Tskanay stood trembling now, her fists clenched, her face immobile. Her whole body spoke of failure. She had tied herself to something lost in this place and would carry the mark of it for the rest of her life and she knew it.
Katsuk said: “Hoquat, we are truly bound together now. Perhaps we are brothers. But which of us is Cain and which Abel?” He turned away, went out, leaving the door open.
In the clearing, Katsuk stood a moment thinking.
Innocence is not taken by being used.
He looked at his right hand, the hand that had struck Tskanay earlier in anger. It was wrong to strike her. There was a small bit of Charles Hobuhet remaining in me. That’s who struck her. Now she has cleansed me of that. It was a hoquat thing to strike her. She has cleansed that away, too, and proved the innocence of my chosen victim. I am Katsuk who can smile at what she did and appreciate its value to me.
In the hut, Tskanay said: “Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!” She was crying.
David put a hand on her calf, said: “Don’t cry.” She put her hands to her face, sobbing harder. David pleaded: “Please don’t cry, Tskanay.” She jerked away, dropped her hands. “My name is Mary!” Still crying, she found her clothes, pulled them on, not bothering to straighten the garments. She went to the door and, without looking back, said: “Well, you heard him. Get dressed.”
***
Harlow B. Watts, teacher at Pacific Day School, Carmel, California:
Yes, David is one of my students. I’m very shocked by all this. He’s a very good student, considerably ahead of most in his form. We use the British system here, you know. David is very sensitive the way he studies things. His reports and other papers often reveal this. He sometimes says odd things. He once remarked that Robert Kennedy had tried too hard to be a hero. When I questioned David about this, he would only say: “Well, look, he didn’t make any mistakes.” Don’t you think that’s an odd thing for a boy to say?
***
In the afternoon, the sky darkened with a heavy overcast. A cold, raw wind began blowing from the southwest. It chilled David where he stood at the lake margin below the huts. He rattled the six pebbles in his pocket. Six days!
Most of the people in the camp, more than twenty of them, had gone into the big hut and built a fire there. They had two haunches of elk turning on a spit over the fire.
David felt that everyone in the camp must know what he and Tskanay had done. His cheeks felt hot every time he thought about it.
Two youths squatted at the timber’s edge watching him unobtrusively. Tskanay was no longer his guard. He had not seen her since she had left the little hut. The two youths were his guards now. David had tried to talk to them. They had refused, turned away when he insisted. He heard them talking in low voices.
Barren frustration permeated him. Again, he thought of Tskanay. She had not changed a thing. Even worse, she had bound him tighter to Katsuk.
“Perhaps we are brothers now.”
Katsuk had said that.
By forgiving, by denying anger, Katsuk had put a new burden on his captive. A link had been forged between them.
David tried to imagine Katsuk and Tskanay making love. It had happened. Tskanay admitted it. Katsuk as much as admitted it. David could not imagine them doing it. They had been two other people then—Mary and Charlie.
It was growing darker. Sunset conjured a bloody lake at the edge of the forest’s green darkness. The wind was blowing hard up on the ridges, sweeping the clouds away. The moon emerged and David saw it as Katsuk would: the moon eaten, a curve of it gnawed out by Beaver. The moon was in the lake, too. He watched it there as it drifted against the reeds and was gone. But the reeds remained.
One of the youths behind him coughed. Why wouldn’t they talk to him? David wondered. Was it Katsuk’s command?
He heard distant aircraft engines. An airplane’s green wing light moved off to the north. The engines flowed with the light, a cold, far sound in the sky. Sound and light gathered up David’s hopes, bore them away. He chewed his lower lip. He could feel himself falling into emptiness, the whole sky opening to take him. That plane, the warmth, the light, the people—all vanished into another dimension.
Katsuk was speaking in the big hut, his voice rising and falling. The curtain had been thrown back. Light spilled into the clearing. David turned away from the lake, went toward the firelight. He passed the two youths in the dark, but they gave no indication of noticing him. David squatted just outside the range of the firelight, listened.
Katsuk, his powerful body clad in the loincloth and moccasins, wore the red cedar band around his head, a single raven feather stuck into the band at the back. He stood with his back to the open door. The fire drew glowing outlines of his movements, his skin now amber, now bloody.
“Have I found this innocent in my belly like a woman?” Katsuk demanded. “Look you! I am Katsuk. I am the center, yet I live everywhere. I can wear the chief beads. What do you fear? The hoquat? They did not conquer us. Gun, steel, knife, hatchet, needle, wheel—these conquered us. Look you! I wear the chilkat cloth and moccasins made by a woman of our people.”
He turned slowly, staring at each face in turn.
“I can see in your faces that you believe me. Your belief strengthens me, but that is not enough. We were the Hoh people. What are we now? Does any among you call himself a Christian man and sneer at me?”
His voice grew louder: “We lived on this coast more than fifteen thousand years! Then the hoquat came. Our cedar plank houses are almost gone from this land. We hide a few pitiful huts in this forest! Our salmon rivers are dying. I must tell you these things mostly in English because all of you do not speak our tongue.”
He turned, stared out into the dark, whirled back.
“Ours is a beautiful tongue! English is simple beside it. Things have reality in our tongue! I go from one condition to another in my tongue and feel each condition. In English, I feel very little.”
He fell silent, stared into the fire.
A woman shifted closer to the fire at the right and David thought at first it was Tskanay, youth and grace in her movements. But she turned, the light flaring briefly, and he saw it was the old aunt, Cally. Her face was a gaunt mask. The illusion shook him.
Katsuk said: “Look you at the preparations you made for me. You brought body paints and a Soul Catcher rattle. Why do these things unless to honor me?”
He touched the knife at his waist. “I am Drukwara. I make war all around the world. I have only two dances. One of them is Bee.”
Someone in the circle around the fire coughed.
Cally said: “Ish, answer him. A man must answer him.”
Ish stood up directly across the fire from Katsuk. The old man’s gangling frame appeared taller in the low light. His eyes reflected firelight.
He said: “You talk of old times, but these are not old times.” Diffident voice, fear in it.
Katsuk said: “You mean we no longer bang a log drum until moonrise.” He pointed to the ground beside Ish. “But you bring a flute and that wood rattle dressed with eagle feathers. Why?”
“Some of the old ways work,” Ish said. “But those tribes were wild.”
“Wild?” Katsuk shook his head. “They had their loyalties. Their world had shape. They worked it so.”
“But they were wild.”
“That is a hoquat word! Our woods, our animals, our people had loyalties and shape!”
“Shape,” Ish said, shaking his head.
Katsuk said: “You came up the Hoh road. In cars, by damn! You parked your cars beside those of the hoquat and walked in here. You saw the signs of the new shapes:
WATCH FOR TRUCKS. RANGE AREA—WATCH FOR LIVESTOCK.
Whose trucks? Whose livestock? We drive their trucks to help destroy our land! That shingle mill down there at tidewater where they let you work ... sometimes! That’s the shape now!”
Ish said: “That what you learned at the university?”
“You�
�re more right than you imagine, uncle. I am the last chosen of my mother’s clan. Once we were strong and could withstand any strain. We supported our people in their troubles. Now ...”
“Now, you bring trouble on all of us,” Ish said.
“Do I? Or do we merely live in hoquat trouble we have come to accept?” Katsuk pointed to the west. “The dragways of our whaling canoes, dug deep for those thousands of years, line the beaches down there. Yet we must petition a hoquat congress to tell us we can use one little piece of that land! Our land!”
“If you’re talking about the old village at the beach,” Ish said, “we’ll get it back. The whites are beginning to understand our problems. They have—”
“Pity!” Katsuk shouted. “They throw us a bone out of pity—a tiny corner of all this that once was ours. We don’t need their pity! They deprive us of the experience and responsibility of being human!”
Ish said: “Who cares why the whites do what we—”
“I care!” Katsuk touched his chest. “They come into our land—our land! They cut the underbrush to decorate their flower arrangements. They pile the logs high that should be left as trees. They take fish for sport that should feed our families. All the while, these hoquat do the one thing we must not forgive. They remain complacent in their evil. They are so satisfied that they are doing right. Damn these fiends!”
“Some of them were born here,” Ish protested. “They love this land.”
“Ahhhh,” Katsuk sighed. “They love our land even while they kill it and us upon the land.” Guilt filled David. He thought: I am Hoquat. His people had stolen this land. He knew Katsuk was speaking the truth. We stole his land.
That was why the two youths set to guard him wouldn’t speak to him. That was why the room full of people around Katsuk showed their sympathy with him even while they voiced fears and objections.
David felt himself hostage for all the sins of his kind. He had even sinned as his ancestors had, with a woman of these people. Thought of Tskanay weighed him down. He felt shattered, broken by the ruin of a life that once had seemed sweet and constant. He stared into the hut: ruddy shadows on rafters there, firelight in the crossbeams ... all the people—honey-red skin, the sleek black hair, the gray hair, the old and tangled hair. He suddenly saw Tskanay almost directly behind Ish in the third row: round face, a purple blouse, fawn red of her skin in the firelight. David swallowed convulsively, remembering the slither of her clothing in the dark hut, the tangle of shadows.
Katsuk said: “You will not stop me. No one will stop me.”
Cally stood up. She moved with slow stiffness now. She faced Katsuk. “We won’t stop you. That’s true. But if you kill that boy, you’ll be like the worst of them. I won’t want to live with that in my family.” She turned away, walked into the shadows.
Ish said: “What’s past is past.” He sat down.
Katsuk straightened, glanced left and right. He did not appear to be looking at his audience but to be showing them his face.
He said: “All the past is in my words. If those words die, you will have forgotten the moaning and misery in our houses. You will forget what the hoquat did to us. You will forget what we were. But I will not forget. This is all I must say.”
He turned, strode out of the house.
Before David could move, Katsuk was upon him. Katsuk grabbed the boy’s arm, dragged him along. “Come, Hoquat. We go now.”
***
Sheriff Mike Pallatt:
Sure I think old Cally has seen her nephew. Why else would she come in with all that warning stuff? She and her gang were in the Wilderness Area. That’s where I’m concentrating my men. I listened to her real good. Got a head on her shoulders, that old woman. She says we should call him Katsuk, we call him Katsuk. There’s no more Charlie Hobuhet. Somebody calls him Charlie at the wrong moment, that could blow the whole show.
***
It began to rain intermittently soon after they left the clearing of the huts: rain, then moonlight, rain, moon. It was raining steadily and hard before they reached the old mine shaft. There was distant lightning and thunder. David, allowing himself to be dragged along in the darkness, wondered if Katsuk was creating the trail one step at a time out of his magic. Katsuk could not possibly see his way in the wet blackness.
All the way up the hill, Katsuk chanted and raged.
David, his heart palpitating, heard the word-ravenings and understood only the rage. Wet branches clawed at him. He tripped on roots, slipped in mud. He was drenched by the time they reached the shaft.
Katsuk’s mind was in turmoil. He thought: It was the truth. They know I told them truth. Still they fear. They do not give me all their thoughts. My own people are lost to me. They do not want the powers I could give them. My own people!
He pulled Hoquat into the shelter of the mine shaft, released him. Water ran from them. Katsuk pressed his hands against the chilkat loincloth. Rivulets ran down his legs. He thought: We must rest, then go on. Some of my people are fools. They could tell the hoquat where I am. There must be a reward. Some have the hoquat sickness. They could do it for money. My own people deny me a home in their thoughts. There is no home. My own people turn away. No one will come to meet me. I am truly homeless.
How could he rest here? Katsuk wondered. He could feel his own people down there by the lake—restless, disturbed, divided, arguing. They had heard his words and felt his meaning, but all in a language which blasphemed what he held sacred.
No darkness will ever rest in me. I will be a ghost spirit. Not even Tskanay supports me.
He thought of how Tskanay had looked at him. Her eyes had seen him and found him alien. She had given her body to the boy, trying to swallow innocence. She had thought to make Hoquat unfit. She had failed. Hoquat’s shame reinforced his innocence. He was more innocent now.
Katsuk stared into the black emptiness of the old mine shaft. He sensed the dimensions of it with his memory, with his skin, his nose, his ears. There were ghost spirits here, too. The boy’s teeth chattered. Hoquat’s fear could almost be touched.
The boy whispered: “Katsuk?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we?”
“In the cave.”
The old mine?”
“Yes.”
“Are y-you g-going t-to b-build a f-f-fire?”
Lightning gave a brief flicker of illumination: the cave mouth, dripping trees, rain slanting down. Thunder followed, close, a crash that made the boy gasp.
Katsuk said: “Perhaps we have too much fire.”
The world suddenly was shattered by a barren plume of lightning so close they smelled the hell fragrance of it as the thunder shook them.
The boy whirled, clung to Katsuk’s arm.
Again, lightning flickered against wet blackness, this time near the lake. The thunderclap came like an echo of the one before it.
The boy trembled and shook against Katsuk.
“That was Kwahoutze,” Katsuk said. “That was the god in water, the spirit of all the regions brought together by water.”
“It was s-so close.”
“He tells us this is still his land.”
Again, the lightning flashed—beyond the lake now. Thunder followed, rumbling.
The boy said: “I don’t want to steal your land.”
Katsuk patted his shoulder. “And I was going to over-proud my enemies. This land does not know who owns it.”
David said: “I’m sorry we stole your land.”
“I know, Hoquat. You are truly innocent. You are one of the few who feel why this land is sacred to me. You are the immigrant invader. You have not learned how to worship this land. It is my land because I worship it. The spirits know, but the land does not know.”
Silence fell between them. Katsuk freed himself from the boy’s grip, thinking: Hoquat depends upon me for his strength, but that can be dangerous for me. If he takes strength from me, I must take strength from him. We could become one person, both of us Soul C
atcher. Who could I sacrifice then?
David listened to the sound of falling rain, the distant progression of lightning and thunder. Presently, he said: “Katsuk?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to kill me ... like your aunt said?”
“I use you to send a message.” David chewed his lower lip. “But your aunt said ...”
“Unless you tell me to do it, I will not kill you.” Relief flooded through David. He drew a deep breath. “But I’d never tell you to—”
“Hoquat! Why do you prefer mouth-talk to body-talk?” Katsuk moved into the shaft. Rebuked, David stood trembling. The old madness had returned to Katsuk’s voice.
Katsuk found the pack by smelling the mustiness of it. He squatted, felt the fabric, removed matches, a packet of tinder. Presently, he had a small fire going. Smoke drifted in a gray line along the ceiling. The flame cast raw shadows on old beams and rock.
David approached, stood close to the fire, trembling, holding his hands out to the warmth.
Katsuk gathered the cedar boughs of their bed, spread the sleeping bag. He stretched out on the bag with his back against a rotting beam.
The boy stood with his head just beneath the smoke. The gray line above him was like a spirit essence drifting toward the dark entrance into the world.
Katsuk withdrew the willow flute from his waistband, touched it to his lips. He blew softly. The clear sound circled upward into the smoke, carrying his mind with it. He played the song of cedar, the song to placate cedar when they took bark for mats and clothing, for rope and net string. He blew the song softly. It was a bird singing deep in the shade of cedar boughs.
Sweetly on the song, he sensed a vision: Janiktaht carrying a basket piled with curling shreds of cedar bark. And he thought: This is better for Janiktaht. I should not be forever seeking her face among the faces of strangers.
The words of the song echoed in his mind: “Life maker cedar ... fire maker cedar ...”
The vision of Janiktaht moved within him. She grew larger, larger, older, uglier. The basket of cedar bark shriveled.
Sweat broke out on his forehead. His mind stumbled. He dropped the flute.
Soul Catcher Page 14
