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People coming? Katsuk had said it.
The air was cold. He felt an added chill of madness. Katsuk is sick. I could run back to the meadow.
But he might catch me, or shoot me with that arrow.
The sky was dark over the trees downstream. Rain walked on a black line up the river, that hard sky
behind it, clouds crouched over the sunset, the wind floating the leaves, whipping night before it.
Katsuk called from the shelter. "Hurry up. It is going to rain."
Again, Katsuk coughed.
David entered the shelter, smelling raw earth, the damp fungus odors of rot.
Katsuk had a hole dug in one corner. He pulled a small metal drum from it. The lid popped with a rusty
creaking. Katsuk extracted two blankets and a small, tightly wrapped package.
"Fire tinder," Katsuk said, tossing the package to the boy.
Katsuk turned, moved toward the shelter's entrance. David saw that the man was almost staggering.
"You thought to kill me with Cedar sickness," Katsuk said. "I will yet do what I must do. Raven will
give me the power."
* * *
Chief Park Ranger William Redek:
It's cold in there for this time of year, been more snow and rain than usual. Snow line's lower than I can
remember for years. I hear Indian fakirs have a trick for keeping warm without lots of clothes or fire, but
this Hobuhet is a different kind of Indian. Doubt if he knows that trick. If he and that boy are in there,
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they have to be in shelter of some kind, and with fire. That, or they're dead. You lose enough body heat
and that country kills you.
* * *
Katsuk lay on moss between two logs, his mind howling in a fevered nightmare. There was a wood
path, an arrow. The arrow must balance just right. He had found the wood for the arrow in the
avalanche scar of a tall cedar. It had been a trick, all a trick. He held the arrow and the arrow held him.
He led a cortege up the wood path from the most ancient times to the present. His mind was drunk with
all the lives it held.
A spirit shouted in his mind: "The earth does not know who owns it!"
Katsuk groaned.
Delirium moved his feet on the wood path. He sang the names of his dead, but each new name brought
a change in the nightmare. When he sang Janiktaht's name, he saw Hoquat running, hair flying like a
wind-whipped bush.
Another name: Okhoots.
He was in a field embroidered with yellow flowers, a bubbling spring beside the field. He drank at the
spring, but the water failed to slake the dry burning of his throat.
Another name: Grandfather Hobuhet.
He was confronted by wave tops blown white in a gale, a sorrel weaving in green water. A dead whale
rose out of the water, said: "You dare disturb me!"
Another name: Tskuldik.
Father . . . father . . . father!
He called a nameless name in a canyon, was back on the nightmare trail of his ordeal. He heard the
woods' dirge, felt wet bracken at his waist. He was marching upcountry from the hoquat places. There
was a dirty yellow logging rig parked beside the road, heavy green of second-growth fir behind it. Side
roads poked out into the tree wall. Dead snags thrust up through the green.
There was an alder bottom, a stump ranch glimpsed through the bleached-white maze of trunks. He
saw platform notches on old stumps, ragged bark dangling. There was a corrugated culvert with
arsenic-yellow skunk cabbages on one side of a rutted road, water trickling out the other side. He saw
the open scar of a logged-off hillside, a sign: WARNING: UNDERGROUND POWER AND
TELEPHONE CABLES.
As he read the sign, Katsuk felt his mind plunge into a cold river. He saw moss-covered boughs
vibrating in the water. He became one of the boughs.
He thought: I have become a water spirit.
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In his delirium, he screamed for Raven to save him. Raven swam by him under the water, became a fish,
kull t'kope!
Katsuk awoke, trembling with terror. Cramps contorted his body. He felt weak, drained. Dawnlight
glared gray through the shelter's open entrance. Sweat bathed him. He shivered with chill. Blankets had
been tucked around him, but he had thrown them off in his nightmare thrashing.
Painfully, his knees trembling with Cedar sickness, he managed to stand, forced himself to the entrance.
He leaned against a log upright, shivered, half conscious of some ultimate necessity which he could not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]