Soul Catcher (2 page)

You’ve seen those papers he wrote. That one
where he compares the Raven myth of his people to the Genesis myth
of Western civilization is very disturbing. He has perceived the
link between dream and reality—how we seek to win a place in
destiny through rebellion, the evil forces we build up only to
destroy, the Great Conquests and Great Causes to which we cling
long after they’ve been exposed as empty glitter. Here ... notice
his simile for such lost perceptions:

“ ... the fish eyes like gray skimmed milk
that stare at you out of things which are alive when they shouldn’t
be.”

This is the observation of someone who is
capable of great things, as great as any achievements in our
Western mythology.

***

It had begun when his name still was Charles
Hobuhet, a good
Indian
name for a
Good Indian
.

The bee had alighted, after all, on the back
of Charles Hobulet’s left hand. There had been no one named Katsuk
then. He had been reaching up to grasp a vine maple limb, climbing
from a creek bottom in the stillness of midday.

The bee was black and gold, a bee from the
forest, a bumblebee of the family Apidae. It’s name fled buzzing
through his mind, a memory from days in the white school.

Somewhere above him, a ridge came down
toward the Pacific out of the Olympic Mountains like the gnarled
root of an ancient spruce clutching the earth for support.

The sun would be warm up there, but winter’s
chill in the creek bottom slid its icy way down the watercourse
from the mountains to these spring-burgeoning foothills.

Cold came with the bee, too. It was a
special cold that put ice in the soul.

Still Charles Hobuhet’s soul then.

But he had performed the ancient ritual with
twigs and string and bits of bone. The ice from the bee told him he
must take a name. Unless he took a name immediately, he stood in
peril of losing both souls, the soul in his body and the soul that
went high or low with his true being.

The stillness of the bee on his hand made
this obvious. He sensed urgent ghosts: people, animals, birds, all
with him in this bee.

He whispered: “Alkuntam, help me.” The
supreme god of his people made no reply. Shiny green of the vine
maple trunk directly in front of him dominated his eyes. Ferns
beneath it splayed out fronds. Condensation fell like rain on the
damp earth. He forced himself to turn away, stared across the creek
at a stand of alders bleached white against heavy green of cedar
and fir on the stream’s far slope.

A quaking aspen, its leaves adither among
the alders, dazzled his awareness, pulled his mind. He felt
abruptly that he had found another self which must be reasoned
with, influenced, and understood. He lost clarity of mind and
sensed both selves straining toward some pure essence. All sense of
self slipped from his body, searched outward into the dazzling
aspen.

He thought:
I am in the center of the
universe!
Bee spoke to him then: “I am Tamanawis speaking, to
you ...” The words boomed in his awareness, telling him his name.
He spoke it aloud: “Katsuk! I am Katsuk.”

Katsuk.

It was a seminal name, one with potency.

Now, being Katsuk, he knew all its meanings.
He was Ka-, the prefix for everything human. He was Ka-tsuk, the
bird of myth. A human bird! He possessed roots in many meanings:
bone, the color blue, a serving dish, smoke ... brother and
soul.

Once more, he said it: “I am Katsuk.”

Both selves flowed home to the body.

He stared at the miraculous bee on his hand.
A bee had been the farthest thing from his expectations. He had
been climbing, just climbing.

If there were thoughts in his mind, they
were thoughts of his ordeal. It was the ordeal he had set for
himself out of grief, out of the intellectual delight in walking
through ancient ideas, out of the fear that he had lost his way in
the white world. His native soul had rotted while living in that
white world. But a spirit had spoken to him.

A true and ancient spirit.

Deep within his innermost being he knew that
intellect and education, even the white education, had been his
first guides on this ordeal.

He thought how, as Charles Hobuhet, he had
begun this thing. He had waited for the full moon and cleansed his
intestines by drinking seawater. He had found a land otter and cut
out its tongue.

Kuschtaliute—the symbol tongue!

His grandfather had explained the way of it
long ago, describing the ancient lore. Grandfather had said: “The
shaman becomes the spirit-animal-man. God won’t let animals make
the mistakes men make.”

That was the way of it.

He had carried
Kuschtaliute
in a deer
scrotum pouch around his neck. He had come into these mountains. He
had followed an old elk trail grown over with alder and fir and
cotton wood. The setting sun had been at his back when he had
buried Kuschtaliute beneath a rotten log. He had buried
Kuschtaliute in a place he never again could find, there to become
the symbol tongue.

All of this in anguish of spirit.

He thought:
It began because of the rape
and pointless death of my sister. The death of Janiktaht ... little
Jan.

He shook his head, confused by an onslaught
of memories. Somewhere a gang of drunken loggers had found
Janiktaht walking alone, her teenaged body full of spring
happiness, and they had raped her and changed her and she had
killed herself.

And her brother had become a
walker-in-the-mountains.

The other self within him, the one which
must be reasoned with and understood, sneered at him and said:
“Rape and suicide are as old as mankind. Besides, that was Charles
Hobuhet’s sister. You are Katsuk.”

He thought then as Katsuk:
Lucretius was
a liar! Science doesn’t liberate man from the terror of the
gods!

Everything around him revealed this
truth—the sun moving across the ridges, the ranges of drifting
clouds, the rank vegetation.

White science had begun with magic and never
moved far from it. Science continually failed to learn from lack of
results. The ancient ways retained their potency. Despite sneers
and calumny, the old ways achieved what the legends said they
would.

His grandmother had been of the Eagle
Phratry. And a bee had spoken to him. He had scrubbed his body with
hemlock twigs until the skin was raw. He had caught his hair in a
headband of red cedar bark. He had eaten only the roots of devil’s
club until the ribs poked from his flesh.

How long had he been walking in these
mountains?

He thought back to all the distance he had
covered: ground so sodden that water oozed up at each step, heavy
branches overhead that shut out the sun, undergrowth so thick he
could see only a few body lengths in any direction. Somewhere, he
had come through a tangled salmonberry thicket to a stream flowing
in a canyon, deep and silent. He had followed that stream upward to
vaporous heights ... upward ... upward. The stream had become a
creek, this creek below him.

This place.

Something real was living in him now.

Abruptly, he sensed all of his dead
ancestors lusting after this living experience. His mind lay
pierced by sudden belief, by unending movement beneath the common
places of life, by an alertness which never varied, night or day.
He knew this bee!

He said: “You are Kwatee, the Changer.”

“And what are you?”

“I am Katsuk.”

“
What
are you?” The question
thundered at him.

He put down terror, thought:
Thunder is
not angry. What frightens animals need not frighten a man. What am
I?

The answer came to him as one of his
ancestors would have known it. He said: “I am one who followed the
ritual with care. I am one who did not really expect to find the
spirit power.”

“Now you know.”

All of his thinking turned over, became as
unsettled as a pool muddied by a big fish.
What do I
know?

The air around him continued full of dappled
sunlight and the noise and spray from the creek. The mushroom-punk
smell of a rotten log filled his nostrils. A stately, swaying leaf
shadow brushed purple across the bee on his hand, withdrew.

He emptied his mind of everything except
what he needed to know from the spirit poised upon his hand. He lay
frozen in the-moment-of-the-bee. Bee was graceful, fat, and funny.
Bee aroused a qualm of restless memories, rendered his senses
abnormally acute. Bee ...

An image of Janiktaht overcame his mind.
Misery filled him right out to the skin. Janiktaht—sixty nights
dead. Sixty nights since she had ended her shame and hopelessness
in the sea.

He had a vision of himself moaning besides
Janiktaht’s open grave, drunk with anguish, the swaying wind of the
forest all through his flesh.

Awareness recoiled. He thought of himself as
he had been once, as a boy heedlessly happy on the beach, following
the tide mark. He remembered a piece of driftwood like a dead hand
outspread on the sand.

Had that been driftwood?

He felt the peril of letting his thoughts
flow. Who knew where they might go? Janiktaht’s image faded,
vanished as though of its own accord. He tried to recall her face.
It fled him through a blurred vision of young hemlocks ... a
moss-floored stand of trees where nine drunken loggers had dragged
her to ... one after another, to ...

Something had happened to flesh which his
mind no longer could contemplate without being scoured out, denuded
of everything except a misshapen object that the ocean had cast up
on a curve of beach where once he had played.

He felt like an old pot, all emotion scraped
out. Everything eluded him except the spirit on the back of his
hand. He thought:

We are like bees, my people—broken into many
pieces, but the pieces remain dangerous.

In that instant, he realized that this
creature on his hand must be much more than Changer—far, far more
than Kwatee.

It is Soul Catcher!

Terror and elation warred within him. This
was the greatest of the spirits. It had only to sting him and he
would be invaded by a terrible thing. He would become the bee of
his people. He would do a terrifying thing, a dangerous thing, a
deadly thing.

Hardly daring to breathe, he waited.

Would Bee never move? Would they remain this
way for all eternity? His mind felt drawn tight, as tense as a bow
pulled to its utmost breaking point. All of his emotions lay closed
up in blackness without inner light or outer light—a sky of
nothingness within him.

He thought:
How strange for a creature so
tiny to exist as such spirit power, to be such spirit power—Soul
Catcher!

One moment there had been no bee on his
flesh. Now, it stood there as though flung into creation by a spray
of sunlight, brushed by leaf shadow, the shape of it across a vein,
darkness of the spirit against dark skin.

A shadow across his being.

He saw Bee with intense clarity: the swollen
abdomen, the stretched gossamer of wings, the pollen dust on the
legs, the barbed arrow of the stinger.

The message of this moment floated through
his awareness, a clear flute sound. If the spirit went away
peacefully, that would signal reprieve. He could return to the
university. Another year, in the week of his twenty-sixth birthday,
he would take his doctorate in anthropology. He would shake off
this terrifying wildness which had invaded him at Janiktaht’s
death. He would become the imitation white man, lost to these
mountains and the needs of his people.

This thought saddened him. If the spirit
left him, it would take both of his souls. Without souls, he would
die. He could not outlast the sorrows which engulfed him.

Slowly, with ancient deliberation, Bee
turned short of his knuckles. It was the movement of an orator
gauging his audience. Faceted eyes included the human in their
focus. Bee’s thorax arched, abdomen tipped, and he knew a surge of
terror in the realization that he had been chosen ...

The stinger slipped casually into his
nerves, drawing his thoughts, inward, inward ...

He heard the message of Tamanawis, the
greatest of spirits, as a drumbeat matching the beat of his heart:
“You must find a white. You must find a total innocent. You must
kill an innocent of the whites. Let your deed fall upon this world.
Let your deed be a single, heavy hand which clutches the heart. The
whites must feel it. They must hear it. An innocent for all of our
innocents.”

Having told him what he must do, Bee took
flight.

His gaze followed the flight, lost it in the
leafery of the vine maple copse far upslope. He sensed then a
procession of ancestral ghosts insatiate in their demands. All of
those who had gone before him remained an unchanging field locked
immovably into his past, a field against which he could see himself
change.

Kill an innocent!

Sorrow and confusion dried his mouth. He
felt parched in his innermost being, withered.

The sun crossing over the high ridge to keep
its appointment with the leaves in the canyon touched his
shoulders, his eyes. He knew he had been tempted and had gone
through a locked door into a region of terrifying power. To hold
this power he would have to come to terms with that other self
inside him. He could be only one person—Katsuk.

He said: “I am Katsuk.”

The words brought calm. Spirits of air and
earth were with him as they had been for his ancestors. He resumed
climbing the slope. His movements aroused a flying squirrel. It
glided from a high limb to a low one far below. He felt the life
all around him then: brown movements hidden in greenery, life
caught suddenly in stop-motion by his presence.