The Purification Ceremony

by Mark Sullivan

  "What about me?" Kurant asked.

  "Nelson will take you here," Cantrell said, pointing to the corner of the westernmost green field. "There's a box blind with a good view. You want pictures, that's where you'll get 'em without bugging anyone else."

  "You act as if I'm going to thrash around in the woods, screaming, 'Run for your lives!' or something," Kurant protested.

  Cantrell shot him a withering glance. "Wouldn't surprise me."

  A mousy-looking woman with short brown hair, glasses and an apron came through swinging doors to the left of

  the fireplace. "Dinner's ready, Mike."

  Cantrell broke away from Kurant and gestured in the woman's direction. "Like to introduce my wife, Sheila. Also our cook. Damn good one, too."

  Sheila smiled awkwardly. "I'm glad to meet you all. The dining room's through here."

  Earl went in first and gasped. "Would you look at this!"

  We all crowded in behind him. Gas lamps lit the room. Another fire burned in a hearth beyond a pedestal table. On every wall hung gigantic whitetail bucks, bucks that dwarfed the deer in my cabin. The biggest one, a twenty-two-point nontypical with matching twelve-inch drop tines, occupied the place of honor above the mantelpiece. Cedarshafted arrows in a leather quiver and a primitive longbow were attached to the wall just below the buck's head.

  "I'll be goddamned," Griff whispered. "They said it would be good, but I had no idea . . ."

  "Now you see what I was talking at you about, Mr. Addison?" Cantrell said, slapping Earl on the back. "Makes your blood rise, don't it?"

  Despite the conflicting emotions I had endured back in my cabin, my spine tingled; I was thirteen again, sharing a cabin with ray father the night before the season opened in Maine.

  "Whose bow is that?" Butch asked.

  "Mr. Metcalfe's, all he used in the last years," Nelson answered. "He shot that buck with it, the biggest nontypical taken in modern times with a longbow. Unofficial, of course. Made the bow himself. Arrows, too. He was a particular bugger, eh? But a regular shaman when it came to hunting."

  I winced at the reference, but said nothing. As we took our seats around the dinner table, the doors to the kitchen blew open and a short, large-breasted woman with braided black hair burst into the room carrying a tray of soup. "You gotta hunt, you gotta eat!" she announced. "I'm Theresa, your table-and-scullery slave. You got praise, whisper it in my ear. You want to bitch, tell it to those dusty old stuffed heads on the wall!"

  Patterson, who had been stroking his wispy blond beard, broke into giggles at the stunned expressions at the table. He pointed at Nelson. "You got Theresa for ten days. This poor bastard's been married to her fifteen years."

  Theresa sniffed, "Poor bastard, eh? As Timothy will tell you, he thanks the spirits of the forest to have found such a wood nymph to keep him warm at night."

  "Wood nymph?" Patterson cried.

  "Mmmmm," she said. She threw back her braid, leaned down and planted a big kiss on Nelson's forehead. "And here sits my satyr."

  We all broke up at the expression on Nelson's face. Theresa squinted at us. "You doubt my powers? Any of you?"

  Almost as one, we shook our heads. She cocked her chin in Patterson's direction. "See? Thirty seconds in my presence and the animals eat from my hand."

  Theresa placed bowls of steaming leek soup in front of us and disappeared back into the kitchen. She returned with bottles of white wine. The soup was followed by a main course of steamed salmon, carrots and new potatoes.

  Lenore Addison gulped from her wineglass. She pointed up at one of the deer heads and nudged her husband.

  "Maybe you'll do it here."

  Earl became red-faced. "Give it a rest, sweet thing."

  "C'mon, little man, those are the stakes, admit it." She waved her hand at Kurant. "Now here's part of your story: tycoon, perpetually miffed because his wife's a better deer hunter, spends years and tens of thousands of dollars in pursuit of a record-book whitetail. Only the two times he's had the monster right in front of him, he shook so hard, well . . ."

  "Buck fever, that's what it's called, right?" Kurant asked.

  "Earl gets a variation of it I call Ebola Buck Fever, temperature above a hundred and five, muscles in convulsions, basic breakdown of the entire system."

  "And you don't get the fever, is that what you're saying?" the writer asked.

  "Well, some would say it's luck. But the last one I shot scored one seventy-seven clean."

  From the other end of the table, Phil whistled. "That's a buck! In Texas?"

  Lenore nodded. "Off the King Ranch. One of those ghost deer the locals call Muy Grande."

  "One seventy-seven makes the book, right?" Kurant asked, scribbling.

  "The second time I've made it," she answered cheerfully. She patted her husband's arm. His attention was on the china that dinner had been served on.

  "Now, to be fair, Earl's come close. One sixty-eight typical three years ago. One sixty-nine and a half last year in Kansas. But he never manages to cross that fine line."

  Lenore paused for effect. "You know, I shot a book buck the first time I went hunting with him. I think that's why Earl loves me so much."

  "Shit luck." The little businessman seethed.

  "Now, now, hon, some of us are just born in tune with nature."

  "Well, that's true, you certainly grew up in the great outdoors. Folks, don't let the diamonds and gold fool you. Lenore here spent most of her life crapping in an outhouse before she met me. Wasn't for yours truly, she'd still be grazing beers in the joint I found her in down in brush country.

  She speaks real pretty only because she's spent the last two years with one of those speech pathologists who helps you try to kill your accents."

  Lenore managed a sour smile. "You say the nicest things, little man."

  "Only when I got one of your hundred-dollar fingernails in my back, sweet thing," Earl replied.

  The awkward silence that followed their spat was broken finally by Theresa's arriving with apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

  Kurant tapped his pen on his pad. "What's this obsession you all have hunting bucks with big antlers?"

  From the far end of the table, Phil said, "You get better, you want a bigger challenge."

  "You're saying these big-antlered deer are more difficult to hunt?"

  Patterson laughed and gestured to Cantrell. "You were right, this guy doesn't know squat, eh?"

  "Well, then, teach me," Kurant said.

  Patterson said, "Once a whitetail buck survives past three years, he might as well be a different species. The older bucks have an extra sense about them. They can see you blink at a hundred yards, hear you scratch your butt at two hundred and smell you a quarter mile away. They know every inch of their terrain and they notice anything out of place. They are the craftiest game animal in North America. To harvest a book buck is a big deal."

  "A sad deal, too," Arnie commented. "I always feel bad about it. Not harvesting a book deer—any deer."

  "Yet you do it?"

  Arnie shrugged. "Can't explain it, but sure, I shoot."

  "The rest of you feel like Arnie?" Kurant asked.

  "No, siree," Earl said. "When I've got a big buck down I sure don't cry. I feel like I've . . . well, it's probably not politically correct to say it . . . but like I've conquered."

  "The way I'd put it is I fooled him on his own turf," Phil agreed.

  "Not me," Butch said. "I think when you get one it's mostly luck. They have to make the mistake. So, like Arnie, I feel happy and sad when I've killed a deer."

  "So why not photograph them instead?" Kurant said.

  "Then it ain't hunting, hon," Lenore said. "It's taking pictures. To hunt, you got to kill."

  "What do you think, Griff?" Kurant asked.

  Griff massaged the skin below his left eye. "For me the kill is not the point. I go into the woods not caring at all whether I shoot a deer. I hunt for the process, the thinking, the becoming attuned with on
e of God's great creations. The means, to me, are more important than the ends. How I hunt is more significant than what I take home."

  "Yet you are a committed trophy hunter?" Kurant asked. Griff shook his head. "I hunt big bucks, not trophies. To hunt a big, mature buck is to engage in my art at its most demanding level.

  Requires all of my skill, hones my concentration, pulls out my best. It's a process of self-refinement, like Zen archery."

  "You make it sound spiritual."

  He nodded. "In the hunt we celebrate our role in the beautiful and yet vicious cycle of life. I'm rejoicing in my predatory ancestry."

  "You agree with that?" Kurant asked me.

  I felt dizzy. "That sort of thinking can go too far."

  "Really? Why's that?" Griff asked.

  I shrugged, unwilling to open that door. "It's just how I feel."

  From the far end of the table, Cantrell said, "Used to be people just loved the thrill of the hunt and the sight of a big buck in the woods."

  "That's what I hunt for," Butch said. "I'm pretty liberal, but . . ."

  "He's Gandhi, for Christ's sake," Phil interjected. "Except for the hunting."

  "It hits me at a gut level I can't explain," Butch said. "Always has."

  Kurant wrote all that down. He thought for a moment, then looked at Griff. "But if the process is the most important thing, what do you think about the Ryan incident?"

  Phil groaned. "That went down six years ago. Old news." Cantrell stood up abruptly from the table. "I've had enough of this jabber. I'll see about getting your lunches set."

  As Kurant watched the outfitter disappear through the kitchen door, he said, "It's not old news to me. I mean, Lizzy Ryan was killed by a trophy hunter just like you."

  Lenore slurred her words. "Wasn't she the one out in her backyard during deer season . . . ?"

  " . . . wearing white mittens!" Earl finished. "Must have looked just like a deer's tail twitching."

  "The guide, what was his name?" Arnie asked, snapping his fingers.

  "Teague," Kurant replied. "He and J. Wright Dilton, the hunter, testified they saw a huge buck running over the ridge. They followed the tracks, came over the rise and said they saw the deer's tail. Teague said shoot. Dilton shot. Lizzy died in her backyard. And both men got off scot-free."

  "Yeah, I read something about that," Patterson said, stroking his beard. "The state's fault. There were no laws then in Michigan making it a crime."

  "She should have known better," Lenore said. "I mean, didn't her husband hunt?"

  Kurant nodded. "Devlin was known as one of the best."

  "He must have lost his mind when they got off," Arnie said.

  Kurant shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I heard he had a tough time of it."

  "Wouldn't you have?" Griff demanded. "First thing I was taught was never to shoot unless you're sure of your target. If that had been a panel of ethical hunters, neither man would have walked out of that courtroom free."

  "You trying to say we're not ethical because we think Lizzy Ryan had some role in her own death?" Earl demanded.

  I said, "If you think because that woman wore white mittens in her backyard during hunting season, her killing was somehow excusable, then you stay at one end of the estate for the next ten days, I'll stay at the other."

  Cantrell came back in the room and glared at Kurant. "That's enough. These people have a big day ahead of them, Breakfast's at five. I advise you all to get some sleep."

  I went out into the darkness through the fresh snow toward my cabin. Behind me, Earl was angrily talking to Lenore. I heard my name mentioned, followed closely by

  ". . . probably a dyke!"

  I heard the water lapping at the lakeshore and walked to it. I peered out into the gloom, wondering what Metcalfe must have thought about as he walked out onto the ice. Did he anticipate the water taking him? I was assuming here, but did he love Grover's mother so much that he couldn't live without her? My thoughts wandered to my own mother and I told myself to stop. I wasn't ready.

  I was about to head back when I noticed the snow had ceased and a vent had opened in the cloud cover. I looked up into a starry night and a crescent moon. A hunter's moon. My father would have rejoiced at the sight. But to me, the moon seemed a thing of many threads, some known and others best forgotten, all of them pulling me toward something I could not avoid. I ran to the cabin. I slammed the door shut behind me. The envelope still lay on the table. I went to it and got my father's note out.

  My Beloved Little Crow,

  It is not the seasons that haunt us, but how we see ourselves in those seasons. We are at the whim of the six worlds and the invisible Power that flows through it. But because we are humans, not animals, we understand our fleeting time of awareness and the terrible decisions we must make in the handling of Power, and this is our curse. And yet we can still take hope in such a chaotic world. There are other forces at work capable of cleansing the things that soil us, and I hope you learn to sense them. I miss you terribly, Little Crow. Think of your mother and me when you see rivers. Think of us when you smell autumn leaves in the rain. Think of us when the seasons turn.

  Love, Daddy.

  It was dated nearly three years before his suicide. Some of his old friends at the funeral told me he was obsessed with that big buck, and I believe he'd decided long ago to take his life once he'd killed it. I put the letter back in the envelope. His cryptic words echoed around me and bounced off the conversation at the dinner table.

  In my mind, I was suddenly eleven again, struggling to keep up with my father as we tracked a deer across a ridge top in central Maine. We had been after the deer for hours in three inches of snow when he noticed the buck's tracks stopped, then jumped sideways: a sure sign the animal became aware of us and was beginning an evasive action.

  "He's going to circle us, Little Crow," my father whispered. "Go east!"

  I ran in the direction he pointed, through spruce and into a stand of hickory where pale grass jutted from the snow. When the hickory gave way down slope to a meadow choked with wild apple and white pine, I threw myself down behind a stone wall, waiting.

  Without looking back, I knew my father watched behind me. And then the buck came, working his way up the ravine, his cedarrubbed antlers swinging in the wind.

  I hardly remember shooting. But I did and the buck took off, then staggered and dropped. I turned to Father, unbelieving, "I . . . I got him?"

  He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. "You sure did."

  I remember being unable to look at the deer as I came up to it. There was this feeling inside me, like a river eating away a new channel until I didn't seem like the young girl who'd left the cabin that morning, but a liquid that reflected all that had been part of the day: the forest, the swamps, the snow, the tracks and this deer.

  I stood over the buck and the trembling in my hands carried through to my arms and into my knees. I dropped next to the animal and cried. I was angry at myself for crying, as if that weren't the way I should feel; as if I would have acted differently had I been a boy. But my father understood. He knelt and hugged me and said that his uncle Mitchell, who had died the summer before, always believed that those who don't feel great sorrow at the death of an animal should not take to the woods. He crooked my chin with his finger and brushed away my tears.

  "Taking life is as profound as giving life, it is the transfer of spirit or Power, which is what our ancestors believed was everywhere around us.." he said. "You'll feel this same way when your children are born, because it is all part of the same endless cycle of Power. When you kill, you are accepting the Power of the animal as your own and as part of the greater Power around us. When you kill to end the hunt, you are acknowledging your own death, too; and the fact that one day your spirit will leave your body to meld with all that has come before and all that will come."

  He took his knife from his sheath and cut a lock of my hair and handed it to me.

  "Leave a par
t of yourself here in the woods because you are taking part of the woods away with you," he went on.

  "Say a prayer of thanks to the buck for giving himself to you so that you may eat and live. Then wrap your hands about his muzzle and take in the air that remains in his lungs. All that made the deer lives in that last breath."

  As if in a trance, I took the lock of my hair and cast it into the wind. I prayed then, not to some white-bearded man—that seemed ridiculous—but to that river inside me. I went forward past the antlers and took the buck's muzzle and cupped my hands around it. The air in the deer's lungs had the mustiness of earth turned over in springtime. I held it until spots danced before my eyes and I heard all the sounds of the forest in my mind.

  I lived in that forest for years and took comfort there. Then there was tragedy and I left. And the only things that ever gave me that kind of comfort again were my husband's arms and the gentle night sounds my children made sleeping.

  I went to the bedroom in the cabin and picked up their photograph. It was the new one from school. Kevin had sent it, the one kind gesture of late. Patrick needed a haircut, but his smile was like small arms around my shoulders. Emily? She reminded me of my mother, strong and yet softhearted.

  I gave them life, I thought. And it was as my father had predicted: I had sobbed with sorrow and joy when they slipped from me bloody and warm.

  And yet here I was, separated from them by court order and thousands of miles, preparing to chase a wild animal through the woods.

  What kind of woman was I?

  NOVEMBER SEVENTEENTH

  BEFORE DAWN, SNOW bowed the conifers alongside the skidder road, creating in the headlights of the Piston Bully the illusion of a tunnel, still and close and white. Gusts spun the snow before us in bodiless waves. The rumble of the diesel machine filled all the space around me. Patterson wrestled to keep the snowcat on the track. I held onto a handle on the dashboard, gripping the forestock of the rifle between my knees, the anxiety of last night held at bay by the anticipation of being at last in deer country.