Soul Catcher (9 page)

The helicopter would return. People would
come on foot.

David strained to hear the sound of
rotors.

***

Katsuk had led him into solid shadows under
trees, and David prayed now that the aircraft would come only when
they were in a clearing or on a trail not shielded by trees.

Crazy Indian!

Katsuk felt the pressure of the boy’s
thoughts, but he knew the two figures in this forest gloom were not
people. No people passed this way. They were primal elements who
snagged their essence upon bits of time like animal fur caught on
thorns. His own thoughts went as wind through grass, moving this
world only after they had passed. And when they had passed,
everything behind them resolved itself into silence,
almost-but-not-quite the way it had been before their
intrusion.

Yet—something changed. They changed
something essential that could be felt on the farthest star. Once
Katsuk stopped, faced the boy, and said:

“Therefore the flight shall perish from the
swift, and the strong shall not strengthen his force, neither shall
the mighty deliver himself.” That’s what it says in your hoquat
book. It says “he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee
away naked in the day.” You hoquat had some wise men once, but you
never listened.”

Another time, they rested and drank at a
spring that bubbled from a ledge. A green river roared in its chasm
below them. High clouds rippled the sky and there were hill shadows
on gray rocks across the river.

Katsuk pointed down to the river.
“Look.”

David whirled, stared down, and in the quick
rhythm of light flung by the river into the canyon’s gloom he saw a
brown deer swimming, its head thrusting at the far shore. The light
and sound and animal movement roaring together dazzled his
mind.

There was a dark chill in the wind, and as
they left the spring David sensed the quick silence of the forest
birds. More clouds had accumulated. A deerfly crouched on his arm.
He watched it pause and take flight. He had long since given up
hope that Katsuk would produce food from this wilderness. It had
been talk, just talk—all those words about food in this place.
Katsuk had said it himself: Words fooled you.

David’s eye was caught by the venturesome
racing of a squirrel’s feet along a high limb. He wondered only if
the creature could be caught and eaten.

The day wore on. Sometimes Katsuk talked
about himself and his people, fanciful stories indistinguishable
from reality. They moved through damp woods, through sunlit
clearings, beneath clouds, beneath dripping leaves. Always, there
was the sound of their own footsteps.

David forgot about his hunger in the
presence of great weariness. Where were they going? Why were there
no more aircraft?

Katsuk did not think of a destination,
saying, “Now we are here, and we will go there.” He felt himself
changing, sensed the ancient instincts taking over. He sensed blank
places growing in his memory, things he no longer knew in the ways
this hoquat world accepted.

Where would the changes in him lead?

The answer unfolded in his mind, the spirits
revealing their wisdom: The workings of his brain would go through
a deep metamorphosis until, at last, his mind lay like a drunk
within his driven self. He would be Soul Catcher entirely.

There was a spring shadowed by a giant
cottonwood. Deer tracks led up to it and all around. Katsuk stopped
and they drank. The boy splashed his face and collar.

Katsuk watched him, thinking:
How
powerful, this young human, how strange, drinking from that spring
with his hands. What would his people think of such a lad in such a
pose?

There was a new grace in things the boy did.
He was fitting himself into this life. When it was time for
silence, he was silent. When it was time to drink, he drank. Hunger
came upon him in its proper order. The spirit of the wilderness had
seeped into him, beginning to say that it was right for such a one
to be here. The rightness of it had not yet become complete,
though. This was still a hoquat lad. The cells of his flesh
whispered rebellion and rejection of the earth around him. At any
moment he might strike out and become once more the total alien to
this place. The thing lay in delicate balance.

Katsuk imagined himself then as a person who
adjusted that balance. The boy must not demand food before its
time. Thirst must be quenched only in the rhythm of thirst. The
shattering intrusion of a voice must be prevented by willing it not
to happen.

Bees weighted with pollen were working in
fireweed on the slope below the spring. Katsuk thought:
They
watch us. They are the spirit eyes from which we never
escape.

He stared through leaf-tattered light at the
working creatures. They were fitted into the orderliness of this
place. They were not many creatures, but one single organism. They
were Bee, the spirit messenger who had brought him here.

The boy finished drinking at the spring, sat
back on his heels, watchful, waiting.

For a glimmering instant, something in the
set of the boy’s head opened for Katsuk a glimpse of the man who
had fathered this human. The adult peered out of youthful eyes,
weighing, judging, planning.

Momentarily, it unnerved Katsuk to think of
that man-and-father here. The father was no innocent. He would have
all of the hoquat vices. He would have the powers, evil and good,
which had given the hoquat dominion over the primitive world. That
one must be kept in the background, suppressed.

How could it be done? The boy’s flesh could
not be separated from that which gave it life. A spirit power must
be invoked here. Which spirit power? How? Could the man-father be
driven away with his own guilt?

Katsuk thought:
My father should come to
help me now.

He tried to call up a vision of his father,
but no face came, not even a voice. Katsuk felt the seeds of
panic.

There had been a father. The man had
existed. He was back there walking the beaches, fishing, breeding
two children. But he had taken the path of drink and inward rage
and a death in the water. Were the hoquat to blame for that?

Where was his face, his voice? He was
Hobuhet, the Riverman, whose people had lived on this land for
twice a thousand years. He had fathered a son.

And Katsuk thought:
But I am no longer
Charles Hobuhet. I am Katsuk. Bee is my father. I have been called
to do a terrible thing. The spirit I must call upon is Soul
Catcher.

Silently, he prayed then, and saw at once
how the boy’s eyelids blinked, how his attention wandered. No power
stood against Soul Catcher in this wilderness. Once more, Katsuk
felt calm. The greatest of the spirits could not be doubted. The
hoquat father had been driven back into the flesh. Only the
Innocent remained.

Katsuk arose and strode off along the slope,
hearing the boy follow. There had been no need for words of
command. Soul Catcher had created a wake in the air which drew the
boy into it as though he were caught on a tow line.

Now, Katsuk left the game trail he had been
following and struck off through moss-draped hemlocks. There was a
granite ledge up above them somewhere hemming in the river valley.
Without ordering his feet to seek that place, Katsuk knew he would
find it.

He came on the first outcroppings within the
hour and moved out of the trees, climbing a slope of stunted
huckleberry bushes toward rock shade. The boy followed, panting,
pulling himself up by the bushes as he saw Katsuk doing. They
emerged presently on a bald rock and there was the river valley
spread out southward with sweet grass and elk grazing in a
meadow.

A string of fat quail stuttered through
sun-splashed shadows below him, catching Katsuk’s attention. The
quail reminded him of a hunger which he knew his body would feel if
it were time for that sensation. But he sensed no hunger, knowing
by this that his flesh accommodated itself to primitive ways.

The boy had sprawled out on sun-warmed rock.
Katsuk wondered if Hoquat felt hunger or denied it. The lad also
was accommodating to primitive ways. But how was he doing it? Was
he immersed so deeply in each moment that only the needs of the
moment called out to his senses? The climb had tired him and thus
he rested. That was the correct way. But what else had changed in
the hoquat flesh?

Carefully, Katsuk studied his captive.
Perspiration had left damp darkness in the hair at the boy’s neck.
Stains of brown dirt marked the legs of his trousers. Streaks of
mud were drying on his canvas shoes.

Katsuk smelled the boy’s sweat, a youthful,
musky sweetness in it which called up memories of school locker
rooms. He thought:

It is a fact that the earth which marks us
on the surface also leaves its traces within us.

There would come a moment when the boy was
tied so firmly to this wilderness that he could not escape it. If
the link were forged in the right way, innocence maintained, there
would be a power in it to challenge any spirit.

I was marked by his world; now he is marked
by mine.

This had become a contest on two levels—the
straight-forward capture of a victim and the victim’s desire to
escape, but beneath that a wrestling of spirits. The signs of that
other contest were all around.

Katsuk looked out across the valley. There
was an old forest on the far slope, fire dead, burned silver
hacking the green background into brittle shapes.

The boy turned onto his back, threw a hand
across his eyes. Katsuk said: “We will go now.”

“Can’t we wait just a minute?” Without
removing the hand from his eyes. Katsuk chuckled. “You think I
don’t know what you’ve been doing?” The boy took the hand away,
looked up at Katsuk. “What do you ...”

“You slow down when we’re crossing a meadow.
You trip when we ford the river, then you want me to build a fire.
You think I don’t know why you complained when we left the elk
trail?”

Blood suffused the boy’s cheeks.

Katsuk said: “Look where we are now, eh?” He
pointed skyward. “Wide open to searching devil machines, huh? Or
men could see us from the valley. They could identify us with
binoculars.”

The boy glared at him. “Why do you say
devil machines
instead of helicopters? You know what they
are.”

“True, I know what you think they are. But
different people see things differently.”

David turned away. He felt stubborn
determination to prolong this moment in the open. Hunger and
fatigue helped him now. They sapped his physical strength but fed
his rage.

Abruptly, Katsuk laughed, sat down beside
him.

“Very well, Hoquat. I will demonstrate
Raven’s power. We will rest here while it’s warm. Stare at the sky
all you wish. Raven will hide us even if a devil machine flies
directly over us.”

David thought:
He really believes
that!

Katsuk rolled onto his side, studied his
captive. How strange that Hoquat didn’t understand about Tamanawis.
The boy would wait and wait, hoping, praying. But Raven had
spoken.

The rock felt warm and soothing beneath him.
Katsuk rolled onto his back, glanced around. A quaking aspen grew
from the sunward side of their aerie. The quickness of the bright
sun pulsing on the aspen’s leaves made him think of Hoquat’s
life.

Yes, Hoquat is like that: trembling in every
wind, now glittering bright, now shadowy, now innocent, now evil.
He is the perfect Hoquat for me.

The boy said: “You don’t really believe that
raven stuff.”

Katsuk spoke softly: “You will see.”

“A guy at camp said you went to the
university. They must teach you at the university how stupid that
stuff is.”

“Yes, I went to the hoquat university. They
teach ignorance there. I could not learn ignorance, although
everyone was studying it. Maybe I’m too stupid.”

Katsuk grinned at the sky, his gaze
aimlessly following an osprey which soared and circled high above
them.

David watched his captor covertly, thinking
how the man was like a big cat he’d seen at the San Francisco
zoo—supine on the rock, reclining at ease, the tawny skin dulled by
an overlay of dust, eyes blinking, flaring, blinking.

“Katsuk?”

“Yes, Hoquat.”

“They’re going to catch you and kill
you.”

“Only if Raven permits it.”

“You were probably so stupid they wouldn’t
let you stay at the university!”

“Haven’t I admitted it?”

“What do you know about anything?”

Katsuk heard the rage and fear in the boy’s
voice, wondered what kind of a son this one had been. It was easy
to think of that stage in the boy’s life as past—all done. This one
would never live to a ripe and wrinkled fulfillment. He had
accepted too many lies, this one. Even without a Katsuk he would
never have made it to a rich old time of quiet.

“You don’t know anything!” the boy
pressed.

Katsuk shrugged himself into a new position,
selected a stem of grass growing from a crack in the rock. He
slipped the grass free of its sheath, began to chew the sweet
juices.

David tasted the sourness at the back of his
throat, muttered: “You’re just stupid!”

Slowly, Katsuk turned his head, studied the
boy. “In this place, Hoquat, I am the professor and you are the
stupid.”

The boy rolled away, stared into the
sky.

“Look up there all you wish,” Katsuk said.
“Raven hides us from searchers.” He extracted another grass-blade
from its green sheath, chewed it.

“Professor!” the boy sneered. Katsuk said:
“And you are slow to learn. You are hungry, yet there is food all
around us.” The young eyes jerked toward the grass in Katsuk’s
mouth.

“Yes, this grass. It has much sugar in it.
Back when we crossed the river, you saw me take the roots of those
reeds, wash them, and chew them. You saw me eat those fat grubs,
but you only wondered out loud how we could catch fish.”