside him, would have pitched head foremost into the pool if Katsuk had not caught him.

“Thirsty,” Hoquat whispered.

“Then drink.”

Katsuk held the boy’s shoulder while he drank. Hoquat gasped and sputtered, coming up at last with his face and blond hair dripping.

“We will go into the cave now,” Katsuk said.

The cave was a pyramidal black hole above the pool, its entrance hidden from the sky by a mossy overhang which dripped condensation. Katsuk studied the cave mouth a moment for sign that an animal might be occupying it, saw no sign. He tugged at the thong, led Hoquat up the rock ledge beside the pool and into the cave.

“I smell something,” the boy said.

Katsuk sniffed: There were many old odors—animal dung, fur, fungus. All of them were old. Bear denned here because it was dry, but none had been here for at least a year.

“Bear den last year,” he said.

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, found a rock spur too high up on the cave’s wall for the boy to reach with his tied hands, secured the end of the thong on the spur.

The boy stood with his back against the rock wall. His gaze followed every move Katsuk made. Katsuk wondered what he was thinking. The eyes appeared feverish in their intensity.

Katsuk said: “We will rest here today. There is no one to hear you if you shout. But if you shout, I will kill you. I will kill you at the first outcry. You must learn to obey me completely. You must learn to depend on me for your life. Is that understood?”

The boy stared at him, unmoving, unspeaking. Katsuk gripped the boy’s chin, peered into his eyes, met rage and defiance. “Your name is Hoquat,” Katsuk said. The boy jerked his chin free.

Katsuk put a finger gently on the red mark on Hoquat’s cheek from the two blows at the rockslide. Speaking softly, he said: “Do not make me strike you again. We should not have that between us.”

The boy blinked. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes, but he shook them out with an angry gesture.

Still in that soft voice, Katsuk said: “Answer to your name when I ask you. What is your name now?”

“Hoquat.” Sullen, but clear.

“Good.”

Katsuk went to the cave mouth, paused there to let his senses test the area. Shadows were shortening at the end of the notch as the sun climbed higher. Bright yellow skunk cabbages poked from the shadowed water at the lower end of the spring pool.

It bothered him that he had struck Hoquat, although strong body-talk had been required then.

Do I pity Hoquat? he wondered. Why pity anyone?

But the boy had showed surprising strength. He had spirit in him. Hoquat was not a whiner. He was not a coward. His innocence lay within a real person whose center of being remained yet unformed but was gaining power. It would be easy to admire this Innocent.

Must I admire the victim? Katsuk wondered.

That would make this thing all the more difficult. Perhaps it would occur, though, as a special test of Katsuk’s purpose. One did not slay an innocent out of casual whim. One who wore the mantle of Soul Catcher dared not do a wrong thing. If it were done, it must fit the demands of the spirit world.

Still, it would be a heavy burden to kill someone you admired. Too heavy a burden? Without the need for immediate decision, he could not say. This was not an issue he wanted to confront.

Again, he wondered: Why was I chosen for this?

Had it occurred in a way similar to the way he had chosen Hoquat? Out of what mysterious necessities did the spirit world act? Had the behavior of the white world become at last too much to bear? Certainly that must be the answer.

He felt that he should call out from the cave mouth where he stood, shouting in a voice that could be heard all the way to the ocean:

“You down there! See what you have done to us!”

He stood lost in reverie and wondered presently if he might have shouted. But the hoard of life all around gave no sign of disturbance.

If I admire Hoquat, he thought, I must do it only to strengthen my decision.

* * *

From the speech Katsuk made to his people:

Bear, wolf, raven, eagle—these were my ancestors. They were men in those days. That’s how it was. It really was. They celebrated when they felt happy about the life within them. They cried when they were sad. Sometimes, they sang. Before the hoquat killed us, our songs told it all. I have heard those songs and seen the carvings which tell the old stories. But carvings cannot talk or sing. They just sit there, their eyes staring and dead. Like the dead, they will be eaten by the earth.

* * *

David shuddered with aversion to his surroundings. The gray-green gloom of the cave, the wet smoothness of rock walls at the sunlit mouth which his thong leash would not permit him to reach, the animal odors, the dance of dripping water outside—all tormented him.

He was a battleground of emotions: something near hysteria compounded of hunger, dread, shuddering uncertainty, fatigue, rage.

Katsuk came back into the cave, a black silhouette against sunlight. He wore the Russell knife at his waist, one hand on the handle.

My knife, David thought. He began to tremble.

“You are not sleeping,” Katsuk said.

No answer.

“You have questions?” Katsuk asked.

“Why?” David whispered.

Katsuk nodded but remained silent.

The boy said: “You’re holding me for ransom, is that it?”

Katsuk shook his head. “Ransom? Do you think I could ransom you for an entire world?”

The boy shook his head, not understanding.

“Perhaps I could ransom you for an end to all hoquat mistakes,” Katsuk said.

“What’re you …”

“Ahhh, you wonder if I’m crazy. Drunk, maybe. Crazy, drunken Indian. You see, I know all the cliches.”

“I just asked why.” Voice low.

“I’m an ignorant, incompetent savage, that’s why. If I have a string of degrees after my name, that must be an accident. Or I probably have white blood in me, eh? Hoquat blood? But I drink too much. I’m lazy. I don’t like to work and be industrious. Have I missed anything? Any other cliches? Oh, yes—I’m bloodthirsty, too.”

“But I just—”

“You wonder about ransom. I think you have made all the mistakes a hoquat should be permitted.”

“Are you … crazy?”

Katsuk chuckled. “Maybe, just a little.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Barely whispered.

“Go to sleep and don’t ask stupid questions.” He indicated the cave floor, clumps of dry moss which could be kicked into a bed.

The boy took a quavering breath. “I don’t want to sleep.”

“You will obey me.” Katsuk pointed to the floor, kicked some of the moss into position at the boy’s feet.

Every movement a signal of defiance, Hoquat knelt, rolled onto his side, his tied hands pressed against the rock wall of the cave. His eyes remained open, glaring up at Katsuk.

“Close your eyes.”

“I can’t.” Katsuk noted the fatigue signs, the trembling, the glazed eyes. “Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t.”

“Why?”

“Are you going to kill me?” Stronger that time.

Katsuk shook his head.

“Why are you doing this to me?” the boy demanded.

“Doing what?”

“Kidnapping me, treating me like this.”

“Treating you like what?”

“You know!”

“But you have received ordinary treatment for an Indian. Have our hands not been tied? Have we not been dragged where we would rather not go? Have we not been brutalised and forced to take names we did not want?”

“But why me?”

“Ahhhh, why you! The cry of innocence from every age.”

Katsuk pressed his eyes tightly closed. His mind felt damned with evil sensations. He opened his eyes, knew he had become that other person, the one who used Charles Hobuhet’s education and experiences, but with a brain working in a different way. Ancient instincts pulsed in his flesh.

“What’d I ever do to you?” the boy asked. “Precisely,” Katsuk said. “You have done nothing to me. That is why I chose you.”

“You talk crazy!”

“You think I have caught the hoquat disease, eh? You think I have only words, that I must find words to pin down what cannot be cut into word shapes. Your mouth bites at the universe. You give tongue to noises. I do not do that. I send another kind of message. I draw a design upon the emotions. My design will rise up inside people where they have no defenses. They will not be able to shut their ears and deny they heard me. I tell you, they will hear Katsuk!”

“You’re crazy!”

“It is odd,” Katsuk mused. “You may be one of the few people in the world who will not hear me.”

“You’re crazy! You’re crazy!”

“Perhaps that’s it. Yes. Now, go to sleep.”

“You haven’t told me why you’re doing this.”

“I want your world to understand something. That an innocent from your people can die just as other innocents have died.”

The boy went pale, his mouth in a rigid grimace. He whispered: “You’re going to kill me.”

“Perhaps not,” Katsuk lied. “You must remember that the gift of words is the gift of illusion.”

“But you said …”

“I say this to you, Hoquat: Your world will feel my message in its balls! If you do as I tell you, all will go well with you.”

“You’re lying!”

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.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Y-yes.”

“Then I will teach you how to live in my land. Many things are provided here to sustain us—roots, sweet ants, fat grubs, flowers, bulbs, leaves. You will learn these things and become a man of the woods.”

“A w-woodsman?”

Katsuk shook his head from side to side. “A man of the woods. That is much different. You are sly and have a devil in you. These make the man of the woods.”

The words made no sense to David, but he nodded.

Katsuk said: “Raven said to me we can travel by daylight. We will go now because the hoquat will be sending men on foot. They will come to this place because of your sly handkerchief.”

David ran his tongue over his lips. “Where are we going?”

“Far into the mountains. We will find the valley of peace, perhaps, where my ancestors put all the fresh water once.”

David thought: He’s crazy, pure crazy. And he said: “I’m thirsty.”

“You can drink from the spring. Stand up now.”

David obeyed, wondered if the thongs would be tied on his wrists. His side hurt where he had slept on the rock floor of the cave. He looked at the light flaring outside. Travel by daylight … with a helicopter out there somewhere?

Was pursuit close on their heels? Was crazy Katsuk running in daylight because searchers were near?

Katsuk said: “You think your friends will fly to us in their devil machine and rescue you.” David stared at the cave floor. Katsuk chuckled. “What is your name?”

“Hoquat.” Without looking up.

“Very good. But your friends will not see us, Hoquat.”

David looked up into staring dark eyes. “Why not?”

Katsuk nodded at the cave mouth. “Raven spoke to me out there. He told me he will conceal us from all searchers in the sky. I will not even bind you. Raven will keep you from running away. If you try to escape, Raven will show me how to kill you. Do you understand me, Hoquat?”

“Y-yes. I won’t try to escape.”

Katsuk smiled pleasantly. “That is what Raven told me.”

* * *

...

* * * * *

Back | Next
Framed