The Purification Ceremony (25 page)

    He motioned for me to move by him into the main cavern, and in that motion I understood he possessed tremendous, fluid strength. As a child, I had heard Mitchell tell stories of people he called Kinapaq. Unlike the Puoin, the Kinapaq manipulated Power for their own ends. In Micmac myths, the Kinapaq could run like the wind, toss boulders across rivers, hold their breath for hours under water. I’d always laughed at the idea; despite the fact that at times I’d had inexplicable experiences that Mitchell and my father attributed to Power, at a certain level I still did not fully believe in it. Power and the six worlds were the stuff of legends, legends that gave meaning and a sense of ancient history to our way of life. But they weren’t real.

    Now I didn’t know. I got a feeling about him that I had never experienced before; I knew that if I tried to fight or flee now, he would kill me instantly.

    “Kneel,” he commanded when I’d reached the middle of the cave. “Hands behind your back.”

    I swallowed hard, but did as he asked.

    He slipped behind me. The bow limbs squeaked in protest. The tip of the broadhead pricked me at the back of neck, and it was all I could do to keep from crying out. He took hold of my wrists with one hand and quickly tied them together with wide strips of deer hide. He gagged me with a red handkerchief.

    He forced me facedown on the deer skins and tore the waders off me, then tied my ankles together with longer strips before sitting me upright against the wall of the cave.

    He threw a tanned deer cape over my legs, turned without a word and went into the alcove. He come out immediately, carrying my rifle and one of the yellow-shafted arrows.

    “Kauyumari said you’d be the one to come,” he said again, unloading the gun. “He says you are the only one with a true sense of the forest. I left the island this morning so you would enter of your own will.”

    Don’t whine. Don’t struggle, I thought. Let him talk. Let him reveal himself. Know the deer, my father used to say.

    He retracted the bolt to retrieve the bullet in the chamber. He knelt in front of me and checked the lashes around my ankles. “Don’t try to escape,” he said. “I will know where you run before you do.”

    I nodded, knowing somehow that what he said was true. He crawled out the tunnel with my gun.

    Until then I’d been relatively calm. It was as if it were all happening to someone else and I was standing there watching. Now, alone in the dim confines of the cave, the weight of the situation bore down and I began to shake. I summoned up every ounce of mental energy to stop it. I knew he knew I was frightened, but I didn’t want him to see it. He had not made any untoward movements so far and I was afraid that any physical demonstration of weakness would provoke an attack, as it would if he were a predator and I a crippled forest animal. I had to show him I was strong.

    Several minutes of deep, controlled breathing managed to quell the tremors, only to give way to a profound sense of weakness as the adrenaline left my system. I struggled feebly against the lashes. Who was he? He had an ageless quality about him. He could have been Metcalfe or his son, Ronny. I realized I had no idea what either man looked like; there were no pictures or paintings of any of the Metcalfes in the lodge. That was more than strange, and yet I hadn’t thought of it before. Questions raced through my head. Were the pictures of the Metcalfe family removed on purpose? Who was this person — Kauyumari — who’d said I’d come? What was the significance of the other photographs I’d found in his gear — the one of the man balancing on the cliff and the other of the adobe house? Who was the fourth person who’d given a scalp? Why hadn’t I felt him coming the way I had in the woods? My mind raced in circles, considering and discarding theories, until all was a jumble and I felt terribly tired.

    I must have dozed, because when I opened my eyes again, he was sitting cross-legged on one of the deer skins •about six feet away, studying me. There were two yellow arrows before him in a cross formation and beside them a gourd of water and beside it the wolf skin that had been removed from his head to reveal a thick shock of steel-gray hair. He must have been remarkably handsome once, but that seemed to have been drained from him, leaving a gaunt, bony face above the beard line and thin, almost blue lips. I could see his eyes clearly now — the irises were a willow green, the pupils hugely dilated and black, the whites filmy and bloodshot. The most tortured eyes I’ve ever seen.

    He reached out and untied the gag, then sat back.

    We held each other’s gazes for several minutes. My heart caught again. It was as if he actually had the ability to reach inside and read me. I turned away, sickened by the sensation, but it did not cease.

    Finally I blurted, “Are you Ronny Metcalfe?”

    He said nothing.

    “If you won’t tell me who you are, at least tell me why you’re doing this sick thing.”

    His body squeezed up tight, hinting at something unfathomable simmering below his tranquil outward surface. For a second I feared it would boil over and I would be swept away. Instead, his eyes became glassier, heavier, and he said thickly, “I’ve seen the pouch around your neck. You have Indian blood in you, don’t you?”

    “Micmac and Penobscot,” I replied.

    “Northern Woodland, Algonquin.” He nodded. “What is your name?”

    “Diana,” I answered. “Diana Jackman.’:

    No, your Indian name.”

    I hesitated. “Little Crow.”

    That seemed to satisfy him. “Little Crow, I watched you in the woods. You are a fine hunter. You come to it with reverence. Very rare. And yet trailing behind you, like a shadow, is a sadness, a confusion that you are unwilling to face.”

    I started at that. “I… I’m just here to hunt.”

    He laughed, but there was no feeling in it. “I see things others do not. We are kindred spirits, I think.”

    In spite of myself, I snapped, “We have nothing in common. I don’t kill people for sport.”

    “Sport!” he roared. “This is no sport! I’m here to cleanse the filth that has defiled the hunt, to purge the evil liquid that now festers within the great ceremony, to render balance where there is none!”

    He was on his feet now, raving, kicking over pots and pans. He held a wicked-looking knife with a black stone blade and a deer-antler handle. I scooched back against the wall, cowering from his rage.

    “Kauyumari and Tatewari have commanded me to come here,” he fumed. “Here there is no sacrifice and thanksgiving for brother deer. There is just the pursuit of trophies and all of it… all of it orchestrated by him, the one who corrupted the sanctity of the hunt to begin with. Him! Sanctioned in his evil deeds by the laws of civilized man, making his money from it!”

    He yanked at his hair, then coiled himself down to pluck the two yellow arrows from the floor of the cave. He held one in each hand and closed his eyes halfway and began to shuffle, almost a dance really, in slow, purposeful circles around the firs. As he moved, I could sense the frenzy draining from him.

    Tears streamed down my face. I could not help it. Finally he stopped before me. “Can you understand?” he asked softly.

    I shook my head, snuffling.

    He knelt in front of me. “I’ve scared you, haven’t I? I’m so sorry. Do you know you remind me of someone I loved?” And he reached out to stroke my face.

    I jerked away from his touch, but he smiled. “You think I’m a barbarian, but I’m not. I am an educated man. I did my doctoral thesis on the Huichol peoples of the Sierra Madre. Do you know the Huichol? I’ve been living among them again since the abomination.”

    “I’ve never heard of them,” I said, trying to keep him talking about something that seemed to soothe him.

    “We worship the deer,” he announced. “Deer is Kauyumari, the messenger between man and God, whom we call Tatewari. Deer also brings Peyote to earth. Peyote is as sacred to the Huichol as the deer. Peyote and other plants in the desert bring visions of Tatewari to the taker.”

    If he caught my befuddlement, he did not show it. Instead, he looked out into a distant place and spoke tenderly. “Once, a long, long time ago, the Huichol lived in Wikuta, the hallowed high desert.

    We were a hunting society and the deer was our brother. Even now, when a Huichol hunts a deer, he does not try to chase it as you or I might do here. Instead, we look for a deer that will stand and face us and not run. Then we set snares where he lives and catch him so that we might talk to the deer as our brother, to tell him why he must die so we may live. It is difficult because before he dies, the deer talks to us with his eyes and breaks our hearts.

    “When a Huichol kills the deer in the sacred way, he finishes by offering prayers to Tatewari and to Maxa Kwaxi, elder brother deer,” he continued. “When all is consumed, the bones are buried in the forest so that deer may regrow from his bones.”

    He laughed. His face radiated with animation. He touched the side of his nose. “We hunt Peyote the same way in the same place, the Wikuta, the sacred desert. Kauyumari is there, too. We believe, in fact, that deer comes from the sky and where he lands, Peyote is found. Therefore Peyote must be tracked and shot with an arrow like deer.”

    He fell silent and sighed at the memory. I was trying desperately to understand him, to figure out what the murders had to do with it all. “Do you see yourself as a Huichol?”

    He laughed, this time a real laugh. “I am more than a Huichol,” he said. “I have trained these past few years to become a Mara’akame, what you might call a shaman. I lead the hunts for deer and for Peyote and Kieli, which also brings great visions. In my visions I am one of the wolf people who came before all of us. Wolf is my animal ally. He has led me here to purify that which has been desecrated.”

    “Why us?” I demanded. “We’ve done nothing illegal, nothing to hurt you.”

    He ignored me. He stood suddenly and ran back into the alcove, returning immediately with a small drum, the deer horns, the third yellow arrow and a buckskin pouch about eight inches long. He sat across from me a third time. He reached into the pouch and brought out what appeared to be a short length of animal intestine filled with blood.

    “This is deer’s spirit,” he informed me, unwrapping a piece of sinew he’d used to tie the intestine shut. He smeared some of the blood on his fingers and then, before I could react, smeared the blood on my face in long streaks.

    “Don’t. Please,” I begged, recoiling from the moisture on my skin.

    “I can tell that in your way you worship the deer, too. Little Crow,” he went on. “But you have unfinished business with deer. Because I have respect for you, I will help you complete your business before I have to go.”

    “No,” I said. “Please, I don’t want to — ”

    “In some ways, you know,” he interjected, “the Huichol are children. They hunt only Peyote and deer and Keili and raise corn and believe these are the ways to know God.

    “But I have learned that there are other paths into the spirit world. There are some Mara’akame among the Huichol who disapprove of the men I have sought out in the far reaches of the Sierra, the men who have taught me other ways to talk with Tatewari.”

    His face screwed up and he hissed through his teeth,

    “They cursed me for following these men and learning these paths. They said ingestion of the Datura plant would lead to madness. But I wanted answers Peyote would not give me. Datura has given me the wolf as an ally, has given me the vision.”

    He cocked his head. “Do you think I was wrong?”

    He said this last with such intensity that even though I had no idea what he was talking about, I shook my head.

    “No,” I said. “I believe knowledge is a good thing.”

    He nodded, but said nothing more. He arranged the arrows in a splayed pattern around the drum, tips pointed outward like the points on a compass. He dripped blood on the yellow arrows, smeared blood on his own cheeks and started to chant, low at first, then gradually increasing the volume until the sound echoed off the roof of the cavern. Despite a hoarse, hollow voice, the singing was beautiful, and though I knew not the language, I understood he was talking to his Tatewari, the God of the Sierra Madre.

    Now his every action turned gesture, precise, ritualistic, layered with meaning I felt but did not comprehend. He reached into the buckskin pouch again and removed a stout wooden pipe with a short stem and then another, smaller pouch. He unwrapped the pouch, still singing, and a stench, acrid and fungal, filled the space between us. He plucked a wad of a dark, stringy mixture from the pouch and thumbed it into the bowl of the pipe, then set the pipe on the drum.

    He stood and placed the wolf’s cape back over his head, then bowed in four directions before padding once more clockwise around the fire ring, all the while singing in that hoarse, hollow voice.

    After completing the circle three times, he knelt, got stick matches from the pouch, lit one and held the flame to the bowl. The sick-sweet smoke I’d smelled in the alcove belched forth from the pipe. He sucked on it and held his breath before releasing a cloud of gray. His eyes fluttered and threatened to close, but he shook this off.

    “An old wise man of the Sierra taught me the mixture,” he said, holding the pipe stem toward me. “Datura, Keili — the tree of the wind — Peyote, cannabis and the mushroom. He called it the path to past visions. I call it memory smoke. Memory is how I see Tatewari’s purpose for me. What is God’s purpose for you, Little Crow?”

    He gestured for me to take the pipe in my mouth. I shook my head violently and gritted my teeth. “No, I don’t want any.”

    He reached around the back of my head and took hold of my hair. I struggled, but he held me in a vicious grip, wrapped his lips around the pipe bowl and blew smoke back out the stem into my face. I held my breath as long as I could; then he took his other hand and pinched my nose shut and he shook my head as if he were disciplining a dog. I screamed and gulped air and the smoke that now surrounded us like fog.