THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  Why did it not just kill him and be done? Today, in the tunnel, he had thought that it would kill him. His cheek began a faint throb as if wakened by the foul and almost unbearable memory.

  The white men, who would not work unless Hunting Wolf was present, were nevertheless resentful and suspicious of him as he had squatted by them at the rock, watching them silently with glittering eyes as they swung their picks against the stone. They were frightened men. He could not understand their clumsy, guttural tongue, but Henderson had told him that the men were spreading stories that animals had spoken to them. That had made Hunting Wolf’s heart sink with dread. If he so wished he could make the very rocks speak to him. But there were methods to it, and payments due for such communing with the spirits of nature, and the white men neither knew them nor would believe in them.

  To speak with a creature or a plant required a heart of purity and a lifetime of learning. Only then would a ceremony of four days in a sweat lodge bring the shaman close enough to the spirits to speak thus with those that were insensible to human communication.

  Of course Hunting Wolf also knew how to shift shape into the guise of an animal or bird. But he did not become that being, only a mere approximation of the beast. Anyone with the eyes to see could tell that it was not a real animal, that it moved in a strange way or was incorrect in its detail. And to produce such a trick took such fasting and praying and purification that the act was scarcely worth the toil. He had done it but once, and then only when they were in dispute with the Blackfoot. Their shaman spotted him at once and it was over. It had drained him. But to possess the living, as he suspected the Trickster was doing, was a sin beyond measure. He thought of the dead and wasted body of the bird and sent up a prayer for its defiled soul.

  Yes, if animals were indeed talking to the white men, he knew it was not their genuine spirits speaking, but something dark, powerful and malicious. He knew it for certain now.

  It had been ten days since they had buried the workers. Ten days since he had recognized the thing that was in the bird. But since then it had shown itself only to frighten and confuse the unbelieving white men. He knew it would show itself to him soon, and today it had. Oh, Great Spirit, save him, it had.

  As Hunting Wolf had watched the men at their toil, a small motion on the ground at the tunnel entrance attracted his attention. A ground squirrel entered the tunnel, its tiny stripe-backed body erect on two hind legs as it surveyed the warm interior of this hole in the mountain.

  The man at the entrance saw it and kicked at it thoughtlessly, making it scuttle for a crevice in the wall. Hunting Wolf felt the blood drain from him. He had seen a ground squirrel at this time of year only once or twice in his life. They were sleepers. They slumbered through these ferocious months, until spring woke them gently with the sound of dripping meltwater and the scent of sap. This one could be like the few he had seen: lost, disoriented, doomed unless it found its way back to the nest, but he knew it was not. Oh, it was doomed for certain. But only because something evil had ripped it from its slumber and entered its innocent body.

  He stood up and shouted at the men, waving his hands in the air and stamping his feet for them to get out. Though they could not understand his words they understood clearly his message.

  Several of them shrieked and dropped their picks, and their panic sent waves through the rest like a flame under twigs. They ran from the tunnel, skidding in the rubble and pushing each other roughly to escape. But from what? Every sense in Hunting Wolf’s body had told him he was in the presence of a greater evil than he had imagined existed. But he could not identify its source or its nature. His nerves were singing with it.

  There was no sign of the creature. His eyes had strained on the crevice he’d watched it disappear behind, but there came no sound or movement. He’d prayed then for strength and guidance and had been answered by the soft brush of his guide’s wing on his neck, and its touch gave him vigor.

  Then there was a noise. It was faint at first as Hunting Wolf strained to interpret it. A tiny, tinkling, brittle sound. He narrowed his eyes to its source. From the entrance a soft wind seemed to be blowing the small particles of icicle that littered the floor. Each morning the men smashed the icicles that formed on the roof overnight before they began work, leaving the floor scattered with the shards, where they lay frozen and unmelted until ground down by boots and metal. It was these glittering rods of ice that were now tumbling toward him, picking up speed as they came, yet he could feel no breath of wind to blow them. But they were moving. The pieces of ice bounced along in a fury to a point behind him in the tunnel. There was something hideously wrong with the way the ice was behaving. All through the tunnel there were smaller and lighter pieces of rock on the floor, yet they remained still, undisturbed by the breeze that seemed to be animating the ice. It was only the thin, sparkling wands of frozen springwater that were moving. But he realized then that they were not being blown at all. They were being sucked. Sucked toward something. Something just behind him. He was aware of a crawling warning between his shoulder blades, a sensation that made him swallow back bile that was rising from his stomach in unnamed terror. The ice battered against his legs in its effort to reach its destination, making tiny cuts on his flesh as it flew. Its noise was hideous. A tinkling from hell.

  Slowly he had turned around to face the darkness at his back, his eyes swiveling in their sockets, fighting to see in the blackness of the cave. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw, and he was only half-seeing it in the darkness. He had muttered then, through his blind terror, “Great Spirit, save me.”

  Forming itself out of the ice in the black shadows was a thing so huge, misshapen and abominable that Hunting Wolf fought to remain conscious against the forces that would have him swoon. It reeked like rotting flesh, and its grotesque form crackled under its icy sheath as it shifted in an unholy mockery of life.

  Then it had spoken to him, though the thick rasping sound seemed to come from both it and Hunting Wolf himself.

  “Do you know my name?”

  Hunting Wolf knew its name. He had always known its name. He prayed for the power to speak. His bladder had emptied down his leg, and the sordid sensation of the hot, acidic urine running over his knee had granted him that power.

  “You are Inktumi.”

  It laughed: a foul sound that he felt at the back of his own throat while it continued. He fought back a retch as it replied.

  “Am I?”

  “And you are Inktomi.”

  It was breathing and rasping in the dark. Waiting.

  “And you are Inktomni.”

  It waited still.

  “And you are Sitkonski.”

  Silence sat thick and vile in that rock prison. The power of the spirit was overwhelming. It pulsated. It throbbed. Hunting Wolf’s mind had raced then, sifting through the knowledge his father had given him, searching for escape. Nothing had prepared him for this. This was an invincible spirit, not a lowly spirit of the kind that any medicine man can call for his own mundane uses. They were easily tamed and dispatched: this was something he had never encountered, a spirit of such malice and power that it baffled him as to why it addressed him at all rather than crushing him like a fly.

  It spoke again. “And you are the shit your mother squirts in the dirt of her grave.”

  It laughed again, a sound like a man choking on his own vomit. Then, a pause, a long pause followed by a new voice. A voice of kindness and gentle love. His father’s.

  “Boy? Are you there? Are you there, my smiling boy?”

  Hunting Wolf’s heart soared. His father. Back from the spirit world to save his son. Hope had entered his soul.

  “Father. Help me, Father.”

  His father’s voice had then spoken about the things it would like to have done to his son. The things no man should say and live. This was not his father. The abomination was playing with him.

  Hunting Wolf’s hands flew over his ears and he screamed to shu
t out the obscenities, but they were being spoken from inside his skull now, impossible to escape. Tears of rage, shame and terror were pouring down his cheeks. Suddenly, as he had feared he would go mad with the horror, it stopped. The crackling half-seen form shifted before him, the sound it made grating on the rocky floor only hinting at its terrifying bulk. Its voice was low and mocking this time, coming from the rock as well as the icy black form it had fashioned into a body.

  “Do I displease you, son of a diseased dog?”

  Its breath was of the grave. “Destroy me then, vermin.”

  Hunting Wolf, breathing heavily, had composed himself then to think. Destroy it? What had his father warned? No. He must not be tempted to that course of action. Above all, not that. He spoke with a throat that threatened to close against the stench of decay surrounding him. “I will die first.”

  The ice crackled and the rock began to crumble from the walls around them. It roared from the darkness, though the roar was silent. “Destroy me!”

  He stood facing this thundering nightmare, his brow soaked with sweat, his hands clenched into useless fists. “No, foul spirit. I will not.”

  From the darkness a huge, taloned limb shot out, its savagely curled claws made of ice, but ice that betrayed dark, putrid fluid flowing beneath its sheen like black blood through rotting veins. Three huge talons slashed Hunting Wolf’s face open with an ease that was in itself an affront.

  “DESTROY ME!”

  Hunting Wolf staggered backward, his hand over the gushing wound, blood spurting between his fingers. There was a sudden shiver in the air and a tremble as though before a clap of thunder. The profanity of ice before him exploded into a thousand particles, shooting out its borrowed matter like a cannon and blowing him fifteen feet or more along the floor toward the entrance.

  That was all he had recalled. Henderson had been there somehow, had picked up Hunting Wolf’s battered body and stumbled away from the tunnel with his slumped flesh held inexpertly in long, thin arms. The men had become near-hysterical when they saw the minister struggling toward them with the limp body of the bloodied shaman, and they ran from the two figures rather than rush to their aid.

  Now, here by the fire, Hunting Wolf gathered his courage, assembled all the pieces of the incident and tried to make sense of it. He could make none. His body felt broken, but his spirit was wounded more severely. The ignorance. How could he fight with no knowledge of what he faced? He was impotent as a shaman, and powerless as a man. His face spoke of his terrors as Singing Tree knelt over him, a new poultice in her fist, and applied it to his face.

  “You may speak of it to me, husband. I do not judge you as they do.”

  He wrapped his hand around hers as she held the soft, soothing herbs to his wounds. “Singing Tree.”

  “I am here.”

  “Before this is done, you will doubt me.”

  She looked at him with a half-scolding, half-bewildered expression. “I will never doubt you, my love. You must rest.”

  And he closed his eyes. But there was no rest.

  His thin hand shook as he held the Bible. Turning the pages in the yellow light of the lamp, he mouthed the words he read, as though speaking them out loud would give them meaning. James Henderson was far from being comforted by their message. His mouth was reading for him, but for all he knew it could be a cheap novel he held in his cold, pale fingers, so opaque was his mind with fear and turmoil.

  A sudden gust of wind rattled the flimsy shutters of his cabin, and he looked up with a start, making an involuntary noise of fright that shamed him. Nothing but the wind. He realized he was breathing too fast and he let the Bible rest on the table, laid both palms flat on the wooden surface and tried to calm himself.

  What had he seen? In God’s name, what had he seen? It had been a man of reason, of learning, who had boarded that ship in Glasgow for Canada, strong in his faith and sure of his salvation in Christ. Now he sat in this miserable wooden refuge, believing that no walls, perhaps no Christ, could save him from the horror he had witnessed in that tunnel. He was huddled and broken. An outlaw running from his own logic.

  Henderson took a deep breath through his nose and straightened his back. Not what he saw. What he thought he saw. He kept hold of that thought, clung to it like a log in a swollen river. Thought he saw. He stood up, walked to his small, hard bed and knelt before it to pray. A mouse he had been unaware of scampered for the safety of the wall lining-boards as the toes of his great boots scraped the dusty floor. He watched it go with dull eyes.

  Of course the whole thing was illusion. The pungency of the Indians’ beliefs was affecting everyone. His imagination had been ignited even more passionately than those of the simpleminded men of his flock, through constant and intimate contact with Hunting Wolf. This is what he told himself, hearing the words in his head, pretending they were being spoken by his colleagues in his club in Edinburgh, secure that God’s universe was a place of order and sanity.

  But he was not in his club. The wind was screaming outside as he bowed his head to pray to the God that he felt in his heart was growing distant from him.

  No prayers would come. Each time he closed his eyes the imprint of that half-glimpsed thing drew itself on his inner lids. He could see it, writhing and moving like a bed of snakes at the back of the rock hole. Dear God, had it really been there? Something had been there. Hunting Wolf’s face was the physical proof.

  He had been on his way to the tunnel when he had seen the men running like pigeons scattering before a horse and he had run past them, ignoring their pleas and their clutches at his coat, lurching through the snow to reach the mouth of the tunnel. And then he had seen it. A dark mass of malice with the figure of Hunting Wolf standing before it like a scolded child. He must have glimpsed it for only a few seconds before the explosion.

  The impact had thrown him into the snow, but he had regained his feet and rushed to the injured man before he had time to consider the danger or the madness of what he had witnessed.

  Now, he could not shut it out. The nightmare of that thing was beyond reason, and he thought again about what he had heard. That had been the worst of all. The obscenities. For the thing had spoken in perfect English.

  Hunting Wolf, a man who could neither speak nor understand one word of Henderson’s tongue, had been conversing with it. But it had spoken in English. Henderson had understood every filthy, disgusting word. He snapped his eyes open and held his mouth and chin in his hand. Surely no more proof was needed that the whole thing then was a product of his own fevered and sick brain? He was, after all, a man trapped alone in the wilderness with an engineer who loathed him and men who regarded him as eccentric. It was hardly inconceivable that James Henderson was claustrophobic and ill.

  He was delighted with his observation, if horrified that his mind could conjure such sick and loathsome vocabulary.

  Yes. He would see Hunting Wolf tomorrow and end this lunacy. He must tell him once and for all that his hysterical beliefs in things supernatural were adversely affecting not just the men, and he himself, but his friend and supporter, James Henderson. That simple, uneducated man must be made to realize that this was the twentieth century, when such fancies could and should not survive, and did so only in the deluded brains of those who fanned the embers of dangerous fabrication. Psychology. He must introduce Hunting Wolf to the understanding, however primitive, of psychology and hypnosis. The man’s injuries were most likely self-inflicted. It was not unknown among hysterics that they injured themselves to make their fantasies real. He and Hunting Wolf had clearly experienced a form of communal delusion, probably brought about by shock from the explosion. He felt better already. Hysterical hypnosis. That was the explanation, and its effects would end as of now. He clasped his hands again to pray, this time in thanks for the relief his Scottish university education had afforded him in this dark and ungodly place.

  “It hurts, James.”

  He couldn’t move. Henderson stayed still as stone
staring at the wall, hoping he hadn’t heard the voice behind him.

  “James. Fetch Mother. James. I’m scared. It hurts.”

  He was aware that his blood was pounding in his ears and his clasped hands were now clenched so tightly the fingers dug into his own flesh like claws. He turned to see what he prayed he would not. But it was there.

  In the corner of his cabin the small figure of a twelve-year-old boy lay slumped like a broken doll, his head split down one side like a melon opened crudely with a machete, blood soaking the cream shirt all the way to the waist in a thick, black, congealing ocean.

  “No” was all Henderson could breathe.

  This was not Alexander. This was not his beloved Alexander. But it was. He was there in the room. Dying as he had done before, his frail hand lifting to his brother in a desperate appeal for help. Henderson’s mind spun in its frenzy. This could not be, and yet it was. The body was as solid as the crude pine wall it rested against. It was no phantom. And the face. That face.

  The one he had loved so desperately. It was looking at him now. Imploring him. Begging him.

  “It hurts, James.”

  He was still unable to move. Tears pricked his eyes, but his terror and shock kept him nailed to the floor by the bed. His own voice sounded alien to him when he found it.

  “Sandy?”

  “It hurts, James. My head. I want Mother.”

  Henderson was back there, back at his uncle’s farm where they whiled away the summer months, in the barn with the kittens mewling in the hay and the sunlight bursting through the wooden slats like fingers of joy. And he was there to remember that it was his fault.

  “You can’t.”

  “I can so, you scaredy-cat.”

  He was looking again into the face of his beloved younger brother, that face with its blue eyes and curling lip, always ready with a smile or a burst of laughter, and he was daring it to do something it didn’t want to do.

  “Prove it, shrimp.”

  His sweet Alexander, Sandy, tiny imp of fun, looked nervously up at the great plow hanging from the beams by its chains and licked his lips.