Soul Catcher (14 page)

The dream singing persisted.

David heard it and tasted bitter acid in his
throat. The dream terror washed around him in that faint tide of
sound.

He shuddered, wondering if he still dreamed,
if the sensation of awakening was illusion.

A spark of orange light formed in the
darkness. He heard movement near the light. Cautiously, he reached
up with his left hand. His fingers encountered a rough wood
surface.

Memory filled him—a dungeon cave with
moldering plank walls. Katsuk had brought them here at dusk,
searching out the way, exploring ahead while the boy crouched in
shadows. This was a secret place used by his people when they broke
the hoquat law and hunted game in these mountains.

The orange light was a remnant of the tiny
fire Katsuk had built in the cave mouth. Movement of shadowy arms
flickered across the light—Katsuk!

But the singing continued. Was it Katsuk? No
... it seemed far away and full of words he could not understand—a
whistling flute and a slow, walking rhythm on a drum. Katsuk had
played his flute one night and this sounded like a distant parody
of that playing.

David’s fear ebbed. That was real singing, a
real drum, and a flute like Katsuk’s. There were several
voices.

The poachers!

Katsuk had crept away in the first dark,
returning much later to say he recognized the people camped in the
trees at the edge of the meadow.

A groan came from near the fire. Was that
Katsuk? David strained to hear what Katsuk was doing. He wondered:
Should I let him know I’m awake? Why did he groan?

Again, the groan sounded.

David cleared his throat.

“You are awake!” Katsuk hurled the words at
him from the cave’s mouth.

David recoiled at the madness in Katsuk’s
voice, was unable to answer.

“I know you are awake,” Katsuk said, calmer
now and nearer. “It will be daylight soon. We go then.”

David sensed the presence over him,
blackness in blackness. He tried to swallow in a dry throat,
managed: “Where will we go?”

“To my people.”

“Is that them ... singing?”

“There is no singing.”

David listened. The forest outside the cave
gave off only the soughing of wind in trees, faint drippings,
stirrings, and rustlings. Katsuk pressed something hot beneath the
boughs beside David: another heated rock.

“I heard singing,” David said.

“You dreamed it.”

“I heard it!”

“It is gone now.”

“What was it?”

“Those of my people who have eaten
spirits.”

“What?”

“Try to sleep a little longer.”

David remembered the dream. “No.” He pressed
against the moldering boards beside him. “Where are your
people?”

“Everywhere around us.”

“In the forest?”

“Everywhere! If you sleep, the spirit eaters
may come to you and explain their song.”

With sudden realisation, David said: “You’re
trying to tell me it was ghosts singing!”

“Spirits.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“Have you prayed for your spirit?”

“No! What was that song?”

“It was a song asking for power over that
which no human can defeat.”

David groped in the darkness for the
sleeping bag, pulled it around him. He leaned over the place where
Katsuk had placed the heated rock.
Crazy Katsuk! He makes no
sense.

“You will not sleep?” Katsuk asked.

“How soon will it be daylight?” David
countered.

“Within the hour.”

Katsuk’s hand came out of the dark, pressed
David toward the warm rock. In a soothing tone, Katsuk said:

“Go to sleep. You dreamed an important dream
and ran from it.” David stiffened. “How do you know?”

“Sleep,” Katsuk said.

David stretched out over the rock. His body
drank the warmth. The musky, falling, swimming attraction of sleep
radiated from the warmth. He did not even feel it when Katsuk’s
hand released him.

He lapsed into a state with no sharp edges.
Magic and ghosts and dreams: They were gauze in an orange wind.
Nothing completed a sensation of touch. Everything blended, one
blur into another: warmth into the cedar boughs beneath him, Katsuk
returning to the cave’s mouth, the dream into the chill where the
rock’s warmth failed to reach him. Vagueness everywhere.

All blurred and faded.

He felt his childhood fading, thought:
I
am becoming a man.
Memory treasures stored up against just such
an awakening, receded into gray impressions—pictures he recalled
pasting in a book, the rungs of a staircase where he had peered
through to watch guests arriving, being tucked into bed by a benign
figure whose face was lost in a halo of silver hair.

David sensed warm orange firelight. Katsuk
had built up the fire at the cave’s mouth. He felt damp cold under
his back. A night bird screamed twice. Katsuk groaned.

The groan sent a shock all through
David.

Vagueness vanished, taking sleep and the
dreams of his childhood. He thought:
Katsuk is sick. It’s a
sickness no one can heal. Katsuk has caught a spirit and eaten it.
He has the power no human can defeat. That’s what he meant about
the song! The birds obey him. They hide us. He has gone into some
place where humans can’t follow. He has gone where the song is ...
where I’m afraid to go.

David sat up, wondered at such thoughts
coming all unbidden into his mind. Those were not the thoughts of
childhood. He had thought real things, penetrating things. They
were thoughts from immediate pressures of life and death.

As though his thoughts had called it into
being, the song started up once more. It began out of nothing, the
words still unintelligible, even its direction undefined ...
somewhere outside.

“Katsuk?” David said.

“You hear the singing?” He spoke from near
the fire.

“What is it?”

“Some of my people. They hold a sing.”

“Why?”

“They try to call me out of the
mountains.”

“Do they want you to turn me loose?”

“They have eaten a small spirit, Hoquat. It
is not as powerful as my spirit.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“When it is daylight, we will go to them. I
will take you to them and show them the power of my spirit.”

***

From Katsuk’s speech to his people, as
reported by his Aunt Cally:

This is the way it is with me. My mind was
sick. My mind suffered the sickness of the hoquat. I lost my way
without a spirit to guide me. Therefore, I had to beg medicine from
anyone who would give it to me. I begged it from you, my people. I
begged it from my grandfathers, my father’s brothers, all the
people we came from, all our ancestors, my mother’s grandmothers
and grandfathers, all the people. Their medicine words poured down
upon me. I felt them within me. I feel them now. They are a fire in
my breast. Raven leads me. Soul Catcher has found me.

***

In the last of the darkness, Katsuk stood
outside the cave which was an ancient mine shaft high on the
hillside above the lake. He saw lights flickering in the branches
below him, campfires beneath the fog that veiled the valley. The
lights glowed and swam as though they were moving phosphor in
water, shapes blurred in fog ripples.

He thought:
My people.

He had crept close and identified them in
the night, not by their hoquat names but by their tribal names
which were shared only with those who could be trusted. They were
Duck Woman, Eyes on Tree, Hates Fish, Elk Jumping, One-ball
Grandfather, Moon Water ... In his own tongue now, he said their
names.

“Tchukawl, Kipskiltch, Ishkawch, Klanitska,
Naykletak, Tskanay ...”

Tskanay was there, thinking of herself as
Mary Kletnik, no doubt. He tried to summon a Charles Hobuhet memory
of Mary Kletnik. Nothing came into his mind. She was there, but
behind a veil. Why was she hiding? He sensed a lithe shape naked in
firelight, a voice murmuring, fingers touching flesh, a softness
which demanded dangerous things of him.

She was a threat.

He understood this now. Tskanay had been
important to Charles Hobuhet. She might strike through to the
center which was Katsuk. Women had powers. Soul Catcher must deal
with her.

The sun came over the edge of the valley.
Katsuk looked beyond the bowl of fog to the mountain suspended in
the dawn. Black splotches of rock stood out against snow as white
as a goat-hair blanket. The mountain was an ancient shape pressed
hard against the sky and left hanging there.

Katsuk prayed then:
Soul Catcher protect
me from that woman. Guard my strength. Keep my hatred pure.

He went into the mine-cave then, awakened
the boy, and fed him chocolate and peanuts from the pack. Hoquat
ate hungrily, unaware that Katsuk was not eating. The boy said
nothing of his dream, but Katsuk recalled it, sensing the dangerous
forces being gathered against him.

Hoquat had dreamed of a spirit who would
grant any wish. The spirit had said he was not yet ready. Ready for
what? For the sacrifice? It said something that Hoquat had a spirit
in his dream. That didn’t happen to everyone. That was a sign of
real powers. How else could this be, though? The sacrifice must be
a great thing to have any meaning. The
Innocent
must go into
the spirit world with a great voice which could not be denied. Both
worlds must hear him or the death would be meaningless.

Katsuk shook his head. It was disturbing,
but this was no morning for dreams. This would be a day for testing
the realities of the fleshly world.

He went back outside then and saw that the
sun had burned part of the fog from the valley. The lake was a
mirror catching the bright flare of sunlight. It filled the valley
with pale clarity. A black bear came out into the meadow above the
lake, drank the air with its tongue hanging like a dog’s. It caught
the scent of humans, whirled, and loped back into the trees.

Katsuk stripped off the hoquat clothing,
stood in only the loincloth and the moccasins Janiktaht had made,
the medicine pouch hanging at his waist.

The boy came out. Katsuk handed the hoquat
clothing to him, said: “Put this in the pack. Stuff the sleeping
bag on top, and hide the pack beyond where we slept.”

“Why?”

“Do it and come back here.”

David shrugged, obeyed. Presently, he
returned, said: “I’ll bet you’re cold.”

“I am not cold. Come. We go to my people
now.” He led the way at a fast walk which had the boy trotting to
keep up.

They went down across a bracken slope, acid
green with red-leaved vines creeping through the green. A gray prow
of rock jutted from the slope. They went around the rock and
plunged into a dark trail through trees.

David was panting by the time they splashed
across rocky shallows in the creek. Katsuk seemed unaware of
exertion, keeping up that steady, long stride. There were
cottonwoods by the creek—pale, yellow-green moss on their trunks.
The trail went through wet salal, emerged on a narrow ledge thick
with spruce and cedar, a few tall hemlocks. Four crude huts, one of
them as large as all the other three together, were spaced among
the trees about fifty feet apart. All had been built of split cedar
boards dug into the needle duff of the ground and lashed to a pole
framework. David could see the lashings of twisted willow rope. The
largest hut had a low door curtained by raw elkhide.

As Katsuk and the boy came in sight of the
door, the curtain lifted and a young woman emerged. Katsuk stopped,
held his captive with a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

The young woman came fully outside before
she saw them. She stopped then, put her hand to her cheek.
Recognition was obvious in her stare.

David stood locked under Katsuk’s grip. He
wondered what was in Katsuk’s mind. Katsuk and the young woman just
looked at each other without speaking. David studied the woman, his
senses abnormally alert. Her hair was parted in the middle, hanging
loosely over her shoulders. The ends were braided, tied with white
string. Pockmarks disfigured her left cheek, showing around the
hand she held there. Her cheeks were broad. They glistened, and her
eyes were set deeply into the flesh. Her figure was full and
slender beneath a red-purple dress which stopped just below her
knees.

All the way down the mountain, David had
told himself Katsuk’s people would end this nightmare. The old days
of Indians and white captives were gone forever. These people had
come here as part of the search for Katsuk. Now David saw fear in
the young woman’s eyes and began to doubt his hopes.

She dropped her hand, said: “Charlie.”

Katsuk gave no response. She looked at
David, back at Katsuk. “I didn’t think it would work.” Katsuk
stirred, said: “Didn’t think
what
would work?”

“The sing.”

“You think I came because they sang me
in?”

“Why not?”

Katsuk released David’s shoulder, said:
“Hoquat, this is Tskanay ... an old friend.”

Coming toward them, she said: “My name is
Mary Kletnik.”

“Your name is Tskanay,” Katsuk said. “Moon
Water.”

“Oh, stop that nonsense, Charlie,” she said.
“You—”

“Do not call me Charlie.”

Although he spoke softly, his tone stopped
her. Again, she put a hand to her pockmarked cheek. “But ...”

“I have another name now: Katsuk.”

“Katsuk?”

“You know what it means.”

She shrugged. “The center ... kind of.”

“Kind of,” he sneered. He touched the boy.
“This is Hoquat, the Innocent who will answer for all of our
innocents.”

“You don’t really ...”

“The reality I show you, it will be the only
reality.”

Her glance went to the knife at his
waist.

“Nothing that simple,” Katsuk said. “Where
are the others?”