The Purification Ceremony (34 page)

    “Woman, where the hell do you think you’re going, looking like that?” he demanded.

    “Hunting,” I said, pushing by him. The lights in the great room had been dimmed. The fire in the hearth had gone to coals. Theresa slept on one of the couches under a red-and-black wool blanket. A shotgun lay on the floor beside her. Lenore was curled up in a chair across from her. Nelson paced on the landing before the shattered stained-glass window, a rifle held at port arms.

    Kurant sat one floor below, studying through the window the broad oval of light that banished the darkness of the lodge yard. Arnie was tending to Earl, who seemed to have taken a turn for the worse in the hours since I’d left the lodge; the tycoon was shifting and groaning on the bed in the corner. Griff was nowhere to be seen.

    “What d’you mean, hunting?” Phil snapped. “We all took a vote. None of us are leaving this room until the plane comes. Round-the-clock watches. We all make it or none of us do.”

    “I don’t know if the plane is coming any time soon,” I said. “The ice is too thick and broken up around the dock. They’re going to have to wait until a smooth section freezes, or they’re going to have to come in after us by land, which could take days. So you die your way, Phil. I’ll die mine.”

    I kept moving as I talked, padding by Theresa and Lenore into the dining room, where I pulled up a chair and was standing on it when Griff came out of the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches. He saw Phil first and then me and then Metcalf’s bow and the quiver of cedar arrows which I now had in my hands.

    “Diana, I hope you’re not thinking of — ”

    But I was already down off the chair, moving toward the door to the great room. “The only chance to stop him is to go after him alone,” I said.

    Griff put the coffee and sandwiches on the table and ran after me. He caught me as I was about to go out the front door.

    “You can’t do this,” he said.

    “I have to do this,” I said sadly.

    “Give me one good reason.”

    I thought for a moment about telling him everything, then decided he couldn’t possibly understand all of it, so I gave him the piece of it he could grasp: “I was taught as a child never to leave a wounded animal in the woods.

    

    

    IN THE LEGENDS I remember from childhood, the shaman encounters Power after becoming lost deep in the forest. One story in particular accompanied me as I walked east toward the dawn. It was the tale of a young boy who wanted to run away from his cruel older brother. He loses himself to his former life by shooting his arrow into the woods and running as fast as he can to catch it before it falls to the ground. His mind is on each flight of the arrow, not the familiar world of home and parents. Soon he finds himself in alien terrain, disoriented, relying on his senses to survive.

    I walked far out along the logging roads toward that eastern quadrant of the estate where Ryan seemed most comfortable. I drew one of the six cedar arrows from the quiver on my back, spun myself in circles, then loosed the arrow into the stillest, darkest moments of the night. As soon as I let the arrow go, I ran after it.

    The snow under the new snow, the snow that had been wet yesterday, had frozen to create a firm, even floor beneath my feet. I ran without fear of being tripped by an unseen log or stump or rock; they had been buried, changed by the Power of the storm.

    The blizzard weakened and finally stopped. And the clouds broke overhead and the darkness around me gave way to the light of the waning moon.

    I told myself as I ran after my arrow that Ryan had embraced the chaos of the forest of the mind. To kill him, I would have to do the same. Ryan believed he was a Mara’akame. To survive the final clash certain to come, I, despite all my education and training in the visible world, would have to become a Puoin, the last of a line of Micmac shamans that stretched back through my father to my greatuncle and his mother beyond to the old ones who once had lived in the forests of Nova Scotia.

    I ran until I felt the first pangs of uncertainty and fear that well up in the understanding that you are lost.

    I slowed, sweating, letting my eyes roam in the forest heart, casting back and forth through the dimness to catalog the weird relief of gray-and-black gnarled shapes against the snowpack. My mind played games with me.

    The black triangle off to my right, probably a chunk of unexposed rock, became the face of the alpha-bitch wolf, intent on revenging her lost eye. A mosaic of thin dark lines — a branch? Two saplings intertwined? — became Ryan’s arms supporting bow and arrow.

    The evidence was mounting; I could not trust anything I could sense here in the ordinary meaning of the word. So I closed my eyes and repeated the sequence of memory and rhythmic breathing I had followed the evening before. Soon I could feel my heart beating outward, striking objects and reflecting back to me the energies within the predawn.

    I opened my eyes and crept through the gloom, all the while continuing to probe the mutating shapes around me with my heart. A deer browsed into the wind on the bench above me. Two more steps and she caught my scent, snorted and bounded away. At dawn I sensed a ponderous force buried under the snow in a thicket of pine and knew a bear slept there. A half mile more and the sun cleared the ridges on the other side of the Dream, sending brilliant shafts of light and Power through the woods.

    Above me and to my left, hidden in the boughs of a majestic ponderosa, I felt a small, troubled being that had the peculiar ability to look at the world both as vast landscapes and as specific blades of grass. The young crow cawed loudly as it left the tree. And, for a moment, I closed my eyes and left with it, soaring on an updraft until I looked down upon the forest as I had eight days ago in the floatplane.

    When I opened my eyes again, I was frightened to see that even though the sun still shone magnificent and bright, what appeared to be a fine crystalline snow filled the air. I raised my face to the crackling blue-and-white mist, expecting brief cold stings. Instead, my cheeks, nose, mouth and eyelashes were caressed as if by warm feathers. There was a grain in the pattern of this precipitation; it seemed to run, then break around and over invisible objects, and then retract almost the way a waxing tide will inhale and exhale boulders on the seashore. And yet I could still see clearly through the feather snow to the sunlit trees and the drifts over boulders and the crow that had circled back into the glen, heading for its rookery. The crow flapped and glided in on the current of the feather snow as a kayaker would. I realized in awe that I was seeing as the crow saw, that for the first time in the nightmare, I had an ally.

    When the warm crystals passed by my body, they blew outward and swirled. Standing still, I created an eddy in the current of the feather snow. I took a step. The swirl expanded, a minor wave in front of me. Ahead some hundred yards, there appeared the suggestion of a swell in the pattern of the snowfall. There was no wind, and I watched the swell grow before a doe and a fawn stepped out.

    This is what it’s like to lose your mind.

    For much of the morning I crept through the forest, the bow in my left hand, an arrow in my right, teaching myself to interpret the billows and wafts that appeared in the grain of the snowfall much the way I had learned to track deer so many years before. An animal’s passage would be preceded by a bulge in the pattern. If the animal stood still, the ripples were smaller. Birds in flight caused the ripples to curve.

    Near midday I believed I was beginning to understand the limits and permutations of my madness, that I could navigate in this world and, when my task was finished, leave it behind. We cling to such fallacies in times of crisis out of ignorance. And yet it is only during times of crisis, under increasing levels of stress, that we strip away the veils that separate us from deeper levels of existence, selfknowledge and pain.

    My wanderings had taken me along a shelf above one of the small clear-cuts that dotted this part of the estate. Suddenly, I was confused to notice, at the far left of my peripheral vision, the feather snow not bulging, but being sucked away suddenly as if by a tremendous vacuum. I turned and stared at the phenomenon, at the way the snow now spun inward and retreated like a whirlpool.

    Then I sensed a rapid reversal in the maelstrom and a hot, piercing energy flew straight at me from the center of the cone.

    It was like one of those times when you touch something terribly hot and you react by pulling away your finger even though you have not yet experienced the hurt. I dove forward and down, hitting snow even as I heard the smack of the arrow striking soft wood above me.

    I rolled over twice and got up tight behind a blowdown tree. Ryan was here, close enough to shoot at me. I nocked an arrow onto the bowstring and brought the whole contraption into a position where I could draw fast and release.

    Ryan must have taken the way I dove forward as sign of a hit. For he came close to giving me the perfect shot; when I caught sight of him, he was sprinting diagonally through logging slash at about forty yards. The gray wolf’s cape fluttered behind him. He was trying to get above me to see whether I was down for good.

    There was an opening in the brush about fifteen feet ahead of the religion professor, and I drew and swung the arrow at the opening and released a fraction of a second before he entered my line of fire.

    Admittedly, my experience with a bow was limited; as a girl, I’d learned the art at summer camps and continued in my backyard on a target Mitchell built for me out of hay bales. And I had hunted for two seasons with a recurve, but had never taken a shot at an animal because I wasn’t sure of the distance.

    Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that the release was good and the arrow flew true. But in the middle of a full sprint, Ryan changed direction by a few degrees of angle and made a flicking motion with his left hand, his bow hand, even as he crashed to the ground and rolled from my sight. My arrow clattered harmlessly into the saplings beyond him.

    A sickening feeling came over me. It was one thing for me to have ducked at some extrasensory warning I did not fully understand. It was quite another to have such a high degree of awareness that redirecting a speeding arrow was part of your Power. I was not up to this challenge. My mind turned hazy with the thought that sooner or later today I would die.

    But before that thought could hamstring my will, I heard a guttural whine on the flank opposite Ryan. The feather snow there bulged, the swell becoming tubular just before she stepped into view. A thick crust of blackened blood had formed over her left eye. The flesh below it was pink and worried free of fur. She cocked her head in my direction, slunk forward two steps and growled.

    Then I sensed Ryan sneaking through the slash to my left, both of them pinching toward me, sure that the steep rock face at my back would prevent me from fleeing. My throat constricted and I fought against the squeezing off of breath that seemed to slow the flow of the feather snow around me.

    I felt, but never saw, the crow pass over the opening. I only knew that I was suddenly certain of all of the features of the landscape around me, and just as certain of my escape route.

    About twenty yards to my left, hidden by a curve in the shelf on which I hid, was a steep-banked old streambed that cut down-ridge. I drew, raised up and fired an arrow at the wolf. It crashed into the dry deadwood right beside her. She turned tail at the racket and loped into the thicket. She was not frightened. She would merely try another angle of attack.

    But I was already up and dashing toward the streambed. It looked like a ten foot-wide frozen staircase, in places denuded of vegetation, in others choked with shoulder-high cedars. The streambed went straight up for twenty yards, then began a snake dance of curves to a spring at the ridge top. The footing was good and I bounded up the stairs, anticipating the curves and the openings in the cedars even before I saw them.

    I had gained about four hundred vertical feet in elevation before I felt Ryan and his ally below and behind me in the streambed. Accelerating, I burst through several openings and over a series of downed logs before flashing on the crow’s perspective again.

    The streambed changed course just ahead of me. The bank rose sharply on the left side. There were downed tamaracks there in which I could hide and shoot. A place of Power. An ambush.

    What followed seemed to unfold in slow motion.

    Long before I saw her, the feather snow emanating from the cedar jungle below me jetted and swirled. I craned my head forward, waiting. The snow swirled again.

    And then I heard the snarl and snapped my head over my shoulder upstream to the opposite bank. She had circled me! In one leap, the wolf carried herself over and down and halfway across the stream. I could not turn to get the shot. I was trapped.

    In a low crouch she came up the bank, wary, her shoulder blades popping with controlled effort. She bared her teeth and flicked her tongue even as I made a futile effort to get myself turned around with the bow, even as I knew it was over.

    There are moments in a life that are inexplicable. This was one of mine. In the streambed below me, exactly where the feather snow had swirled moments before, a tenpoint buck stepped from the cedars and paused in the opening. Flecks of bright, frothy blood, lung blood, shone at his muzzle. I do not know if Ryan had shot the animal as he’d followed me up the streambed and that was what had caused the bizarre patterns in the feather snow prior to the wolf appearing. Perhaps it was just the energy being given off by a wounded animal fighting for its life. I do not know.

    I only know that the buck was there and that I believe it was the oxygen-saturated scent of his lung blood that saved me; the Power of the liquid life force draining from the deer seemed to sever whatever hold Ryan had on the wolf. She stopped cold in her tracks and responded to an instinct ingrained over thousands of generations. She turned her head so the blind eye faced me and sniffed the air. Sinking inside herself, she made ready her attack and took two catlike steps toward the deer.