The Purification Ceremony (18 page)

    They skirted the edge of the slash to reach the rear of the closest of the outbuildings. The wind blew due out of the north, directly in my face. I squinted while they crept along the south side of the building, where there was very little snow.

    Arnie slid up behind Cantrell. Even from one hundred and fifty yards away I could see the pediatrician’s rifle shake as the outfitter drew a pistol, hesitated, then bolted toward the Quonset hut, only to bog down in drifts of windblown snow. He foundered, but managed to keep his feet under him and made it to the stoop and the door. Griff followed. Arnie was last. There was a moment of indecision at the door; then they all disappeared inside, leaving me alone in the storm.

    Isolation can be a fortifying or dispiriting experience. My parents enjoyed the former; they always returned from the woods invigorated. But kneeling in the snow behind the boulder, I felt submerged in my own powerlessness. I couldn’t shake the overwhelming sense that something was wrong here. I kept looking over my shoulder and up into the trees, craning my head in every direction, then forced myself to stop. What good would worry do? My father used to say that death springs from every angle of the compass; the key to living is to remain calm at the center.

    The door to the Quonset hut crashed open.

    Arnie tore headlong off the porch into the snow, stumbled, tried to rise and stumbled again. I swung my rifle toward Arnie, then the door, then back to Arnie. The powder snow clung to his eyebrows and around his nostrils. His mouth, pinked by the wet snow, arched open. He tried to scream, but made no noise.

    I was up and running, foolishly trying to zigzag across the clearing. But after fifty yards in that white quicksand, I was too tired to do anything but plow on in a straight line, exposed, vulnerable. By the time I reached the Quonset hut, Arnie had dragged himself over next to the storage shed, where he cowered.

    I went up the front steps slowly, then ducked into the murky interior with the gun before me. It was colder inside than out. Breath came like clouds from Griff and Cantrell, floated and disappeared in the rafters. The outfitter slouched on a broken couch. His eyes were closed. His pistol was tossed beside him. Griff was on the floor, his back to the wall, his head in his hands.

    There was a third man inside, a man with a splotchy gray beard looking at me with open, filmy eyes. He was rocked back on his knees in the far corner, hands gripping the vanes and nock of a cedar arrow which showed at his throat. The broadhead was lodged behind his neck in the wall. Hoar coated his skin. Made him perfectly white. Except for the dull red crystals frozen in a downward stream from the corners of his lips.

    I was unable to let my attention wander from the dead man, unable even to shiver. It occurred to me that if my children were to know what I was facing at this moment, they would never sleep again. I suppose this is the terror we all eventually confront.

    With luck, it does not occur until we are past caring. What frightened me more than the dead man was the fact that I was nowhere near as horrified as I’d been finding Patterson and Grover. Was I approaching the point of being past caring?

    “Who is he?” I asked weakly.

    Cantrell didn’t open his eyes. “Must be Pawlett, the trapper that Barney, the floatplane pilot, said was missing.”

    “How long’s he been like that?”

    “Cold as it is, two, maybe three weeks.”

    “Radiophone?”

    “Smashed. Looks like he was going for it when they caught up to him.”

    Griff picked his head up. He’d aged in the past half hour. “We don’t know if it was them. I mean, he’s not scalped. And there’s no feather in his mouth.”

    “Because he’s not a hunter, not one of us,” I said. I told them the theory that Kurant and I had come up with earlier that morning. “I think this guy may have just gotten in the way.”

    Cantrell rubbed his sleeve along his beard. “Then they’ve been in here, in the forest here, for a long time, planning this.”

    “Not planning,” I said. “Scouting.”

    I regretted saying that the moment the words passed my lips. The idea that two, maybe more, people had been roaming the woods looking for places they might kill us was as debilitating a thought as I’d ever had.

    A floorboard grumbled behind me. Cantrell lunged for his pistol. Griff scrambled to stand. I spun, my gun rising toward the silhouetted figure in the doorway. Arnie dropped his rifle on the stoop and threw his hands up.

    “Don’t shoot! Jesus, don’t!”

    My throat choked with heat. And I knew I wasn’t past caring. Not yet anyway. I let down my rifle. “Don’t ever do that again, Doctor,” I whispered.

    Arnie didn’t move for a second. He blinked several times, groping at control. He stared down at his pants. “I pissed myself,” he said meekly.

    I saw his humiliation and said, “Who wouldn’t with three guns pointing at them?”

    The pediatrician attempted a weak smile. “I want to go back. We’re going back, right?’:

    “Soon,” Cantrell said.

    “It will be dark in a couple of hours,” Arnie said.

    “I know,” Cantrell said.

    “But…”

    “Soon.”

    “What about him?” Griff asked, gesturing toward Pawlett.

    “Leave him,” Cantrell said. “We’ve got nowhere to put him and I don’t think he minds.”

    “I mind,” Griff said. He walked over to the trapper and, grimacing, reached behind Pawlett’s head to take hold of the arrow shaft below the broadhead. Griff gave a tremendous tug that freed the steel from the wood. He put Pawlett, still in that praying position, on his side. “There a blanket or a tarp or something we can cover him with?”

    Cantrell looked around, then headed off toward a door in the corner. Without prompting, we all followed.

    In the kitchen, rancid grease coated the cast-iron skillet on the cookstove. Griff tugged on a heavy door across from the sink. The carcass of a spike buck stripped of meat hung from a rafter inside the cold-storage locker.

    “They were living here for a while if they ate all of that,” Griff said.

    Cantrell knelt, reached into the corner beyond the deer and brought out what looked like a dog’s leg. He studied it, his nostrils flaring. “Timber wolf,” he said. “Gray phase.”

    Without another word, Cantrell tossed the leg back inside the locker. He went out into the main room and crossed to a latched door next to the entryway. I was right behind him. The others lagged. Narrow beams of light, barely enough to let us know this was the bunkroom, shone through canvas that had been nailed about the window frames.

    In the darkness I kicked something. It fell and there was a flash of phosphorescent light and a ringing explosion. I dove to the ground expecting more gunfire, frantically trying to get my safety off and figure out where it had come from. Now Arnie and Griff were shouting outside the door. I boxed at my ears, trying to get the ringing to stop. We lay there for what seemed a long time.

    “Diana, you all right?” Cantrell whispered at last.

    “Yes; you?”

    “Still breathing. Where is he?”

    “I don’t know. I couldn’t see where the shot came from.” Behind me, the door cracked open and I cringed. A shaft of light cut into the room. Cantrell squirmed forward on his belly to get behind a bunk bed. I was scrambling back into the shadows when I saw what it was that I’d kicked: a lever-action rifle still smoking from discharge.

    “It’s all right,” I called to Cantrell. I pointed at the gun. He shut his eyes. “I thought I was a goner.”

    I yelled to Griff and Arnie. “C’mon, I kicked over a loaded gun.”

    Griff had a flashlight in his hand. Arnie came in behind him, pale and shaking. “I want to go,” he said. “Right now.”

    Griff patted him on the shoulder. “Let me get a blanket and we’re out of here.”

    Griff stepped inside. He cast the beam around the room. He found a blanket on the nearest bunk and went out. I had Arnie train his flashlight on the gun, a model 94 with a chipped stock and faded bluing. And next to it, a pack stained with tobacco juice and other grimes. There was little in the pack: a mess kit, a knife, .30-.30 shells, some jerky, dried fruit and a rain poncho.

    “Probably Pawlett’s,” I said.

    “Why would he leave his gun in here?” Arnie asked, gripping his own rifle a little tighter.

    “I don’t know,” I said. I took the flashlight from Arnie and shone it deep into the room. The dust had been disturbed back there and I walked over to a heavy oak table against the wall. Several pools of white candle wax caked the tabletop. And between them, quivering in the wind blowing through the open door, were bits of bird down.

    “It’s them, all right,” I said. I squinted at a chunk of something black lying on the table against the wall.

    I set my gun against the table and reached out to it, immediately recoiling at the thin, soft bristle that brushed my palm. I turned with realization and, choking, I elbowed my way past Cantrell and Arnie. I ran now toward the kitchen, holding my hand before me as if I’d burned it on hot embers. The hand pump in the sink was rusty and it shrieked when I worked it, even after the icy water erupted over my skin.

    Griff found me there. My hand was turning a purplish color from the frigid bath and the scrubbing I was giving it with the coarse dishcloth. He took the cloth and drew me away from the sink. My knees threatened to buckle and he grabbed me.

    “That was human hair, a scalp… ” I whimpered.

    “I know,” Griff said. “There was blood on the table, too.”

    The implication set in and I held tighter to him and closed my eyes. I wanted to be anywhere but British Columbia. I wanted to be home, normal, listening to Kevin prattle about his latest publishing coup.

    “Hour of daylight left,” Cantrell called grimly. “Better we start hoofing for the snowmobiles or we’ll get caught out here.”

    They say time accelerates in the presence of danger, but for me the opposite was true; the three-hour trip back to the Metcalfe Estate plodded. I could not shake the sensation of the hair and dried flesh against my skin. It had awakened something in me, something I didn’t know I could feel. I knew that no matter what happened, I would not allow myself to be disfigured like that. It was that realization that made me understand for the first time that I might have to kill a human to survive this ordeal. I wondered if I could.

    The creeping effect of this confrontation was a winding of my intestines and a knot at my scapula. On the phone one night about a month after my forced exile from our home, Kevin and I had had a vicious argument about the trip to Metcalfe. He accused me of barbarism. I told him the hunt was an ancient tradition with a stiff moral underpinning; unlike him, a commercial carnivore, I accepted the moral weight of my canine teeth. Kevin claimed it was a savage act, no different from killing a human, maybe worse, in fact, because the motivations were so suspect in this day and age.

    But killing a human was different. I knew it was true and yet I couldn’t tell Kevin why I knew it was true; that wound, scabbed over for nearly fifteen years, was still festering and continued to fester on the ride back to the estate.

    Overlying all of that was the knowledge that we were trapped in here, that my life might no longer be measured in decades, but in days. For an instant I allowed myself to consider how Patrick and Emily would deal with my dying out here.

    The idea so sickened me that I quashed it immediately; such thinking could corrode resolve, make me less than the woman I would have to be to survive the coming days.

    Whether it was emotional fatigue or an instinctual need to retreat, I somehow slept on the back of the snowmobile for the last ten miles to the lodge. Griff nudged me awake as we entered the yard. A single light glowed through the stained-glass window of the stags on the second floor of the lodge. The lower windows were dark.

    The kitchen door opened and now we could see them all crowded at it. Our faces said enough.

    “They’re not coming, are they?” Theresa said.

    Cantrell shook his head. “Radio’s smashed.”

    “Phil’s been shot,” Butch said.

    “What?” Arnie cried. “Is he okay? Don’t tell me he’s not okay!”

    “Flesh wound,” Butch said. “He’s upstairs, locked in the middle bedroom.”

    The pediatrician bulled his way inside. The others pressed in around us, jabbing the air with questions. Sheila forced her way to the front and told the others to let us in out of the cold. I stepped inside the kitchen, instantly surrounded by the odor of frying onions and garlic. I’d forgotten how enveloping warmth and scent can be. I soaked in it, oblivious to the anxious chatter about me. I limped forward into the great room and slumped into one of the overstuffed chairs by the fire. The others trickled in.

    In turns, Griff, Arnie and Cantrell laid out what had happened. Kurant peppered them with questions. I was so tired I couldn’t speak.

    When Griff described Pawlett’s fate, they became visibly shaken. Even Nelson reached out to the wall for support. After it had sunk in, Butch slapped his hand on his thigh. “Philly was shot at with a cedar arrow, too.”

    “What happened?” Cantrell demanded of his guide.

    Nelson held his palms up. “I ordered everyone to stay here in the lodge for the day. But the guy’s got his own mind. He managed to slip out around midmorning. He says he just meant to hunt around the camp — ”

    “Where is he?” Cantrell jumped in. “I want to hear it from him.”

    Nelson motioned up the staircase toward the second floor. “He’s a stubborn bastard, eh? Couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t try to go out again, especially after what happened. Took his gun away and locked him up there in the old man’s bedroom.”