Soul Catcher (3 page)

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.