“The trail’s too narrow heading out,” Cantrell said. “It’s meant for snowmobiles or ATVs.”
“I saw some snowmobiles in that utility shed,” Butch said.
“They’re old and town’s eighty-five miles,” Theresa said.
“There’s nothing closer?” Griff asked.
She shook her head morosely. “No town for eighty-five miles.”
Her husband snapped his fingers. “Maybe we don’t need to get to town.”
Nelson crossed the room to the big aerial photograph and pointed to a blur of gray. “There’s an abandoned logging camp outside the northwest boundary of the estate. I haven’t been there, but I remember someone saying there’s a radiophone.”
“You’re sure?” Cantrell asked.
“Yes!” Theresa said, excited now. “I heard old man Metcalfe mention it a couple of times.”
“Then we go for it,” Griff said.
“First thing in the morning,” Cantrell said.
“Thank God,” Sheila said.
I wasn’t sure who to thank. Griff walked me to my cabin, where I loaded the rifle and set it against the wall. I propped the back of one of the chairs under the door handle and hung an extra blanket over the window to prevent any light from showing outside. I sat in the overstuffed chair facing the deer head. I twirled the owl feather in my fingers and thought of Patrick and Emily. I started to cry, wondering if Kevin would use this time away to turn them against me. I asked myself how our marriage could have gotten so tangled, and I had to admit the knots were fashioned by my hands.
We were married the summer I graduated with degrees in chemistry and computer engineering. He was already working as a publicist with Krauss. I thrived in my new life, rising quickly at the start-up software company that gave me my first job. Writing computer programs was like setting off into new country; I approached each project as a forest to be scouted and understood. But more important, I was happy in my new self, and by our third anniversary I thought I’d put the hunt, Power, my parents and Mitchell behind me forever.
We bought a town house in the Back Bay. Saturdays were extended shopping sprees on Newbury Street, dinner and the latest film at the Nickelodeon. Sundays were brunch and lazy days reading the Globe and the Times. At parties during the early years, Kevin liked to tell our friends that I was a wild Maine savage he’d found wandering in the city and tamed. I’d always smile and correct him: “Civilized,” I’d say. We’d both laugh.
We rarely left Boston except for weeklong vacations to Nantucket and Key West, which, because we usually took holidays at the same time as our urban friends, were for all intents and purposes Boston with a whaling theme and a palm tree, respectively.
There were moments in these vacation spots, however, usually at sunset, when I would find myself at the water’s edge within earshot of the latest cocktail gathering.
The waves would froth at my ankles and I’d be taken by an obscure longing to be more alone and yet more involved than I was. Invariably, Kevin would approach at that point and hand me a Sea Breeze and we’d walk together back to the party.
Patrick was born in the fifth year of our marriage, Emily in the eighth. My children raised in me the idea that I was connected to the future — if no longer to the past — and I adored them for it. Of course, our marriage had suffered the usual pressures that accompany the raising of young children, and by the time of my father’s suicide, we had lapsed into the routine of kids, work and once-a-week sex.
So perhaps I was ready for the dreams that came to me after my father’s death. My ancestors believed that dreams are windows to the other worlds and that the animals we meet in dreams can tell us of the future, or force us on journeys we are reluctant to take.
After the dreams began, and after I had chased the buck through the snows of southern Maine, my behavior became more erratic, much to Kevin’s dismay.
Several times later that winter and into early spring, I slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. I drove the ninety minutes to Maine and entered the woods in the darkness. I got to the point where I could crawl into a thicket from downwind and flash my penlight into a deer’s eyes and revel in its snort and the way it crashed away.
By late April the forest was heavy with pollen. Tree frogs peeped in a soprano chorus. And the briars at the edges of fields were thick with new growth. One night, under the soothing light of a full moon, I stripped and lay in a deer’s musky bed until dawn came. I listened as the hoots of barred owls irritated roosting male turkeys. The toms raked the dawn with furious gobbles.
When I arrived home that morning caked in mud, reeking of animal musk, I suggested to Kevin that we send the children off to school and spend the day in bed. He demanded I seek help. I refused, saying there was nothing to be helped. He slept in the guest room after that night.
Nineteen months after my father’s death, I received some of his forwarded mail. In the package was a letter describing the opening of the Metcalfe Estate. I read the letter a dozen times, especially the passages that described the remoteness of the forests. It called to me in a way I find difficult to explain. Looking back, I believe that my mind demanded a retreat into the chaotic reality of the wilderness, the unconscious, unknown place where the roads end and we begin; otherwise I would surely go mad. The next morning, with no word to Kevin, I took seven thousand dollars out of the savings account and booked the hunt. I took another two thousand for airfare and to outfit myself with the necessary equipment.
Kevin had our accounts frozen after he discovered the withdrawals.
“How could you take that kind of money without asking me?” he demanded.
“I knew you wouldn’t let me have it,” I replied. “And I needed it. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You could have at least tried,” he said. “Diana, I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”
I hesitated at his sad expression. “Maybe you don’t, Kevin. Maybe that’s the problem. But before I can tell you who I am, I need to go hunting.”
“Hunting? That’s what you spent nine thousand dollars on?” he cried. “Absolutely not. I hate hunting. You’ll just have to call them and get the money back.”
“And if I don’t?”
Kevin looked at me icily. “Diana, you told me once that if I loved you, I wouldn’t ask you questions about your father. I didn’t want to, but I respected your wishes. Now I’m telling you, if you love me, you’ll get the money back. That’s what it comes down to — do you love me?”
I twirled the owl’s feather in my hand, admitting that what had once been so clear had turned cloudy. I had loved him once. Now I didn’t know anymore.
To get my mind off him, I studied the owl’s feather in the gaslight glow. The white down filigreed out from the quill. I raised it and blew. The feather lofted and swirled to my knee. A soft, gentle thing.
Why feathers? I asked myself. Why feathers from ravens and owls? The killers were sending a message. But what? The raven was a scavenger. The owl, a bird of prey. I couldn’t see the connection.
I took the feather and placed it under a tumbler turned upside down on the table. It was close to midnight now. I remember suddenly feeling more tired than I had ever been before. I lay down on the bed in my long underwear, then brought the loaded rifle in bed with me.
I did not fall asleep for a long time. I did not want to sleep because I did want to close my eyes and hear the creaking of the building in the wind and the flick of snow against the windowpanes. But despite my efforts I heard sleep coming, and as hard as I tried to fight, I couldn’t. The talons of it came over me and I passed like a shadow into the night.
NOVEMBER NINETEENTH
THE NEXT MORNING, the sky had barely flattened toward sunrise when, against the dove whistle of the wind outside, the floorboards on the cabin porch creaked.
I had been up for nearly an hour, huddling under the blankets, waiting in the cold for the light to come because I forgot to bank the stove the night before.
Dawn would give me courage. Until it came, I told myself, I would not open the door to get kindling. Who knew what might wait in the darkness?
The boards protested weight again. Chewing at my lip, I slipped from the bed with the rifle and padded across the cold floor to the curtained window. I peeked out, trying to see the porch, but all I could make out were the butt-ends of the log pile.
A moment passed, then two. The boards groaned a third time. I turned down the gas lamp until it sputtered and died, then eased the chair out from under the doorknob. My heart felt ready to stop forever, but, gun in my right hand, I took the latch with my left and yanked the door open.
Kurant scrambled backward on his heels, dropped his flashlight and skidded onto his fanny when he found my gun barrel thrust in his face.
“What are you, crazy?” I squeaked. I had gone fluffy inside.
He crabbed backward on his elbows through the snow that had welled behind the woodpile, sputtering, “I was trying to figure out if you were awake yet! I wanted to talk. I’m… I’m… I couldn’t sleep and… I wanted to talk.”
“No, you’re scared.”
“I am not.” He brought his legs under him. He wiped at the icicles that clung to his mustache. “I mean, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then…?”
“Bring some kindling,” I said, actually glad for the company. “My stove’s out.”
I built a tepee with the sticks over the embers buried in the ashes. I put some scraps of paper in below and blew. It smoked, then flamed, and I added more sticks until the interior of the stove crackled. Kurant intently studied the feather.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
Kurant started. “I don’t know. Why? Why would I know?”
“I didn’t say you would. I just figured somebody like you, a writer, would have a theory.”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” he said quickly. He glanced away and made a whisking motion in the air with his hand. “I mean, I did, but mostly I just thought of the way Grover hung there. All night I thought about it… and I kept asking myself — what makes a human want to hunt another human? What makes a human want to hunt anything?”
There was a passion in his voice I hadn’t heard before.
“So you weren’t being honest when we got here, were you? You are against hunting.”
He shrugged. “Let’s say I don’t understand the impulse.”
“I think there’s more to it than that. You’re a vegetarian?”
“When I can be,” he admitted. “Here it’s impossible, so I do what I have to do. It’s my job. But that’s besides the point. What’s your take on the feathers?”
“Maybe they’re meant to answer your question: what makes a human want to hunt?” I said. And then I had a thought that chilled me more than the dank cold inside the cabin. “Or maybe the feathers are not what we’re supposed to be seeing at all. Maybe they’re just a calling card. Maybe it’s who’s being hunted that’s the message.”
“I don’t get what you’re…”
“Hunters,” I said. “The hunters are being hunted.” Kurant dropped down hard in the leather chair. He chewed at his mustache, then murmured, more to himself than to me, “This is worse than anything I could have come up with. I thought I’d looked at it from every angle, but I didn’t consider brutal irony.”
I was about to ask him what that meant when a knock came at the door.
“Diana?” Griff called out. “Cantrell wants us. Now!”
“Give me five minutes,” I called back. I turned to Kurant. “If you don’t mind, I need to shower and dress.”
The writer left. And as I got into the shower, I couldn’t help remark again that he reminded me of Kevin in his mannerisms, sure of himself and yet, in some ways, weak.
After Kevin had given me the ultimatum to get back the money, I stayed out of the woods for a week and acted the dutiful wife. I told myself to call Cantrell, to cancel my slot.
But I kept having the dream of the buck running and I put it off. That weekend I made plans to take Patrick and Emily to the Arboretum in Brookline, a safe alternative, I thought, to the big woods that beckoned.
But nature’s canvas and woman’s design are often at odds. In the car, I felt myself drawn out of the city, out past the densely inhabited suburbs toward the more rural areas, all the way to the Quobbin Reservoir northwest of Springfield. We parked near a logging road and I led the kids into the woods. They had never been in a real forest before and I could see their discomfort: Emily sucked hard on her thumb and Patrick held my pants leg even when I told him to run ahead. But after a couple of hours, the woods worked their magic on them. They dashed up the trails to show me a mushroom growing in the black soil or a trout darting in the shallows of a brook. They froze in amazement when a doe and her fawns crossed a ridge in front of us.
“Can we follow them?” Patrick asked.
“Go ahead,” I said. “As long as you’re downwind, they won’t smell you.”
Patrick ran after the deer, only to catch his foot on a root and fall. He squirmed on the ground, crying and holding his ankle. We were miles from the road and it took me hours to carry him out, especially with Emily crying that she was tired and hungry. I hadn’t brought enough food or water. Then she fell and cut her chin.
I’d told Kevin we’d be home from the Arboretum by noon. We returned long after dark, after a two-hour trip to the emergency room to get stitches in Emily’s chin and a cast on Patrick’s ankle. Kevin was wild with worry and demanded to know how it had happened. I told him simply that we’d been out for a walk and they’d both fallen.
“I was chasing a deer way out in the woods,” Patrick said.
“I was hungry and slipped on a rock,” Emily said.
“They’ll both be fine,” I asserted cheerfully.
;’Have you gotten the money back?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I promised.
Two days later, without warning, he went to see an attorney. He painted me as a troubled woman whose behavior constituted a threat to the kids and used the hospital reports and the withdrawals from our savings account as evidence. He filed for divorce and a restraining order.
I got the order in the parking lot outside my office. I raced home, furious, but by the time I got there, the locks had been changed. My clothes were boxed in the garage. I demanded and got a hearing in family court. The judge asked me all about the money I’d spent and the late-night disappearances and taking my kids to the woods unprepared. I explained as best I could without bringing up the dreams.
He must have sensed that I was telling much less than I knew.
“I’m not convinced you are as much a threat to your children as your husband has alleged, Ms. Jackman,” he said. “But I’m concerned enough, based on some of the things you’ve done recently, to ask you to undergo a psychological evaluation. If everything comes back okay, we’ll talk joint custody.”
I could see what was going to happen, what a psychologist might find out about me, about my past and how it was worming its way through my mind, how it could be construed as something destructive — to me, to the people around me. I’d lose Emily and Patrick for sure. It sickened me, but I understood that getting custody in the long run meant possibly losing them for now.
“I don’t think I need to talk to a psychologist,” I told the judge. ‘Tm their mother and I love them and that should be enough.”
“Then I’m going to have to limit your access,” the judge replied. “One hour every two weeks until such time as you agree to an evaluation. Next case?”
The months living alone in the apartment before flying out for the hunt had been the longest of my life. I tried to make each visit and telephone conversation last, to imagine for myself and the kids that the situation was only temporary. It seemed to work with Emily, who was still young and has always possessed my mother’s unfailing optimism. Patrick, however, knew. And because he is so sensitive and introspe
ctive, I could hear his pain every time we spoke, every time he asked, “When are you coming home, Mommy?”
“Soon, honey,” I said to myself as I dressed. “I promise you, soon.”
“Two of the snowmobiles run okay enough to make the trip,” Cantrell announced. “But no one’s worked the trail out of here in three years. I don’t know what we’ll face between here and Camp Four.”
We had come outside on the back porch of the lodge facing the game pole. The snow flew sideways in sheets. The hanging deer were rimmed in ice crystals. They twisted and swung in the wind like dancers frozen in attitudes of free flight. Gray, nameless birds braved the gale to alight archly between the outstretched legs of the stags and peck at the ruby meat. The faces around me were haggard with exhaustion.
“I need three volunteers,” Cantrell said.
I raised my hand. So did Griff, Nelson, Phil, Kurant and, to my surprise, Arnie. I wanted to use the phone to call home, to talk to Patrick and Emily. It seemed very important to hear their voices, as if that music alone could keep me safe until the plane returned.
Cantrell looked us over, then pointed to Griff, me and Arnie. “Griff will drive the second machine. Arnie and Diana will ride shotgun, watching our backs.”
Phil jumped forward. “You’re taking a woman and a guy who falls apart on a bumpy airplane ride over me? Listen, man, I was in ’Nam.”
“ ’Nam!” Butch laughed. “Phil, you talk as if you walked rice-paddy hamlets in the Mekong Delta. You were a supply sergeant at the Army auto works in Saigon.”
“I was still there, man. You and Arnie were smoking pot, protesting and hiding from the world at Penn State. But I was there.”
“I didn’t smoke pot,” Arnie said.
“I did,” Butch said. “But so what, Phil. It’s still not like you had combat experience or anything.”
Kurant began his protest before Phil could respond. ‘‘You’re trying to keep me away from the story, Cantrell. I won’t stand for it.”
The Purification Ceremony Page 12
