The Purification Ceremony (10 page)

    A fawn appeared in the middle of the road, frozen by the oncoming headlights. I slammed on the brakes, expecting her to run. Instead, the young deer peered lovingly at me. For an instant it seemed that she had been waiting for me. Pressure built behind my eyes. My stomach twisted. I lurched from the driver’s seat out into the snow. I vomited.

    I crouched outside the headlight glare, unable to shake the terrible scene that had just unfolded before me on the ridge above the log landing. I’d lain in the snow for several minutes, staring at the base of the tree trunk, unwilling to look skyward again, holding tight to disbelief, holding tight to a vision of the forest as beautifully ordered, not brutally arbitrary like this. And then cutting through the haze was the unreality of the cold blue cast of Patterson’s eyes gazing, unseeing, at me. His expression, even behind the blood that matted his fine blond beard, was at once comical and unbelieving. The young guide had been scalped, gutted and hung from the tree like a deer.

    I knew I had to cut him down, as if taking him from the branches would somehow make what had happened endurable. I went to the tree robotically and searched with my flashlight until I found where the yellow nylon rope had been lashed to a lower branch on the back side of the tree trunk. The knot freed and Patterson’s weight shifted to my arms. The insistent pull of the other end of the rope opened me wholly to the horror, and I heard a moan roll from my chest.

    Patterson settled on his side in the snow, naked from the waist up, bootless. The flesh on his head was raw and bleeding. A stick lodged between the two sides of his rib cage held his chest cavity open. The tail feather of a red hawk had been lodged between his upper front teeth.

    There was an agony and a loneliness and a hatred in the wind around me I had not felt since my mother died. I wrenched the feather free. I threw it in the snow. I kicked at it, hearing Patterson talk of his baby earlier that day, and I kicked at the feather again. I saw Emily and Patrick before me. I wanted to hold them until all of it — the guide, the blood, the flayed flesh — disappeared.

    Then the state of shock that had allowed me to do all this evaporated. Panic embraced me. I’d lurched from the body, grabbed my gun and fell down the hill toward the snowcat, feeling the sickness swell in me.

    The fawn was gone by the time I’d gotten back to my feet. I threw the machine in gear, telling myself if I could get to Griff or the lodge, I’d make it back home to my babies, back to where I belonged, the near past and the long past buried where it belonged.

    No more than a quarter mile down the trail, Griff stepped out of the darkness. He had his hat in his hand. His thick white hair was matted with sweat. He squinted and waved his hat at me when I stopped. I jumped from the cabin and rushed to him sobbing. “Oh, God. Oh, God, Griff, they hung him from a tree…”

    I collapsed, shaking in his arms. He pushed me back. “Who’s hung? What tree?”

    “Patterson. He’s dead…”

    My throat closed. The arms and chest of Griff’s white camouflage suit were smeared with fresh blood. I struggled free of him. I ran.

    Griff was right behind me, calling, “Diana! What the hell…?”

    My fingers closed on the rifle in the passenger seat and I swung the muzzle toward him, thumbing the safety off. “Don’t take another step, Griff. I swear I’ll shoot.”

    The gun trader’s jaw dropped. His hands went up. “Calm down, now. No one’s gonna get shot here, least of all me. I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but…”

    “The blood on you,” I said. “It’s fresh.”

    His attention shifted briefly to his chest, then back to me. He attempted a smile. “Well, I hope so! Just over there is a giant nontypical whitetail that I arrowed about two o’clock this afternoon. It took me hours to drag him out here. Look at me, I’m soaked.”

    I studied him uncertainly. “You could have run to get here. It’s less than three miles from where I found Patterson.”

    “Run?” He chortled. “I’m pushing sixty. Young lady, I don’t run three miles through snow for anything or anyone.”

    I couldn’t reply; I could still smell Patterson.

    Griff lowered his right hand. “Let me get my flashlight. I’ll show you the buck.”

    I hesitated, then said, “Slow.”

    He fished around in his pants pocket, brought out a flashlight and flicked it on, then played it over the ground toward an opening in the brush line. I caught the glint of thick antler. Griff’s bow lay on top of the animal. “Only shot once today,” he said. “You can check the quiver.”

    I engaged the safety. I lowered the gun. “No, I think we should get Cantrell.”

    A half hour later, the outfitter knelt by the body, scratching at his beard, his baseball cap pushed back so it stuck almost straight up in the air. He touched where the rope had been threaded behind the guide’s Achilles tendons. He jerked his hand back as if the rope were razorsharp. “Well, then,” he said, rising from the body and twisting his leather glove violently with both hands. “What do you know about that? What do you know about that?”

    We’d run into Cantrell halfway back to the lodge. We were so late he’d gotten worried and come looking for us. Cantrell blew out his breath several times as if to control himself. At last, he lifted Patterson’s arm. Our flashlight beams crisscrossed on the slender wound in the guide’s lower back. Cantrell’s expression got hard and I knew what he was thinking; a hunting bullet made a small hole entering, then it mushroomed and created a much bigger hole exiting. It killed by impact and shock. This was different.

    Cantrell rolled Patterson over. A similar slit showed just above his right hipbone. Hemorrhage wounds. Patterson had been shot with an arrow. I pointed my gun at Griff.

    “I never left my stand except to track my deer,” he protested.

    Cantrell had a pistol out now. “We’ll be checking on that.”

    “Do it. And quick with the snow falling, or my tracks will be memory,” Griff urged. “Besides, who’s to say it wasn’t you, or you? He was scalped — that’s what Indians do to their enemies, Little Crow. Wasn’t it?”

    “It’s also what white soldiers did to Indian women and children,” I snapped. “Not to mention the soldiers who used our women’s breasts for hats and our boy’s scrotums for change purses!”

    Griff’s lips quivered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… it must be someone from outside.”

    Cantrell had been watching us. “Too far to come in from outside. So I figure it’s still you.”

    “Why?” Griff demanded. “I’ve got nothing against this kid. And if I did want to kill him, why would I hang him in a tree where Diana could find him?”

    “ ‘Cause maybe you wanted her to find him,” Cantrell said. “ ‘Cause maybe you’re a nutcase.”

    Griff retorted, “Just go check my tracks. Check my bow.” “I’ll need all your arrows,” Cantrell said.

    “Done,” Griffin said. He handed the outfitter the quiver. “That’s deer blood, for your information.”

    Cantrell took the quiver. One arrow had dried bubbles of blood on it. I watched every blink, every hand movement, every muscle in Griff’s face as if my life depended on it. Which at that moment it did.

    Cantrell said at last, “I’ll be keeping these a while.”

    Griff nodded, but I could see he wasn’t happy.

    “Mike,” I said, “I want to get out of here. Now.”

    Cantrell chewed on his mustache. “Not till we check those tracks and get our story straight.”

    “What story?” Griff asked. “For Christ’s sake, Patterson’s been murdered, scalped, gutted and hung from a tree.”

    “More to it than that, I’d say,” Cantrell said, his voice rising. “The Mounties investigate killings up here. We don’t tell no one, especially the other clients, till I can radio them in.”

    “Why not?” I demanded.

    “I got two reasons. One: could be one of the other guests, and by telling we found a body, we let ‘em know that we’re watching before the Mounties can fly in. Two: because me and Sheila risked everything to lease this property; if we go back now and tell ‘em without a cop standing there, they’ll panic and there goes our dream.”

    “Or maybe there’s a third reason,” Griff said. “Maybe you killed your guide.”

    Cantrell’s features hardened, but his voice remained steady. “I won’t honor that with a response. My wife’s been through some damn hard times the past ten years because of me. She deserves more than to have it end like this. What’s it gonna be?”

    Griff and I glanced at each other.

    “You don’t have to make your decision ‘cause of me,” Cantrell said. “Do it for Sheila.”

    I hesitated, then said, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Which is more than you’re giving Griff.”

    Griff said, “My conscience is clear. If yours is, you’ll call the Mounties the second we get back to the lodge.”

    “You got my word,” Cantrell said.

    “What about Patterson?” Griff asked. “They’ll notice him missing.”

    “Already figured that out. Last week, when we flew out to get supplies, there was a bad stomach bug in town. Sheila got sicker than a hound after we got back. Three days of fever, puking, the trots. I’m gonna say Patterson got it and is laying low in his cabin so none of the clients get sick. No one’ll go near him.”

    “What took us so long to get into camp?” I asked.

    Cantrell gestured to Griffin’s buck on the back of the snowcat. “Griff and Patterson were tracking that deer when the kid came down sick. Took us a spell to get him and the buck back to the machines. And you couldn’t figure out how to drive it. I came to your rescue.”

    “We’re not leaving his body here,” I said, remembering my father. “There are coyotes.”

    “Wolves, more like it,” Cantrell said. “We’ll get him into the icehouse. We don’t use it this time of year and it’ll keep his body cold until the Mounties can take a look. We’ll wait until morning time to check your area, Mr. Griffin.”

    Two hours later, Arnie was on his feet in the dining room. The pediatrician’s arms and hands mimed a rifle in action. “About noon, two doe stepped out where I could see them, just feeding along, and then a third, but her tail’s out straight and she’s acting real nervous, you know, kind of glancing back at the thick stuff they’d come from.”

    “Buck behind her, my man,” Butch said. The recording-equipment salesman had tied his long hair back in a ponytail. He had a thick gold hoop in his ear I hadn’t noticed before and was wearing a colorful embroidered denim shirt.

    “You know it.” Arnie grinned. “Only the fourth to come by my stand this morning. But the second I see this one, I know he’s a shooter. Long tines. That two-foot spread between the beams. And the size of his body! My old man never would have believed it.”

    Phil bunched up his massive shoulders and shook his shiny black head as if he couldn’t believe his misfortune. “And you saw him first through the binoculars I lent you?”

    Arnie grinned again. “Clear as day, thanks, Philly boy.”

    “Don’t mention it,” he grunted morosely. “Guy comes unprepared. I got to lend him everything. And he shoots the big one. Man, the world’s against me today.”

    “Hey, I said thanks didn’t I?” Arnie protested. “Anyway, I’m getting the gun up on him, praying I don’t miss, and…”

    Dinner was like one of those hallucinations that bubble up during a high fever, discordant and random. I heard the conversation at the table, but my mind jarred under the clash of distant voices and strange, contorted images. Look at them all celebrating their deer, I thought, oblivious to the darkness outside. Or, worse, one of them rejoices in the darkness. I studied each as a psychiatrist would, searching for any hint that one — and I still had not wholly ruled out Cantrell or Griff — was a killer. Griff had acted strange this morning. What was that he’d said to me just before leaving the cat? The woods can be an unforgiving place. And Cantrell. I knew he was a hunter. He’d seen death. But the way he’d come up with that plan to explain away Patterson’s absence — so quick, so cold. The body right there beside him.

    We’d parked at the edge of the lodge grounds and sneaked Patterson into the icehouse before returning to the cats to drive them in with the headlights blazing and Cantrell hitting the air horns. Two huge whitetail bucks hung from a crossbar behind the lodge. We parked in front of the dead animals and made a show of working the iron gambrel into the hocks of Griffs deer before hoisting it up alongside the others.

    The rest of the hunters as well as Sheila, Nelson and Theresa straggled out to see what had taken us so long and to pay their respects to Griff and his deer. Cantrell’s performance was flawless in explaining our late return and Patterson’s sickness. He delivered the story with equal doses of drama and humor. And never blinked.

    Earl Addison acted the tycoon and ordered, “Just keep the kid away from us until he’s done being sick. Last thing I want is a bug when deer like this are being harvested.”

    “Don’t you worry,” the outfitter replied cheerily. “He’s already in his cabin. Sheila will take of him, seeing how she’s already beaten the flu.”

    While Griff’s buck was substantial, it paled in comparison to the deer Arnie and Lenore Addison had shot.

    Arnie’s six-by-six typical appeared to make the Boone & Crockett record book with very few deductions for asymmetrical points. Lenore’s had just missed the book, but was bigger in body than either Arnie’s or Griffs, close to three hundred pounds dressed.

    At the dinner table, Lenore was saying, “You know, Earl, if you’d just shower before each hunt, maybe you’d see a good buck.”

    “I did see one,” Earl said. “He just wouldn’t step out.” She rolled her eyes to the rest of the table.

    “He wouldn’t step out,” Earl insisted.