Soul Catcher (6 page)

He thought:
My name is David. David, not
Hoquat. David-not-Hoquat.

His legs ached. His feet were wet and sore.
He felt that if he could just close his eyes right here he could
sleep standing up. When he blinked, his eyelids felt rough against
his eyes. His left arm was sore where a long red abrasion had been
dragged across his skin by the rough bark of a tree. It had torn
both his jacket and shirt. The madman had cursed him then: a savage
voice out of darkness.

The night had been a cold nightmare in a
black pit of trees. Now he saw morning’s rose vapors on the peaks,
but the nightmare continued.

Katsuk gave a commanding tug on the thong,
studied the boy’s response. Too slow. The fool would kill them both
on that slide.

“What is your name?” Katsuk asked.

The voice was low, defiant: “David
Marshall.”

Without change of expression, Katsuk
delivered a sharp backhand blow to the boy’s cheek, measuring it to
sting but not injure. “What is your name?”

“You
know
my name!”

“Say your name.”

“It’s Dav—” Again, Katsuk struck him. The
boy stared at him, defiant, fighting back tears. Katsuk thought:
No reprieve ... no reprieve ...

“I know what you want me to say,” the boy
muttered. His jaws pulsed with the effort of holding back
tears.

No reprieve.

“Your name,” Katsuk insisted, touching the
knife at his waist. The boy’s eyes followed the movement.

“Hoquat.” It was muttered, almost
unintelligible. “Louder .” The boy opened his mouth, screamed:
“Hoquat!” Katsuk said: “Now, we will climb.”

He turned, went up the shale slope. He
placed each foot with care: now on a flat slab jutting from the
slide, now on a sloping buttress which seemed anchored in the
mountain. Once, a rock shifted under his testing foot. Pebbles
bounded down into the trees while he waited, poised to jump if the
slope went. The rocks remained in place, but he sensed the
trembling uncertainty of the whole structure. Cautiously, he went
on up.

At the beginning of the climb, he watched to
see that

Hoquat made each step correctly, found the
boy occupied with bent-head concentration, step for step, a precise
imitation.

Good.

Katsuk concentrated on his own climbing
then.

At the top, he grasped a willow bough,
pulled them both into the shelter of the trees.

In the shaded yellow silence there, Katsuk
allowed the oil-smooth flow of elation to fill him. He had done
this thing! He had taken the Innocent and was safe for the moment.
He had all the survival seasons before him: the season of the
midge, of the cattail flowering, of salal ripening, of
salmonberries, the season of grubs and ants—a season for each
food.

Finally, there would be a season for the
vision he must dream before he could leave the Innocent’s flesh to
be swallowed by the spirits underground.

Hoquat had collapsed to the ground once
more, unaware of what waited him.

Abruptly, a thunderous flapping of wings
brought Katsuk whirling to the left. The boy sat up, trembling.
Katsuk peered upward between the willow branches at a flight of
ravens. They circled the lower slopes, then climbed into the
sunlight. Katsuk’s gaze followed the birds as they swam in the sky
sea. A smile of satisfaction curved his lips.

An omen! Surely an omen!

Deerflies sang in the shadows behind him. He
heard water dripping at the spring. Katsuk turned.

At the sound of the ravens, the boy had
retreated into the tree shadows as far as the thong would allow. He
sat there now, staring at Katsuk, and his forehead and hair caught
the first sunlight in the gloom like a trout flashing in a
pool.

The Innocent must be hidden before the
searchers took to the sky, Katsuk thought. He pushed past the boy,
found the game trail which his people had known here for
centuries.

“Come,” he said, tugging at the thong.

Katsuk felt the boy get up and follow.

At the rock pool where the spring bubbled
from the cliff, Katsuk dropped the thong, stretched out, and buried
his face in the cold water. He drank deeply.

The boy sprawled beside him, would have
pitched head foremost into the pool if Katsuk had not caught
him.

“Thirsty,” Hoquat whispered.

“Then drink.”

Katsuk held the boy’s shoulder while he
drank. Hoquat gasped and sputtered, coming up at last with his face
and blond hair dripping.

“We will go into the cave now,” Katsuk
said.

The cave was a pyramidal black hole above
the pool, its entrance hidden from the sky by a mossy overhang
which dripped condensation. Katsuk studied the cave mouth a moment
for sign that an animal might be occupying it, saw no sign. He
tugged at the thong, led Hoquat up the rock ledge beside the pool
and into the cave.

“I smell something,” the boy said.

Katsuk sniffed: There were many old
odors—animal dung, fur, fungus. All of them were old. Bear denned
here because it was dry, but none had been here for at least a
year.

“Bear den last year,” he said.

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the
gloom, found a rock spur too high up on the cave’s wall for the boy
to reach with his tied hands, secured the end of the thong on the
spur.

The boy stood with his back against the rock
wall. His gaze followed every move Katsuk made. Katsuk wondered
what he was thinking. The eyes appeared feverish in their
intensity.

Katsuk said: “We will rest here today. There
is no one to hear you if you shout. But if you shout, I will kill
you. I will kill you at the first outcry. You must learn to obey me
completely. You must learn to depend on me for your life. Is that
understood?”

The boy stared at him, unmoving, unspeaking.
Katsuk gripped the boy’s chin, peered into his eyes, met rage and
defiance. “Your name is Hoquat,” Katsuk said. The boy jerked his
chin free.

Katsuk put a finger gently on the red mark
on Hoquat’s cheek from the two blows at the rockslide. Speaking
softly, he said: “Do not make me strike you again. We should not
have that between us.”

The boy blinked. Tears formed in the corners
of his eyes, but he shook them out with an angry gesture.

Still in that soft voice, Katsuk said:
“Answer to your name when I ask you. What is your name now?”

“Hoquat.” Sullen, but clear.

“Good.”

Katsuk went to the cave mouth, paused there
to let his senses test the area. Shadows were shortening at the end
of the notch as the sun climbed higher. Bright yellow skunk
cabbages poked from the shadowed water at the lower end of the
spring pool.

It bothered him that he had struck Hoquat,
although strong body-talk had been required then.

Do I pity Hoquat?
he wondered.
Why
pity anyone?

But the boy had showed surprising strength.
He had spirit in him. Hoquat was not a whiner. He was not a coward.
His innocence lay within a real person whose center of being
remained yet unformed but was gaining power. It would be easy to
admire this Innocent.

Must I admire the victim?
Katsuk
wondered.

That would make this thing all the more
difficult. Perhaps it would occur, though, as a special test of
Katsuk’s purpose. One did not slay an innocent out of casual whim.
One who wore the mantle of Soul Catcher dared not do a wrong thing.
If it were done, it must fit the demands of the spirit world.

Still, it would be a heavy burden to kill
someone you admired. Too heavy a burden? Without the need for
immediate decision, he could not say. This was not an issue he
wanted to confront.

Again, he wondered:
Why was I chosen for
this?

Had it occurred in a way similar to the way
he had chosen Hoquat? Out of what mysterious necessities did the
spirit world act? Had the behavior of the white world become at
last too much to bear? Certainly that must be the answer.

He felt that he should call out from the
cave mouth where he stood, shouting in a voice that could be heard
all the way to the ocean:

“
You down there! See what you have done
to us!”

He stood lost in reverie and wondered
presently if he might have shouted. But the hoard of life all
around gave no sign of disturbance.

If I admire Hoquat,
he thought,
I
must do it only to strengthen my decision.

***

From the speech Katsuk made to his
people:

Bear, wolf, raven, eagle—these were my
ancestors. They were men in those days. That’s how it was. It
really was. They celebrated when they felt happy about the life
within them. They cried when they were sad. Sometimes, they sang.
Before the hoquat killed us, our songs told it all. I have heard
those songs and seen the carvings which tell the old stories. But
carvings cannot talk or sing. They just sit there, their eyes
staring and dead. Like the dead, they will be eaten by the
earth.

***

David shuddered with aversion to his
surroundings. The gray-green gloom of the cave, the wet smoothness
of rock walls at the sunlit mouth which his thong leash would not
permit him to reach, the animal odors, the dance of dripping water
outside—all tormented him.

He was a battleground of emotions: something
near hysteria compounded of hunger, dread, shuddering uncertainty,
fatigue, rage.

Katsuk came back into the cave, a black
silhouette against sunlight. He wore the Russell knife at his
waist, one hand on the handle.

My knife,
David thought. He began to
tremble.

“You are not sleeping,” Katsuk said.

No answer.

“You have questions?” Katsuk asked.

“Why?” David whispered.

Katsuk nodded but remained silent.

The boy said: “You’re holding me for ransom,
is that it?”

Katsuk shook his head. “Ransom? Do you think
I could ransom you for an entire world?”

The boy shook his head, not
understanding.

“Perhaps I could ransom you for an end to
all hoquat mistakes,” Katsuk said.

“What’re you …”

“Ahhh, you wonder if I’m crazy. Drunk,
maybe. Crazy, drunken Indian. You see, I know all the cliches.”

“I just asked why.” Voice low.

“I’m an ignorant, incompetent savage, that’s
why. If I have a string of degrees after my name, that must be an
accident. Or I probably have white blood in me, eh? Hoquat blood?
But I drink too much. I’m lazy. I don’t like to work and be
industrious. Have I missed anything? Any other cliches? Oh, yes—I’m
bloodthirsty, too.”

“But I just—”

“You wonder about ransom. I think you have
made all the mistakes a hoquat should be permitted.”

“Are you ... crazy?”

Katsuk chuckled. “Maybe, just a little.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Barely
whispered.

“Go to sleep and don’t ask stupid
questions.” He indicated the cave floor, clumps of dry moss which
could be kicked into a bed.

The boy took a quavering breath. “I don’t
want to sleep.”

“You will obey me.” Katsuk pointed to the
floor, kicked some of the moss into position at the boy’s feet.

Every movement a signal of defiance, Hoquat
knelt, rolled onto his side, his tied hands pressed against the
rock wall of the cave. His eyes remained open, glaring up at
Katsuk.

“Close your eyes.”

“I can’t.” Katsuk noted the fatigue signs,
the trembling, the glazed eyes. “Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t.”

“Why?”

“Are you going to kill me?” Stronger that
time.

Katsuk shook his head.

“Why are you doing this to me?” the boy
demanded.

“Doing what?”

“Kidnapping me, treating me like this.”

“Treating you like what?”

“You know!”

“But you have received ordinary treatment
for
an Indian
. Have our hands not been tied? Have we not
been dragged where we would rather not go? Have we not been
brutalised and forced to take names we did not want?”

“But why me?”

“Ahhhh, why you! The cry of innocence from
every age.”

Katsuk pressed his eyes tightly closed. His
mind felt damned with evil sensations. He opened his eyes, knew he
had become that
other person
, the one who used Charles
Hobuhet’s education and experiences, but with a brain working in a
different way. Ancient instincts pulsed in his flesh.

“What’d I ever do to you?” the boy asked.
“Precisely,” Katsuk said. “You have done nothing to me. That is why
I chose you.”

“You talk crazy!”

“You think I have caught the hoquat disease,
eh? You think I have only words, that I must find words to pin down
what cannot be cut into word shapes. Your mouth bites at the
universe. You give tongue to noises. I do not do that. I send
another kind of message. I draw a design upon the emotions. My
design will rise up inside people where they have no defenses. They
will not be able to shut their ears and deny they heard me. I tell
you, they will hear Katsuk!”

“You’re crazy!”

“It is odd,” Katsuk mused. “You may be one
of the few people in the world who will not hear me.”

“You’re crazy! You’re crazy!”

“Perhaps that’s it. Yes. Now, go to
sleep.”

“You haven’t told me why you’re doing
this.”

“I want your world to understand something.
That an innocent from your people can die just as other innocents
have died.”

The boy went pale, his mouth in a rigid
grimace. He whispered: “You’re going to kill me.”

“Perhaps not,” Katsuk lied. “You must
remember that the gift of words is the gift of illusion.”

“But you said ...”

“I say this to you, Hoquat: Your world will
feel my message in its balls! If you do as I tell you, all will go
well with you.”

“You’re lying!”