The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  “What is it? You don’t want me to know where he is?”

  The dog tugged the sack over the ground. It looked back once at the Indian. Don’t follow me. Then it was gone.

  The Indian was puzzled. Instead of turning right for the valley, where he expected the spirit to be, the dog followed the road which wound past the lodge around the mountain to the north face. There were no rivers there, to the best of the Indian’s knowledge, only higher ground and more mountains. At this height, the vegetation would be skimpy and the water scarce.

  A foundation shivered within the Indian’s mind. Again, it was the spirit’s animalness rather than its etherealness that bothered him. The spirit was behaving exactly like a wild animal deliberately hiding from the ski lodge. Animals avoided humans out of fear. But spirits?

  The Indian sat on the ground and closed his eyes. He hummed a small tune taught to him by his grandfather. Bits of memory shook loose. The melody of the song threaded clearly from the dark past, and he hummed it in exquisite precision, remembering every silky, colored tone just as the old man had taught him.

  A jolt of terror coursed through the Indian’s body. His grandfather was interrupting his song, grasping him by the shoulders and warning him about something. He spoke one word, but the Indian did not want to hear it.

  He opened his eyes and listened to the forest. Instinctively his hand went to his medicine bundle. He was being watched.

  The luminous dial on his watch told Jason he had been watching the Indian through binoculars for an hour. The lodge infirmary had rewrapped his bandage, but his arm still felt as if hot steel bars had been drilled through the fang marks. He had to prop the heavy binoculars on his good arm.

  When he had followed the Indian out tonight, excitement had pumped blood through his body so hard his wound burned. He had kneeled in the bushes, fervently wishing he had a gun, for he was sure the beast would show up again. The last act of this drama was about to begin.

  The dog ran off with a sack of food. The seconds ticked into minutes, then the minutes into an hour, and the last act fizzled into anticlimax. Whoever was writing this drama did not know how to end it sensibly. The Indian lay down on the ground and to all appearances fell asleep.

  The Indian clearly shared some kind of relationship with the beast. Jason had seen him pack the food in the bag and give it to the dog. Kimberly’s words came back to haunt him. Suppose it really was some poor deformed human, a friend of the Indian’s whom he was caring for, and not the legendary Bigfoot?

  No. Not with that face. Not with a face that could only have been dreamed up by a witch doctor at his most concentrated moment of existential terror. Deformed faces were ugly but dulled the senses, the personality behind them, barricaded by their own features. That face was alive.

  A pretty picture, Jason thought ruefully. The Indian shadowing the giant and him shadowing the Indian. Was somebody shadowing Jason? Again he felt that peculiar empathy, as though if he looked in the Indian’s face he would see his own features.

  Something hissed.

  Half fainting, Jason hit the ground and flattened out, binoculars raised like a stubby club. But it was not a rattlesnake—it was Martha Lucas, with her finger to her mouth.

  Martha Lucas lived in a bungalow so stuffed with piles of papers, books, and prints that little incidental room was left for such functions as walking and sitting. She knocked a mountain of stuffed file folders to the floor, revealing a chair for Jason. “I don’t usually have guests in here,” she apologized.

  As she waited for water to boil on her hot plate, Jason picked up a stapled sheaf of pages. It was entitled “Trickster of the Winnebagos.” Everything in the room was about Indians. Martha Lucas was an organism whose sole purpose was the gulping down of information about Indians. By the look of her kitchenette, she was a vegetarian, too.

  She handed him a cup of herb tea, then kicked out a niche for herself from the papers on the bed. “Why are you following Moon?” she asked.

  “Why are you?” Jason countered.

  “We could always flip a coin to see who goes first. Fair enough?”

  “Heads,” said Jason, sending a quarter into the air. It came down tails.

  “I think Moon’s on a spirit quest,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  She described it as she had to Helder.

  Jason nodded, stroking his chin. “It fits. It fits. I always wondered why he carries that bag around. Medicine bundle, you called it.”

  “Yes. If I’m right, he’s not going to have much luck.”

  “How come?”

  “He’s too old. He’s in his twenties, and the vision is a rite of puberty. Besides, you’re supposed to remain isolated during the quest. It’d be interesting to know if he was prepared by a shaman.”

  “How long does this quest take?”

  “Three or four days at most.”

  “Did they ever follow their spirits around? I mean tag along after them?”

  “There were all kinds of spirit quests, Mr. Jason. In some tribes it was how you got your name. You always had to go to a sacred place to find them.”

  “When I say follow them, I mean for hundreds of miles.”

  She thought over an answer while watching him, trying to pierce his face to the brain behind and see where he was leading.

  “You would do what your spirit told you to do. Normally, however, you’d be in no shape to walk, unless . . .”

  “What?”

  “Unless it was a really special spirit. It’s a religious experience, and you know what that can do to some people.” She blew steam from her cup. “And before I go any further, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “I’ll answer one now. Moon is wanted by the Canadian police in connection with the deaths of three men in British Columbia last summer.”

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “No. I was with the men when it happened. Moon knocked me out with a rifle butt.”

  She played with the handle of her cup. “Did he do it?”

  “The circumstances are suspicious. I think he shot down a helicopter in which two of them died. He definitely did not kill the third man.”

  “Were you looking for Moon at the Little Harrington that night?”

  Jason hesitated only a moment. “Yes. I have been for several months.”

  “Are you going to turn him in to the police?”

  Jason pressed the teacup to his bandage to see if it soothed the ache. He thought over an answer. He wasn’t ready to tell anybody about the monster. “I suppose I should. But I don’t think he’s all there in the head. I tried to get a rise out of him by mentioning Canada, but he said he didn’t remember. I don’t think he was faking. Then again, he’s got the original poker face.”

  She spoke over the teacup, her eyes wide. “Are you frightened of him, Mr. Jason?”

  Jason took what he thought was a nut from a clay bowl. He bit into it and felt the shell crumple into tiny husk splinters. They were some kind of goddamned seeds. It was another tiny frustration to add to the considerable mass this business had brought him. The distant roar of amplified applause resounding across the valley reminded him that they were not as alone as they felt. “Yes,” he admitted. “I think he’s capable of killing people.”

  Martha settled herself deeper into her papers. “You’re right about him not being all there. He was in a mental hospital for a year and a half.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s got a Medal of Honor in his medicine bundle. Jack Helder spent the morning on the phone running down his war record. Moon was a Green Beret.”

  Jason whistled. “Now that really fits.”

  “He was in Vietnam. His squad or platoon or whatever you call it was wiped out by the Viet Cong. Apparently it was pretty much of a massacre. Rather than let himself be
rescued, Moon went into the jungle alone and spent a month killing guerrillas. And I mean killing them, Mr. Jason. He blew up ammunition dumps, he practically wiped out villages single-­handed. There’s no telling how many he got. The way the Army learned he was still alive was when guerrillas began surrendering in droves. Out of fear of him.”

  “Him personally? How did they know it was just him?”

  “Because of the way he killed them. He used a bow and arrow.”

  Jason felt a thrill of disconnected terror. Capable of murder—the Indian was a master of it! He was as brutal as his spirit. Until now Jason had thought his own survival was evidence of some kind of restraint in the Indian’s mind, but Martha had wiped out that possibility. He would never know how he had survived Canada. “What about the mental hospital?”

  “He was under treatment in Los Angeles for combat fatigue. That’s when they gave him a medal. Then he was released and went home to Stevensville, where he checked in with a psychiatrist once a month. Last spring he disappeared. The doctor in Stevensville was very worried about him.”

  “Why?”

  She spoke into her teacup, hair shrouding her face. “He was being treated for schizophrenia.”

  “Ah! Which he probably had a long time before he went into the Army.”

  “That’s right. You see, he doesn’t have any family. His father left them, his mother died when he was young. Typical broken home. He was raised by priests in a mission school and a grandfather whom he revered. His grandfather apparently was responsible for a lot of his mental problems. He told him all sorts of stories when he was young.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Indian stories that they used to tell their young as they grew up. It’s how the Indians passed on their culture, Mr. Jason. They had no writing, so they spent winters banked up in their lodges, talking about how the chipmunk got his stripes and how the world was made and all that. He revered his grandfather. He was the only family he had. He died just before Moon went into the Army.” Her voice lowered, and her hair slowly covered her face. “You know, when they treated him in the hospital, they gave him all these drugs and shock therapy that wrecked his memory. He had spells of amnesia . . .”

  “And still does, I’d venture to say.”

  “. . . and couldn’t remember his grandfather’s words. To somebody like him that’s death, Mr. Jason. Absolute death.”

  A war casualty like millions of other broken, blasted men through the ages. That was John Moon, Jason reflected. Every world he had lived in crumpled before his eyes. So, like others, he had found religion. A spirit. Something to live for, something to heal the split between his mind and the shambles of his life.

  Some guardian angel!

  “Could I have some more tea?” Jason held out his cup.

  “Of course.” Suddenly flustered, Martha Lucas knocked over papers as she took his cup into the kitchen.

  For some moments Jason had been looking at a book cover on the couch next to her. He had wanted her out of the room in order to examine it more closely.

  The book cover showed a wooden mask carved by a Northwest tribe called the Kwakiutls, who believed giant cannibals lived in the mountains. The face was a skull with added details. Tendrils of hair formed a widow’s peak, and eyeholes burned from beneath frowning brow bones.

  Stretch those brows, Jason thought, and there were the horns. Narrow the nose and forehead, add a bit more hair, and there it was the face of the Bigfoot as he had seen it in the river. Probably the artist who carved this mask had worked from somebody’s description.

  He dropped the paper as Martha returned with a steaming cup of tea. Jason forced down a mouthful of the awful stuff. It sure woke him up, he could say that much about it. “That medicine bundle Moon wears. What’s it for?”

  “He’s supposed to carry a talisman of his spirit in it.”

  “What kind of talisman!” In the dim light, his eyes gleamed.

  “If your spirit was a bird, you’d carry one of his feathers. That kind of thing. A piece of its body, or if it was human some belonging, like a clay pipe.”

  “Not to change the subject, but how long has this lodge been here?”

  She counted with her fingers. “Ten . . . no, eleven months. That’s when the foundation was laid. It wasn’t habitable until last spring.”

  “Was anybody killed while working on it?”

  “How did you know?” A certain suspicion clouded her face.

  “I’m making brilliant deductions. There was somebody killed, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. A plumber. His name was Jameson. Mr. Jason—”

  “And it was at night, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And his head was missing, wasn’t it?”

  She swallowed hard. “Jameson came up one night with a rifle because something was messing around with his equipment. All the pipes and lumber piles were being thrown around. Jameson wanted to surprise it, but it killed him and took his head away. The Rangers said it was a grizzly bear.”

  “And has this grizzly bear been back?”

  Her voice became very small. “Mr. Jason, this lodge has been jinxed ever since it was finished. Practically everyday the phone lines go down. Sometimes the garbage is broken into—” Her mouth opened, and tea slopped over her thumb. “Moon’s spirit! That’s it! It’s a grizzly bear!”

  Jason found himself feeling protective toward Martha Lucas. He had not felt that stab of tenderness since his last sulfurous blast of temper ended in divorce. She had nice hands. He wondered how she kept them so nice. And she was logical in that maddening perfect way that made things come out wrong. He set down his teacup. “I have to be going. I want to get a room, if it isn’t too late.”

  “Wait a minute.” She ran into the kitchenette and returned with a bag of dried tea, telling him it was full of medicinal properties and could cure diseases that had not even been discovered, even snakebite. She told him how to prepare it. Eventually Jason managed to get out of her room without seeming too abrupt.

  “I don’t know nothing about no Bigfoots or nothing.” Lester Cole tried to scurry past Jason to his pickup truck. “I didn’t see nothing, I made it up.”

  Jason inserted himself between Lester and the kitchen door. He summed up Lester Cole as a man covered with little pressure points of fear subject to minute applications of force. “Why would you do that?”

  “Cause I wanted to. I wanted to get in the papers.”

  Jason followed Lester out of the kitchen into the parking lot, then cut in front of him again before he could open the door to his truck.

  “That’s my truck, mister.”

  “What are you going to do, shoot me?”

  Lester’s jaw muscles bunched up. “Get away.”

  “Sure. Soon as you tell me the truth, Lester. I can tell when somebody isn’t telling me the truth, you know.”

  “You can, huh?”

  “I mean, if you really wanted your name in the papers you wouldn’t have admitted a hoax. People would come here to interview you, reporters from television and everything. No, you’re just not telling me the truth, Lester.”

  The parking-­lot lights made Jason’s face a cold series of slabs of the same texture as the granite walls of the lot. His arm bandage glittered whitely under the lights. Lester noticed that Jason was a big man and sprung tight.

  “I never could keep my mouth shut.” He laughed.

  “Oh, that’s okay, Lester. Look, I’m not going to bite you, I just want to know what it looked like.”

  “Fucker’s long gone by now, so if you come here looking for it, you’re wasting your time. You might as well go home. What’s your name, anyhow?” Lester became jovial to hide his craftiness. His rifle was still in the truck cab.

  “Jason.”

  “And you want to know what it looked li
ke.”

  “There you go.”

  “And that’s all you want.”

  Jason held up both hands, palms facing Lester Cole. “Swear to God, Lester, my friend. After tonight you’ll never see me again.”

  Jason had big hands, Lester noted. “I only saw him for a minute, Mr. Jason. He didn’t look like much. He was about six feet tall but real heavy. He had gray fur and a big belly and these long arms with hands turned in like this.” Lester dangled his arms, palms turned facing his body. “And that’s about it.”

  “What about his head, Lester?”

  “Just a head. Just a lot of hair on it.”

  “Nothing unusual about its head?”

  “I told you! It was just a head. Kind of like a monkey has, that’s all.”

  By the way Jason’s rocky face seemed to turn inward Lester realized he had said something important. Finally Jason took out his billfold and stuffed a five into Lester’s shirt pocket.

  “You’ve been a big help, Lester. Sorry to corner you like this.” With a pat on the shoulder, Jason walked away toward the kitchen.

  “If I remember anything else I’ll let you know, Mr. Jason.”

  The kitchen door closed behind Jason as though dismissing Lester Cole from existence.

  There were two of them in the valley!

  Jason’s feet seemed to float over Jack Helder’s lounge carpet. Robotlike, he walked to the desk and reserved a room for three days, his mind in turmoil.

  The one Lester had seen was not the one he had fought in the river. Every eyewitness had noticed a misshapen head except Lester. The footprint cast in Drake’s office was of the hourglass type, not Moon’s beast. And one had stayed here ever since the lodge was erected and had killed a plumber.

  Kimberly had warned him that it took more than one to keep up a population. He had said a cave or cave system would be the ideal home. Somewhere around Mount Colby there had to be a cave. He would go to the Ranger office tomorrow and get a chart.

  Dangling the key in his hand, Jason was walking across the lounge when a terrain map showing in relief the features of Mount Colby and the valley caught his attention. A road crossed the north face of the mountain to a town called Oharaville. The town buildings were small black squares.