The Purification Ceremony (15 page)

    “He’s right, Mike,” Griff said. “We should get everyone inside.”

    Earl, Lenore, Arnie and Theresa hurried toward the lodge. Phil and Kurant seemed torn between staying and leaving. Sheila looked to safety and then to her husband. “Mike? What are we going to do?”

    Wordlessly Cantrell handed his wife his flashlight. He unwound the cord from the cleat on the stanchion. Griff and Nelson got hold of the rope, too.

    “Wait!” Kurant said. “We should take a picture.”

    Nelson looked like he wanted to clobber the writer. But Kurant insisted: “They’re going to need photographs of the scene, aren’t they? The Mounties, I mean.”

    “This better not end up in some story,” Nelson warned.

    Kurant didn’t answer him. He just ran back to the lodge and returned with his camera. The flash burst three times, throwing long shadows toward the forest.

    At last they let the rope run through the pulley on the crossbeam. The weight on the gambrel descended toward earth. Phil and I laid Grover on his back in the snow. Kurant took another picture. I leaned forward, swallowed, then plucked the white owl feather. I did not destroy it the way I had the raven’s quill in Patterson’s mouth. I wanted it.

    They took Grover by his wrists and ankles and dragged him to the icehouse. They wrapped him in burlap, then laid him on the floor next to the similarly wrapped body of Patterson.

    Cantrell squeezed shut the hasp on the lock to the icehouse and turned to face us. I remember thinking that he appeared to be watching something move at a great distance.

    “We need to fix that radio antenna,” Nelson said.

    The outfitter ignored his guide. He said, more to Sheila than to the rest of us, “I’m sorry.”

    “We’ll go on,” his wife replied firmly. “We always have.”

    Cantrell regarded her lovingly for several seconds.

    “Okay,” he said finally. “Griff, Phil and Nelson, I want you armed. Diana, you and I will carry tools and flashlights. Kurant, you go inside.”

    “No way,” Kurant said.

    “Inside,” Cantrell growled. “Now.”

    Kurant crossed his arms. “Sorry, this is the story now and I intend to be there.”

    Cantrell stepped forward. “The hell you will. You reporters are all alike. You’ll turn it into something worse than it is.”

    “Can it get worse than it is?” Kurant snarled.

    Sheila put her hand on Cantrell’s arm. “He’s right, eh?” she said. “Let him take his photographs. Maybe it will help.”

    “I was just trying to save some of our life from the vultures.”

    “I know.”

    “What are going to do, Cantrell?” Earl demanded for the fifth time in as many minutes.

    “I’m thinking on it,” the outfitter responded.

    We were back in the lodge, had been for close to an hour since inspecting the antenna. The gravity of our situation pressed down on us like some brooding and malignant hand. I kept thinking about the radiophone and how much I wanted to call Emily and Patrick and even Kevin, to tell them I was okay, even if I wasn’t. And yet that world, or what had been my world for so many years, now seemed like one in which I was no longer a welcome resident. I was taut and jumpy and questioning my sanity. Who wouldn’t have? I had been the last person to see Patterson alive and one of the last to see Grover. I couldn’t help asking if I might be the next to go. And the second I did, I understood that was what was going through everybody else’s mind, too. Especially after what we’d found at the antenna tower.

    Nelson had led the way through pines to the bare knob of rock three hundred and fifty yards behind the camp where the transmitter stood. We moved single file, with flashlights blazing. Easy targets. I spent the entire march fighting off the same claustrophobic reaction to being hunted that I’d suffered in the woods near the Dream earlier that day.

    Miraculously, we reached the antenna without incident. Nelson and the others stood guard while Cantrell and I climbed the knob. In the frigid air, the snow had become a driven talcum dust that abraded our exposed flesh. I cast my light on the snow. “He’s been here,” I said. “The one with boots too big for him.”

    “I see ‘em,” Cantrell said grimly. “Those there are Grover’s. He’s been wearing them chain-tread pac boots since Sheila bought ‘em for him a few weeks back.”

    We called the others up. Griff and Nelson went to a green metal box at the rear of the superstructure. I shone the light on the tracks for Kurant, who took a couple of photographs but didn’t know if they’d be sharp because of the snow glare.

    “Sonofabitch!” Griff groaned from around the other side of the tower. “The repeater’s smashed!”

    Cantrell’s flashlight arced up the side of the antenna. “Got the coaxial, too. Cut the whole thing out.’!

    Nelson leaned his head against the tower.

    “What’s going on?” Kurant demanded. “What does that mean?”

    Cantrell’s shoulders sank. “It means they’ve cut us off. We have no way to talk to the outside world until the floatplane comes back on the twenty-sixth.”

    “Cut off!” Kurant cried. “For how long? Don’t you have a cellular phone, anything?”

    Cantrell shook his head. “One of the things we were gonna do after the season. We’re in this alone until the plane returns. Eight days.”

    Which is what Cantrell had to tell the others upon returning to the lodge. As a group, we were used to being alone in the woods, self-reliant, able to tolerate physical and mental hardships. Everyone in the room listened to the outfitter with a stoic expression, but there was an unmistakable odor in the air. The faint, burning-wire scent of panic.

    “Is that all you’re going to say?” Lenore said shrilly. “ ‘I’m thinking on it’?”

    “That’s what I said,” Cantrell snapped.

    “Great,” Lenore announced. “Our leader is frozen, unable to act. Earl, honey, for all your faults, you do know how to assemble facts, see what needs to be done and make a decision. Take over for these rubes.”

    Nelson pointed at Lenore. “You, rich bitch, shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you. No one’s taking over here, least of all some computer twerp and his catalog wife.”

    Lenore couldn’t believe it. “Well… well…” she sputtered. “I guess we know who isn’t going to get a tip on this trip, don’t we?”

    Earl looked at his wife incredulously. “Ahh, stow it for once, will you?”

    For a moment Lenore lost all color, then regained her composure, turned and poured herself a drink. A big drink.

    “How about barricading the doors?” Arnie asked.

    “Barricade?” Phil responded. “You think I’m staying in here for the next eight days, you’re out of your mind. I don’t like being inside.”

    “You’ll be where you’re told to be,” Cantrell said. “The only way we’re going to survive is to stick together.”

    “What about the snowcats?” Butch asked. His ponytail had come undone and his hair hung in his eyes. “Couldn’t we ride out to the nearest town?”

    “The trail’s too narrow heading out,” Cantrell said. “It’s meant for snowmobiles or ATVs.”

    “I saw some snowmobiles in that utility shed,” Butch said.

    “They’re old and town’s eighty-five miles,” Theresa said.

    “There’s nothing closer?” Griff asked.

    She shook her head morosely. “No town for eighty-five miles.”

    Her husband snapped his fingers. “Maybe we don’t need to get to town.”

    Nelson crossed the room to the big aerial photograph and pointed to a blur of gray. “There’s an abandoned logging camp outside the northwest boundary of the estate. I haven’t been there, but I remember someone saying there’s a radiophone.”

    “You’re sure?” Cantrell asked.

    “Yes!” Theresa said, excited now. “I heard old man Metcalfe mention it a couple of times.”

    “Then we go for it,” Griff said.

    “First thing in the morning,” Cantrell said.

    “Thank God,” Sheila said.

    I wasn’t sure who to thank. Griff walked me to my cabin, where I loaded the rifle and set it against the wall. I propped the back of one of the chairs under the door handle and hung an extra blanket over the window to prevent any light from showing outside. I sat in the overstuffed chair facing the deer head. I twirled the owl feather in my fingers and thought of Patrick and Emily. I started to cry, wondering if Kevin would use this time away to turn them against me. I asked myself how our marriage could have gotten so tangled, and I had to admit the knots were fashioned by my hands.

    We were married the summer I graduated with degrees in chemistry and computer engineering. He was already working as a publicist with Krauss. I thrived in my new life, rising quickly at the start-up software company that gave me my first job. Writing computer programs was like setting off into new country; I approached each project as a forest to be scouted and understood. But more important, I was happy in my new self, and by our third anniversary I thought I’d put the hunt, Power, my parents and Mitchell behind me forever.

    We bought a town house in the Back Bay. Saturdays were extended shopping sprees on Newbury Street, dinner and the latest film at the Nickelodeon. Sundays were brunch and lazy days reading the Globe and the Times. At parties during the early years, Kevin liked to tell our friends that I was a wild Maine savage he’d found wandering in the city and tamed. I’d always smile and correct him: “Civilized,” I’d say. We’d both laugh.

    We rarely left Boston except for weeklong vacations to Nantucket and Key West, which, because we usually took holidays at the same time as our urban friends, were for all intents and purposes Boston with a whaling theme and a palm tree, respectively.

    There were moments in these vacation spots, however, usually at sunset, when I would find myself at the water’s edge within earshot of the latest cocktail gathering.

    The waves would froth at my ankles and I’d be taken by an obscure longing to be more alone and yet more involved than I was. Invariably, Kevin would approach at that point and hand me a Sea Breeze and we’d walk together back to the party.

    Patrick was born in the fifth year of our marriage, Emily in the eighth. My children raised in me the idea that I was connected to the future — if no longer to the past — and I adored them for it. Of course, our marriage had suffered the usual pressures that accompany the raising of young children, and by the time of my father’s suicide, we had lapsed into the routine of kids, work and once-a-week sex.

    So perhaps I was ready for the dreams that came to me after my father’s death. My ancestors believed that dreams are windows to the other worlds and that the animals we meet in dreams can tell us of the future, or force us on journeys we are reluctant to take.

    After the dreams began, and after I had chased the buck through the snows of southern Maine, my behavior became more erratic, much to Kevin’s dismay.

    Several times later that winter and into early spring, I slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. I drove the ninety minutes to Maine and entered the woods in the darkness. I got to the point where I could crawl into a thicket from downwind and flash my penlight into a deer’s eyes and revel in its snort and the way it crashed away.

    By late April the forest was heavy with pollen. Tree frogs peeped in a soprano chorus. And the briars at the edges of fields were thick with new growth. One night, under the soothing light of a full moon, I stripped and lay in a deer’s musky bed until dawn came. I listened as the hoots of barred owls irritated roosting male turkeys. The toms raked the dawn with furious gobbles.

    When I arrived home that morning caked in mud, reeking of animal musk, I suggested to Kevin that we send the children off to school and spend the day in bed. He demanded I seek help. I refused, saying there was nothing to be helped. He slept in the guest room after that night.

    Nineteen months after my father’s death, I received some of his forwarded mail. In the package was a letter describing the opening of the Metcalfe Estate. I read the letter a dozen times, especially the passages that described the remoteness of the forests. It called to me in a way I find difficult to explain. Looking back, I believe that my mind demanded a retreat into the chaotic reality of the wilderness, the unconscious, unknown place where the roads end and we begin; otherwise I would surely go mad. The next morning, with no word to Kevin, I took seven thousand dollars out of the savings account and booked the hunt. I took another two thousand for airfare and to outfit myself with the necessary equipment.

    Kevin had our accounts frozen after he discovered the withdrawals.

    “How could you take that kind of money without asking me?” he demanded.

    “I knew you wouldn’t let me have it,” I replied. “And I needed it. You wouldn’t understand.”

    “You could have at least tried,” he said. “Diana, I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”

    I hesitated at his sad expression. “Maybe you don’t, Kevin. Maybe that’s the problem. But before I can tell you who I am, I need to go hunting.”

    “Hunting? That’s what you spent nine thousand dollars on?” he cried. “Absolutely not. I hate hunting. You’ll just have to call them and get the money back.”

    “And if I don’t?”

    Kevin looked at me icily. “Diana, you told me once that if I loved you, I wouldn’t ask you questions about your father. I didn’t want to, but I respected your wishes. Now I’m telling you, if you love me, you’ll get the money back. That’s what it comes down to — do you love me?”

    I twirled the owl’s feather in my hand, admitting that what had once been so clear had turned cloudy. I had loved him once. Now I didn’t know anymore.

    To get my mind off him, I studied the owl’s feather in the gaslight glow. The white down filigreed out from the quill. I raised it and blew. The feather lofted and swirled to my knee. A soft, gentle thing.