The Purification Ceremony (19 page)

    “Get him,” Cantrell said.

    While we waited, Kurant slipped over next to me. “Sounded rough.”

    I smiled, thankful for his concern. “I’m alive.”

    He patted me on the leg. “I’m glad you are. I was worried.”

    “I can take care of myself.”

    “Yes and no, I think.”

    That made me uncomfortable, so I was somewhat relieved to see a very annoyed Phil following Nelson and Arnie down the stairs. “Your guide locked me up like I was some street gangster or something!” he yelled at Cantrell.

    “I want my fucking cash back!”

    The outfitter was having none of it. “You disobeyed my guide’s orders. You almost got killed because of it. Now knock off the bull and tell us what happened.”

    Phil glowered.

    “Philly, c’mon. Who else can tell it?” Arnie asked.

    Phil nodded, but his tone was defiant. “I went out ‘cause I was thinking it was dumb to stay inside. Still do. This week’s the peak of the rut, and, damn it, I put down some righteous cash for this hunt and, killings or no killings, I was gonna get my deer.”

    “Brilliant,” Arnie said. “The guy’s just brilliant. Been this way since childhood.”

    “Hey, don’t diss me, Doc,” Phil snarled. “You got your trophy buck.”

    “Aw, Phil, don’t you get it?” Butch demanded. “The bigbuck contest is over. Just tell ‘em what happened.”

    Phil clenched his teeth, but began. “I went east along the lakefront, then cut north, figuring to make a nice loop, not too far from camp. I’d been out about an hour, working through the pines, you know, figuring that the deer would be waiting out the storm in the thick stuff. I came to a nice little clearing with a lot of browse in it and I spotted a couple of deer feeding on the other side. I stopped to see if a good one might be following. I got in the middle of three pine trees where the wind couldn’t get at me, rested my Browning automatic rifle against one of them and started to glass the deer. Man, I hadn’t been there two minutes when I hear this thwack! noise and my right arm gets yanked sideways, pinned against one of the trees. There’s an arrow, one of them cedar fuckers, right through the bottom of my new camo jacket. I snapped my head left and — hard to find the mother at first — but then I see this arrow come up around thirty-five yards away. And behind it is this fucking clown in snow camouflage, boots to face mask. And he’s got this gray wolf cape on for a hat. He’s drawing down on me.”

    Lenore got up and headed for the bar. “I’ve heard it twice and it still gives me the shivers.”

    “Recurve or a longbow?” Griff asked.

    “How the fuck would I know?” Phil complained. “I mean, some crazed asshole with a wolf hat’s gonna stick me, who’s gonna look at his bow? But I’ll tell you what, man: I wasn’t dying that way. I learned not to die in the ’Nam.”

    “C’mon, Phil,” Arnie groaned. “Not ’Nam again.”

    “Hey, hey,” Phil said, wagging a muscular finger at the pediatrician. “There were snipers and bombers everywhere in that country. The auto works got hit a bunch of times while I was there.”

    “Just tell them what happened,” Butch insisted.

    “I reached down left-handed and got the autoloader up, flipped the safety, stuck the butt against the tree behind me and started blazing! Barrel on that mag was jumping all over the goddamned place.”

    Phil nodded his shiny head with satisfaction. “I’ll tell you, that chickenshit bastard didn’t have the guts to hang in there and stick me, ha! ha! After my second shot, he put his ass in overdrive. With that snow gear on, he wasn’t twenty feet into the thick shit and — poof! — he just went invisible.”

    “Did you track him?” I asked.

    “Nah, I was bleeding pretty good. The broad head got an inch of my triceps. So I got my arm freed and came in. Theresa patched me up; then her man here threw me in stir when I said I wanted to go back out after the mother.”

    “For your own good, eh?” Nelson insisted.

    “Sounds it,” Cantrell agreed. “From now until the floatplane comes back, we’re not leaving the lodge yard.”

    “Another week!” Lenore protested. “Why don’t you just cut that last tree on the trail and go to the nearest town?”

    “It’s too far, how many times you got to hear it?” Theresa asked sourly. “I grew up in Barna. It’s sixty miles beyond the logging camp, thirty-five of it by two-track. And it’s a snowbelt up there, gets hit hard in these storms, eh? Those old machines aren’t worth a damn. They’d bog down.”

    “So we stick it out, no problem,” Butch said hopefully.

    Phil took a step forward. “Maybe you, Abbie Hoffman, but not me.”

    “Pal, you’re pissing me off,” Cantrell said.

    “Hey, hey, hey,” Phil said, wagging that beefy finger at the outfitter now. “I’m the only one here who’s seen Mr. Screw Loose mano a mano, and I’m telling you he was on top of me before I knew it. He’s that good. Sure enough, I think he’d rather stay in the trees, but who’s to say he won’t just come in here after us? Man, he pulled Grover’s body right in here and hung him on the pole while we ate dinner. If you think he’s gonna stop there, you’re outta your mind.”

    Before Cantrell or Nelson could break in, Phil barged on. “We’re all good hunters or we wouldn’t be here. Now this fucker’s tryin’ to kill us using deer-hunting tactics. I say we turn it on him, do the same to him and whoever else is with him. I’d rather die trying to cover my ass than sit in front of a fire spanking my monkey, not knowing when the shot’s coming.”

    “We’re staying inside,” Cantrell said again.

    “Hey, who elected you Pol Pot? This is my life you’re talking about,” Phil retorted. “At least put it to a vote. Majority rules, this is America, right? Well, Canada, sorta the same thing, am I fucking right?”

    Cantrell glanced at his wife, who nodded. “Okay, we vote. I vote inside.”

    “Me, too,” said Nelson.

    “Make that three,” Earl added.

    Lenore looked at him with utter disgust. “So predictable.”

    “I’m not looking to die, sweet thing,” Earl snapped. “We got business at home, remember?”

    “What’s her name, this business?” Lenore taunted. “Does she tell you you’re a big, brave hombre? Or does she know how little you are?”

    The Texan’s fingers dug into the leather chair. “At least everything I got works, Lenore. For all that talk that body of yours does, I’m the one who knows you’re all bait and switch.”

    Lenore’s expression did not change, but her fingernails trembled. “How dare you! In public like this!”

    “What’s the matter, sweet thing?” Earl grinned. “Am I getting too close to the enchilada?”

    She threw her drink in his face and snarled at him: “I’m sorry God screwed up my plumbing and I can’t give the little man a little man to leave his computer company to. But I’m still the best thing that ever walked into your sorryass life. Don’t you forget it.”

    Lenore laughed at Earl’s expression as the Bloody Mary ran down Earl’s face. She threaded her fingers through that thick mane of exquisitely dyed hair. Then she took us all in at a glance, and pointed at Phil. “Anyone wants to take my scalp for a trophy will have to fight for it. I’m with you, Muscles.”

    “You bitch,” Earl said as he walked toward the bathroom.

    No one said anything for the longest time after he left. Lenore fluffed her hair again and looked at us. “Don’t worry about it. Earl and I… every now and then… we need to tell each other how much we… love each other. Finish the vote.”

    “Butch?” Phil said.

    “Outside,” he replied without hesitation, but he did not look happy.

    Arnie struggled to control his voice. “I don’t want to go out there again. Not after today. But I’m not waiting in here to die on my knees like that guy Pawlett. I’ll hunt.”

    “Arnie, my man,” Phil said. “All right.”

    Griff pursed his lips and gestured to the outfitter. “I hate to say it, Mike, but I think they’re right. We have a better chance if we go after them.”

    Cantrell was stone-faced. “Sheila?”

    “I’ll stay inside.”

    “Guess I got to be a team player sometime,” Theresa said, rolling her eyes. “Inside.”

    “Five for, five against,” Phil said, looking at me and Kurant.

    “I’m going to abstain,” Kurant said. “I’m a journalist. I’m supposed to be covering this.”

    “Up to you, Diana.”

    I felt a sour giddiness low in my chest. This is what women must have suffered thousands of years ago when they gathered their children to break camp and head after their mates into unexplored terrain. Men had their hunting cults to prepare them for such upheaval. Women had no such institutions. We have always been relied upon to negotiate the vagaries of life with an instinctive optimism. A return to security in such instances often seems impossible. As it did at that moment for me.

    I realized I had spent the previous fifteen years telling myself I could remain encamped in the Back Bay of Boston, sheltered from the savage issues of a life. The thinness of my philosophy now struck me as ludicrous. The hearth would have to be abandoned. “I’m going out.”

    “I knew she would!” Phil cried.

    “But on two conditions,” I added. “We try to capture, not kill, them. And neither you nor Cantrell is in charge once we begin.”

    “What? Who the fuck, then?” Phil demanded. “You?”

    “No,” I said. I pointed at the guide. “Nelson.”

    There was a lot of grumbling on the outfitter’s part over putting Nelson in charge. But Cantrell came to see my position. The guide had worked on the estate for three years. He knew the land better than anyone. If we were to have a chance at capturing the killers, we needed a strategist who could adapt instantly as the hunt evolved.

    When it was agreed upon, there appeared among us a new strength. We were taking action. We were asserting control, acting less like potential victims.

    While Sheila finished up with dinner, we pored over the map. We put red pins where we’d found the intruders’ footprints. White pins where we’d discovered secondary evidence, such as the felled trees. Green pins for the bodies. A blue pin for Phil’s encounter.

    A fragmented pattern emerged. They had killed Pawlett, then moved south toward the estate sometime in early November, felling the trees to trap us. The freshest sign was located east and north of the lodge, this side of the Dream and south of the Sticks. We would focus our efforts in that nine-by-nine-mile quadrant.

    “Hundred and ten square miles is a lot to cover,” Nelson was saying at dinner.

    “We don’t try to cover it,” countered Griff. “We try to predict their movements based on the travel corridors they’re using. People are creatures of habit, just like animals.”

    “Yeah, but don’t we need to know where their camp is, where they sleep, where they eat?” Lenore asked.

    “Sure would help,” Cantrell agreed. “But we got no idea where that is.”

    “Not exactly, maybe,” I said. “But if the tracks we found leading to and from Patterson are an indication, it’s somewhere north of the Sticks.”

    “And within a few hours’ hike,” Butch said.

    “They’ll come south tomorrow,” Nelson said, nodding. “If we can get them moving on our terms, we should be able to backtrack them to their camp.”

    “Let’s not forget we know a lot about them already,” Griff said.

    “Like what?” Theresa asked.

    “Like those cedar arrows. It means he, or they, shoot traditional recurves or longbows.”

    Kurant’s face screwed up. “Sort of bow-hunting fundamentalists, then?”

    “I think we’re talking fanatics, not fundamentalists,” Arnie said. “But so what?”

    Griff waved his fork in the air. “The method they’re using is as important to them as the end result. If they just wanted to kill us, they’d use a gun.

    A longbow has an effective range of maybe twenty-five yards. It forces them to be more methodical, restricts them to thick cover, says that they’ve hunted for a long, long time.”

    “You all think I’m so friggin’ stupid, don’t you?” Earl interjected.

    No one replied. He’d been drinking hard since his verbal brawl with Lenore. She smiled grimly at us and then at her husband. “I think it’s someone’s bedtime.”

    Earl laughed and slapped the edge of the table. “You think because I let her get on me like she does that I’m a stupid shit, don’t you? I see it. The way you look at me.”

    He didn’t wait for an answer. “But, folks, I’m no stupid shit. I’ve made forty million bucks in my life. Earl Addison. He’s a little eccentric, sure. But stupid, no, no, no.”

    “Little man… “

    “Shaddup, will you for just once?!” he roared, rolling his bloodshot eyes. He waved both hands at us like a preacher. “You’re the ones who’re stupid. Stupid and blind.”

    “You got a theory about what’s happening here?” Griff asked.

    “You betcha, bub,” Earl slurred. “You think about it.

    They drag Grover into the lodge yard and hang him. Why?

    To scare us? Sure, I believe that.”

    “Tell us something we don’t know, little man,” Lenore said.

    “Ah, sweet thing… that’s what I love about you — you never change. They ain’t coming in here with Grover just to scare us; they’re doing it, or rather he’s doing it — the one with the air-bob soles — because he feels at home doing it.”

    “You’re drunk,” Lenore said, dismissing him with a flick of her long fingernails.

    “That so?” Earl said, gesturing up at the longbow and the quiver of cedar arrows hanging below the big nontypical buck above the fireplace. “Now, who’s drunk, or stupid, or crazy? Not me, sweet thing. Not old Earl Addison.”

    “But Metcalfe’s — ” Kurant began.