The Purification Ceremony (13 page)

    “Don’t fall into the trap of having a purpose in the woods, Little Crow,” Mitchell once told me. “Having a purpose says you are making the woods yours, which is foolish. The woods are the woods. What you have to do is find a way to just be in the woods so the woods accept you. When you do, you’ll be like a mirror, reflecting everything around you. You’ll sense worlds that are invisible to most people these days.”

    I was wondering whether I was “just being” when it seized me again, the sensation that I was under observation. I stopped on the back side of the trunk of a big ponderosa. I took up my binoculars and investigated the sidehill. I cradled the gun. My thumb came to the safety.

    I swept the field glasses back and forth, too quick to be of much use. I dropped them to my breast. I closed my eyes to see if I might enter into just being and so better understand where the watcher’s energy was coming from. It took a few moments, then a dull, not-unpleasant throb appeared at the nape of my neck. The throb moved around and up the side of my face. I saw clearly the hillside off to my left. I opened my eyes and turned slowly, looking angularly up the hill through the glasses toward a stand of poplar.

    “Unbelievable,” I said to myself. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

    Two huge animals, their bodies so cylindrical and heavy that their legs appeared stunted. Their necks were one and the same as their shoulders, swollen all the way to the flesh where ears met heads. Unmoving on the hillside. Breath came in pillows from their muzzles, melting like blown fog among the treelike branches of their upswept horns.

    The gun came from its cradle of its own accord; and I had in the scope the high shoulder of the biggest one, the one with the myriad boss of antlers, the one that had just taken two plunging bounds up the hill before turning statue again. I aligned the crosshairs and was squeezing the trigger when I had the sudden, awful thought that maybe these were not the source of my unease.

    A fear unlike any I have ever known came over me then. It was a pressurized thing, steady, unfolding and insistent at the back of my knees and around my shoulder blades. It squeezed my ribs until I thought I had lost the capacity to breathe. I felt surrounded and gnawed at and stranded. I wanted to sprint, to clamber up a tree and hide. I wanted to lie down in the snow and bury myself. I wanted to shoot the rifle, run the bolt and shoot again. At anything that moved. At anything that didn’t.

    For the first time, I knew what it was to be hunted.

    I was pinned so completely in the arms of that thought that I barely noticed the two bucks flag their tails and highstep toward the ridge, puffing as they went. I lowered the gun. I leaned my back against the tree and slid down the bark until I was in the gray-shadowed snow. I stared at the silver trees before me as if they were part of a dream that could teach me something. Which, of course, they could.

    “Dreams and hunting are windows into other worlds,” Mitchell and my father used to say. “They are how we see and respect the lives of our ancestors.”

    I was a girl, but I was the last of our line. It had seemed preordained that I would learn to hunt.

    The process began shortly after my eighth birthday with a series of exercises Mitchell and my father called “my initiation into dirt time.” One or both of them would take me into the woods near our house every few days. We raked away leaves, then poured water on the earth and returned the next day to study the tacks that had been left in the mud. Periodically we would return to see how they changed over time and under the influence of weather and the accumulation of debris. Soon I could tell the age of tracks at a glance.

    Where there were no visible tracks, Mitchell taught me to lie on my belly to see disturbances in the leaves that marked an animal’s passing. “Anything that has Power leaves sign of its passing,” he said. “You just have to learn how to see it.”

    Mitchell showed me how to look at tree trunks to tell where antlers had struck them as the deer and moose went by. My father taught me how to gauge the activity of squirrels and birds for clues to what the larger animals were doing.

    “Everything is connected,” they would say. “What happens out here is like guitar strings vibrating. The smaller the animal, the more the big vibrations move them. Watch the small animals; they tell you what the woods are feeling.”

    Once, after school, Mitchell took me to a swampy place and told me to keep my eye on the edge where the open woods met a bog. The edge where two such different environments met, he said, was where the influence of Power was most easily witnessed. He hid me behind two logs and left, telling me he’d return at dark. I watched for hours, trying to see what he was talking about. I saw chipmunks and squirrels and songbirds, but they seemed to be acting out their own lives. Then it began to drizzle and grow dark. I kept looking for Mitchell to appear, but he didn’t and I became afraid. A band of chickadees filtered into the pines at the edge of the swamp and I suddenly knew that they were being moved by something big. I expected a deer to step out in the twilight behind the birds, but not the bear. It ambled out onto a log, snuffling the air for scent.

    Perhaps it was only my imagination, but the bear seemed electric in the drizzle, and that current pulsed outward until it sheathed me and my vision went telescopic; and all there was, was the bear at the end of a glowing tunnel.

    “He’s a big boar,” Mitchell whispered in my ear and the tunnel collapsed and I nearly screamed from fright. But he had clapped his hand over my mouth before the sound could scare the animal. He hugged me and we watched the bear root for insects until it was too dark to see anymore and we could only hear him. When the animal was gone, we made our way back to the trails that led home. I held his hand and watched his Pall Mall glow hot. When he brought it to his mouth, it cast red iron arcs in the darkness. He told me it was a good sign that the bear had come to me. It showed that I had the potential to have animal allies, that I had the sensitivity to become a Puoin.

    I honestly don’t remember how I reacted to this news. I was only eight and a half and did not know there was anything strange about this. But at the very least, it gave me strength to know that Mitchell believed in me, a young girl.

    Sadly, the encounter with the bear was his last gift to me. He’d been a three-pack-a-day cigarette smoker since his youth and it caught up with him. Within weeks he became too feeble to go with me into the woods. He became this figure on our front porch, rocking in his chair, telling me about the six worlds beyond our yard.

    My parents did not believe in sheltering me from death and I helped care for Mitchell in his last days. Despite the fact that he was proud of my father being a doctor, he despised the idea of a hospital. Mitchell died when I was ten and a half, in our upstairs bedroom with all of us gathered around his bed. For many months afterward, my father did not go to the woods, as if it would be too heartbreaking to endure. I’d find him on the porch staring off. I’d crawl up in his lap and he’d stroke my back.

    “I miss Mitchell,” I’d say. “But sometimes I feel like he’s here.”

    “He is,” my father would reply. “I’m just waiting for him to move off a little so I can breathe.”

    In many ways my father never fully recovered from Mitchell’s death. The man who’d been his anchor was gone. But he knew that his uncle would want him to continue to teach me, so at the end of summer we began again. My father taught me how to be still in the woods for hours until I literally became part of the scene and the forest accepted me and revealed itself. Part of me hated the bugs and the cold and the rain. But then there’d be a moment so miraculous — like the time the two beaver cubs played in the pond I’d been assigned to watch, or the day the grouse stood on my outstretched leg and drummed — that all of the discomfort was forgotten.

    “Is this how Mitchell taught you, too?” I asked one day as we walked home.

    “Yes.”

    “Do most people know this stuff?”

    “They used to, and because of it, they looked at the world as a magical place, which it is,” he replied. “Now they see only themselves. They have no respect for nature or their place in it. They kill without respect or reverence. They feel no shame.”

    In my eleventh year, I began a lengthy study of what my father called “proper woods behavior.” Despite his love of the hunt, he had no illusions about it; he understood there was no real reason to pursue game in the mid-twentieth century. Certainly not to fill our stomachs.

    A trip to the supermarket was more efficient. To my father, the hunt was largely ceremonial, a ritual through which he could reestablish and pay homage to his genetic predatory role as well as to his Micmac and Penobscot roots.

    “The hunt reminds us that all life requires death to sustain itself,” he once told me. “The key is to have an abiding respect for the death that supports you.”

    As such, behavior, my behavior, during the hunt had to be meticulous. I was bound by a code of conduct based on a love of the animal and the forest and myself. Be sure of your quarry. Never shoot unless you believe you can kill cleanly and humanely. Never leave a wounded animal in the woods. Never kill anything you would not eat.

    Sitting there in the snow, I wondered if any of those rules applied now that I was hunted as well as hunter. I did not have an answer, and when Griff came down the hill toward me, I was shivering and hiccuping.

    “This may be more than I can deal with,” I said.

    Griff lifted me up by my elbow and said, “This is no time to give up. We need your tracking skills too much.”

    “Whoever is out here is part of the woods,” I said. “He was watching me just now, but he didn’t disturb the animals. It’s as if they accept him.”

    Griff looked at me strangely. He didn’t understand what I was talking about, but he didn’t want to upset me more than I was. He brushed the snow and bark off my jacket and handed me back my rifle. “Cantrell cut your tracks way up ahead. There’s no others. He’s circling back this way, says we’re losing light and with the storm coming we should head back.”

    “I’m telling you I’m scared,” I said.

    Dusk was upon us when we arrived in the lodge yard. The Mounties I’d prayed to see all the way back were not among the crowd gathered at the meat pole.

    “Where are they, Mike?” I asked, annoyed at the edge in my voice. “You said they’d be here.”

    “Don’t know,” he grumbled.

    “That’s not good enough,” Griff replied.

    “Well, it’s gonna have to be!” He punched the dashboard. “Maybe they couldn’t get in with the winds picking up this way. Maybe they’re already out looking around.”

    When I climbed out from the cab, Arnie was taking pictures of Butch, who was holding the antlers of a big deer.

    “Damn, he’s got to be twenty-four inches between the horns,” Phil was saying.

    “More like twenty-six. Good, good buck, eh?” Nelson replied. “The bases are six inches around. He’ll score up there in the Pope and Young, don’t you worry.”

    “I’m not worried.” Butch grinned. His eyes looked so glassy and happy that I thought for a minute he was stoned. “I got what I came for.”

    “Still more than a week of hunting left,” said Arnie in a delirious manner. “Who knows what will happen?”

    “I still haven’t seen a shooter, or anything close,” Phil complained.

    Nelson patted the wall of Phil’s back. “It’s gonna happen. Rut’s not fully on us yet. Bucks aren’t running wild. You’re in a good spot. Give it time.”

    A couple of feet away, Earl stared at the young deer he had killed. Lenore turned her back on him and walked away.

    Cantrell made a show of congratulating both men, then slipped across the yard toward the lodge. I started toward my cabin, watching as Sheila came out, backlit at the kitchen door, wringing her hands in her apron. She took off her wire-rimmed glasses and worked at them as they fell into a muffled conversation. Her side of it was tense. I thought, Sheila and I need to talk.

    I’d almost made it to my cabin when Kurant caught up to me. He was huffing from running. Icicles hung from the writer’s red mustache, “Any luck today?”

    “That buck’s too smart for me,” I lied. “And the photography?”

    “I had a real nice deer step out and when I tried to snap it, the camera wouldn’t go. Too cold.”

    “I have hand-heaters you might wrap around the camera body,” I said. “I’ll bring them to dinner.”

    “That would be great!” he said cheerfully. He smiled that smile and went off through the snow. I decided that even if he had sneaked in here, he wasn’t such a bad guy. Compared with Earl and Lenore, he was downright pleasant. It is also worth stating, because I’d be less than honest if I didn’t, that at that instant I decided I liked the way he moved. His almost delicate walk made me think of Kevin.

    Looking back, I realize what I had found initially attractive in Kevin Walker was his otherness. We met at a party the spring of my freshman year at MIT. I was lonely; I had not been home or spoken to my father since Katherine died the previous fall. Kevin was a year older, an English major at Harvard, the son of a prominent Boston investment banker. As I’ve said, he had lank blond hair and a long, slender, almost feminine build that allowed him to indulge in fashionable clothes. He boasted to me in our first conversation to have no needs save those of the city.

    “Anything outside Boston or Manhattan is positively camping,” he announced.

    “An asinine statement if there ever was one,” I replied.

    Kevin’s eyebrows shot up. He was so used to women fawning over him because of his GQ looks that any challenge was intriguing.

    “You don’t like the metro scene, then?” he asked.