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hoquat dominion over the primitive world. That one must be kept in the background, suppressed.
How could it be done? The boy's flesh could not be separated from that which gave it life. A spirit
power must be invoked here. Which spirit power? How? Could the man-father be driven away with
his own guilt?
Katsuk thought: My father should come to help me now.
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He tried to call up a vision of his father, but no face came, not even a voice.
Katsuk felt the seeds of panic.
There had been a father. The man had existed. He was back there walking the beaches, fishing,
breeding two children. But he had taken the path of drink and inward rage and a death in the water.
Were the hoquat to blame for that?
Where was his face, his voice? He was Hobuhet, the Riverman, whose people had lived on this land for
twice a thousand years. He had fathered a son.
And Katsuk thought: But I am no longer Charles Hobuhet. I am Katsuk. Bee is my father. I have
been called to do a terrible thing. The spirit I must call upon is Soul Catcher.
Silently, he prayed then, and saw at once how the boy's eyelids blinked, how his attention wandered.
No power stood against Soul Catcher in this wilderness. Once more, Katsuk felt calm. The greatest of
the spirits could not be doubted. The hoquat father had been driven back into the flesh. Only the
Innocent remained.
Katsuk arose and strode off along the slope, hearing the boy follow. There had been no need for words
of command. Soul Catcher had created a wake in the air which drew the boy into it as though he were
caught on a tow line.
Now, Katsuk left the game trail he had been following and struck off through moss-draped hemlocks.
There was a granite ledge up above them somewhere hemming in the river valley. Without ordering his
feet to seek that place, Katsuk knew he could find it.
He came on the first outcroppings within the hour and moved out of the trees, climbing a slope of stunted
huckleberry bushes toward rock shade. The boy followed, panting, pulling himself up by the bushes as
he saw Katsuk doing. They emerged presently on a bald rock and there was the river valley spread out
southward with sweet grass and elk grazing in a meadow.
A string of fat quail stuttered through sun-splashed shadows below him, catching Katsuk's attention.
The quail reminded him of a hunger which he knew his body would feel if it were time for that sensation.
But he sensed no hunger, knowing by this that his flesh had accommodated itself to primitive ways.
The boy had sprawled out on sun-warmed rock. Katsuk wondered if Hoquat felt hunger or denied it.
The lad also was accommodating to primitive ways. But how was he doing it? Was he immersed so
deeply in each moment that only the needs of the moment called out to his senses? The climb had tired
him and thus he rested. That was the correct way. But what else had changed in the hoquat flesh?
Carefully, Katsuk studied his captive. Perspiration had left damp darkness in the hair at the boy's neck.
Stains of brown dirt marked the legs of his trousers. Streaks of mud were drying on his canvas shoes.
Katsuk smelled the boy's sweat, a youthful, musky sweetness in it which called up memories of school
locker rooms. He thought:
It is a fact that the earth which marks us on the surface also leaves its traces within us.
There would come a moment when the boy was tied so firmly to this wilderness that he could not escape
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it. If the link were forged in the right way, innocence maintained, there would be a power in it to
challenge any spirit.
I was marked by his world; now he is marked by mine.
This had become a contest on two levels -- the straightforward capture of a victim and the victim's
desire to escape, but beneath that a wrestling of spirits. The signs of that other contest were all around.
Katsuk looked out across the valley. There was an old forest on the far slope, fire dead, burned silver
hacking the green background into brittle shapes.
The boy turned onto his back, threw a hand across his eyes.
Katsuk said: "We will go now."
"Can't we wait just a minute?" Without removing the hand from his eyes.
Katsuk chuckled. "You think I don't know what you've been doing?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]