Soul Catcher

  Katsuk doubled over with mirth. His mind held the entire compass of that scene: boy, legs, fish, the brown-green riverbank with its overhanging moss, that insane tangle of feet and fish. It was the funniest thing Katsuk could remember in all of his life.

  He heard the boy laughing, trying to stop, then laughing more.

  The boy gasped: “Oh ... please! I ... can’t ... stop ... laughing.”

  Katsuk tried to think of something to stop the laughter The pursuers! He thought of searchers coming upon the pair of them at this moment. He thought of the puzzlement this scene would create. How ludicrous it was! He laughed all the harder. His sides ached from laughter. He struggled up the mossy bank, flopped on his back, sent great peels of laughter at the sky.

  The boy scrambled up to sprawl beside him.

  Man and boy—they lay there, spending themselves on laughter until fatigue overcame them, not daring to speak then lest it release new mirth.

  Katsuk thought of the laughing game he had played as a boy, as the boy Charles Hobuhet. Make each other laugh, that was the game. Whoever could not control his laughter lost the game.

  A spasmodic chuckle shook him.

  The boy lay silent. Hoquat had won this game.

  For a while after the joy of that laughter had subsided, they lay on the warm ground, catching their breath.

  Katsuk grew aware that the sky was darkening. Clouds covered the low sun. The clouds moved upriver on a cold, raw wind. Katsuk sat up, stared at the clouds. They hung above the trees, unsupported, mysterious gray turrets with the last glowing stripe of day beneath them.

  He slapped the boy’s arm. “Come. We must make a fire and dry you out.” The boy scrambled to his feet. “And cook the fish?”

  “Yes—and cook the fish.”

  ***

  From a scrap of note left at the Sam’s River shelter:

  When I am confused I listen with as much of my being as I can allow. This was always what my people did. We fell silent in confusion and waited to learn. The whites do a strange thing when they are confused. They run around making much noise. They only add to the confusion and cannot even hear themselves.

  ***

  For a long while that night, Katsuk lay awake in their shelter thinking. Hoquat, breathing beside him with the even rhythm of sleep, remained a disturbing presence. Even asleep, there was a spirit in the boy. It was like the times when the hoquat first arrived and some said they must be the descendants of Seagull, who had owned the daylight. Grandfather Hobuhet had recounted the tale often. The hoquat squawked and ran around like Seagull; so the confusion was understandable. This boy, though, no longer ran around and squawked. He remained silent for long periods. At such times, the spirit could be sensed growing within him.

  The spirit grew even now.

  Katsuk sensed the spirit speaking to the boy. The spirit stood there in the darkness in place of the man this youth would never become. It was a thing of excitement and peril.

  The spirit of the boy spoke then to Katsuk: “You see this, Katsuk? In this flesh there are good eyes and a mind that has seen something you have not.”

  Katsuk felt that he must weep, must punish his senses for this recognition of Hoquat’s spirit. But the revelation demanded that he deal with it.

  “This is flesh that made something happen,” the spirit said.

  Katsuk fought to remain silent. He shuddered. If he answered this spirit, he knew it would gain power over him. It might pick him up and shake him. Katsuk would rattle in the Hobuhet flesh like a stick in a basket.

  “What folly to think you can ignore me,” the spirit said.

  Katsuk clenched his teeth tightly. What a seductive spirit this was. It reminded him of the hoquat world.

  “I give you back your own knowledge of what the world knows,” the spirit said. Katsuk groaned.

  “I make you really know what you only thought you knew,” the spirit said. “You think there is no place in you to receive this? Whether you say aye or nay, something is driven into your heart by the thing itself. This boy’s hand and your eye have met. He has said something and part of you listened ... without compromise. If you have as good an eye as his, you can look directly through his flesh and see the man he would become. He has shared this with you, do you understand?”

  Katsuk rolled his head in the darkness, holding fast to his link with Soul Catcher.

  “Where does such a thing begin?” the spirit asked. “What made you believe you could master this matter? Do you not see the wonder of this youth? Bring your sight back to the surface and observe this being. How do you dignify yourself in this?”

  Katsuk felt sweat drench his flesh. He was chilled inside and out. The temper of this hoquat spirit was emerging. It was looking far back into deeper things. It was primitive and tyrannous. Its concepts spanned all time. There was no greater tyranny. It struck through to the ultimate human. He felt vibrations of color in the night, sensed something wonderful and terrifying about these moments. The spirit had netted a piece of the universe and shaken it out for observation. The thing had been said without decision and without any concern for Katsuk’s desire to hear. It was merely said. The spirit invited him to do nothing except listen. The message was brought to him as though painted on wood. In a time of madness, it said a simple thing:

  “If you carry out your purpose, it must be done as a man to a man.”

  Trembling and awed, Katsuk remained awake in the darkness.

  Hoquat rolled over, mumbled, then spoke quite clearly: “Katsuk?”

  “I am here,” Katsuk said.

  But the boy was only talking in his sleep.

  ***

  From a paper by Charles Hobuhet for Philosophy 200:

  The fallacies of Western philosophy fascinate me. No “body English.” Words-words-words, no feelings. No flesh. You try to separate life and death. You try to explain away a civilization which uses trickery, bad faith, lies, and deceit to make its falsehoods prevail over the flesh. The seriousness of your attack on happiness and passion astounds the man in me. It astounds my flesh. You are always running away from your bodies. You hide yourselves in words of desperate self-justification. You employ the most despotic rhetoric to justify lives that do not fit you. They are lives, in fact, not lived. You say belief is foolish, and you believe this. You say love is futile and you pursue it. Finding love, you place no confidence in it. Thus, you try to love without confidence. You place your highest verbal value on something called security. This is a barricaded corner in which you cower, not realising that to keep from dying is not the same as “to live.”

  ***

  “About thirty thousand years ago,” Katsuk said, “a lava flow pushed its way out of a vent in the middle slope up there.” He hooked thumb over his shoulder. “Some of it fell out in great lumps which you stupid hoquat called Indian tears.”

  David peered up at the mountain, which he could see shining in the morning sun beyond a stand of hemlocks. The mountain was a series of rock pillars. Cloud shapes drifted over it. There was an avalanche scar on a slope to the south. A river ran somewhere under that slope, but the sound of it lay hidden beneath the wind soughing in the trees.

  “What time is it?” David asked.

  “By hoquat time?”

  “Yes.”

  Katsuk glanced over his shoulder at the sun. “About ten o’clock. Why?”

  “You know what I’d be doing at home right now?”

  Katsuk glanced at Hoquat, sensing the boy’s need to talk. Why not? If Hoquat talked here, that would keep his spirit silent. Katsuk nodded, asked: “What would you be doing?”

  “Taking my tennis lesson.”

  “Tennis lesson,” Katsuk said. He shook his head.

  Katsuk squatted on the slope. He held a length of brown-black obsidian in his left hand. He steadied the obsidian on his thigh and chipped at it with a piece of flint. The sound of chipping rang sharply in the clear, high air. It produced a pungent smell which David sniffed.


  “Tennis lesson,” Katsuk repeated. He tried to imagine the boy as a grown man—rich and pampered, a romper man first class in the playboy army. No longer innocent. Black and white dress uniform for night. Black tie. A crew-cut, nightclub smoke-blower. Or whatever would pass for that in his time of maturity. It was a kindness to prevent that. It was a kindness to preserve Hoquat’s innocence forever.

  “Then I’d go swimming in our pool.” David said.

  Katsuk asked: “Do you want to swim in the river down there?”

  “It’s too cold. Our pool is heated.”

  Katsuk sighed, went on chipping. The obsidian was beginning to take shape. It would be a knife soon.

  For some time now, David had been trying to plumb his captor’s mood. There had been increasingly long silences between them while walking around the mountain slope. It had taken a full day. There were ten pebbles in David’s pocket—ten days. Katsuk’s few responses during the long hike had been more and more moody, snappish, and short. Katsuk was troubled by some new awareness. Was Katsuk losing his spirit powers?

  David did not allow himself to think yet of escape. But if Katsuk’s powers were weakening …

  A large chip flew off the obsidian. Katsuk held it up, turned it, examining the shape. “What’re you making?” David asked. “A knife.”

  “But you’ve got ... my knife.” David glanced at Katsuk’s waist. The Russell knife had been missing all during the walk around the mountain, but he had guessed it was in the deerhide pouch Katsuk wore.

  Katsuk said: “I need a special kind of knife.”

  “Why?”

  “To make my bow.” David accepted this, then: “Have you been here before?”

  “Many times.”

  “Did you make knives here?”

  “No, I guided hoquat in here to find pretty rocks.”

  “Did they make knives out of the rocks?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know what kind of rock will make a knife?”

  “My people made knives from these rocks for thousands of years. They used to come up here at least once a year—before you hoquat came with steel. You call this rock obsidian. We call it black fire—klalepiah.

  David fell silent. Where was the Russell knife? Would Katsuk give it back?

  Katsuk had caught a rabbit and two small quail in snares during the night. He had cleaned them with a sharp piece of the brown-black rock, cooked them in an earth oven heated by pitch balls. The pitch had made a hot fire with almost no smoke.

  David found a remnant of rabbit leg, sat down, and chewed on it while he watched Katsuk work. The gray striking rock in Katsuk’s right hand had one narrow end. Katsuk struck sharply and steadily at the obsidian, using the narrow end of the flint. Sparks flew. The sulfurous odor grew strong in the still air.

  Presently, David summoned his courage, asked: “Where’s my knife?”

  Katsuk thought: Ahhh, the sly, clever hoquat! He said: “I must make my bow in the ancient way. Steel cannot touch this wood.”

  “Then where’s my knife?”

  “I threw it in the river.”

  Outraged, David hurled the gnawed rabbit bone to the ground, leaped to his feet. “That was my knife!”

  “Be still,” Katsuk said.

  “My father gave me that knife,” David said, his voice tight with fury. Angry tears began running down his cheeks.

  Katsuk peered up at him, weighing the boy’s passion. “Could your father not buy you another knife?”

  “That one was for my birthday!” David shook tears off his cheeks. “Why’d you have to throw it away?”

  Katsuk looked at the obsidian and flint in his hands.

  A birthday gift, father to son: a man’s gift to a man.

  Katsuk experienced emptiness at the certainty that he would never have a son to receive the gift of manhood. The obsidian felt heavy in his hand. He knew he was experiencing self-pity and it angered him.

  Why pity anyone? There could be no reprieve.

  “Damn you!” David raged. “I hope your Cedar sickness kills you!”

  Awareness blazed in Katsuk. There lay the source of the curse! The Innocent had found a spirit to work his curse. Where had Hoquat found this spirit? Had he received it from Tskanay? Then, where had she found it?

  Katsuk said: “I was warned by Bee to throw away that steel knife.”

  “Stupid Bee!”

  Katsuk jerked his chin up, glared at the boy. “Careful what you say about Bee. He might not let you live out this day!”

  The glazed look of madness in Katsuk’s eyes cooled David’s anger. He felt only the loss now. The knife was gone, thrown into a river by this madman. David tried to take a deep breath, but his chest pained him. The knife would never be found again. He thought abruptly of the murdered hiker. That knife had killed a man. Was that why it had been thrown away?

  Katsuk went back to his chipping.

  David said: “Are you sure you didn’t hide my knife in that pouch?”

  Katsuk put down the obsidian and flint, opened the pouch, exposed the interior to the boy.

  David pointed: “What’s that little package?”

  “It’s not your knife. You can see I do not have the knife.”

  “I see.” Still angry. “What’s that package?”

  Katsuk sealed the pouch, went back to chipping his obsidian. “It is the down of sea ducks.”

  “Down?”

  The soft feathers.”

  “I know that. Why do you carry a stupid thing like that?”

  Katsuk noted how anger spoke in the boy, thought: The down is to sprinkle on your body when I have slain you. He said: “It is part of my spirit medicine.

  “Why’d your spirit tell you to throw away my knife?” David asked. Katsuk thought: He is learning to ask the right questions. “Why?” the boy demanded.

  “To save me,” Katsuk whispered.

  “What?”

  “To save me!”

  “You told Cally nothing can save you.”

  “But Cally does not know me.”

  “She’s your aunt.”

  “No. She had a nephew named Charles Hobuhet. I am Katsuk.”

  And Katsuk wondered: Why do I explain myself to my victim? What is he doing that I must defend myself? Is it the knife I threw away? That was a link with his father, the father he had before he became Hoquat. Yes. I threw away his past. It is what those drunken loggers did to Janiktaht ... and to me.

  “I’ll bet you’ve never even been in a heated pool,” David said.

  Kasuk smiled. Hoquat’s anger darted here and there. It was like a creature in a cage. Tennis lessons, a swimming pool. Hoquat had lived a sheltered life, a life of preserved innocence in the fashion of his people. Despite Tskanay, he remained in that delicate transition place: part-man-part-boy. Innocent.

  Sorrow permeated David. His mouth felt dry. His chest ached. He felt tired, frustrated, lonely. Why was crazy Katsuk making a stone knife? Why was he really making it? Had Katsuk lied?

  David remembered reading the Aztecs had killed their sacrificial victims with stone knives. Aztecs were Indians. He shook his head. Katsuk had promised. “Unless you tell me to do it, I will not kill you.” The stone knife had another purpose. Perhaps it was just to make the stupid bow.

  Katsuk said: “You are no longer angry with me?”

  “No.” Still sullen.

  “Good. Anger blocks the mind. Anger does not learn. There is much for you to learn.”

  Anger does not learn! David thought. He climbed deliberately close to Katsuk, went a short way up the slope, and sat down with his back against the bole of a hemlock. Bits of obsidian littered the ground around him. He picked up a handful, began throwing them past Katsuk at brush and trees down the slope.

  The bits of obsidian made a clattering sound when they hit a tree. They went flick-flick in salal leaves on the forest floor. It was a curious counterpoint noise to Katsuk’s chipping. David felt his anger pouring out in
the exertion of throwing the rocks. He threw harder, harder.

  Kasuk said: “If you wish to throw a rock at me, throw it. Do not play games with your feelings.”

  David leaped up, anger flaring. He held a sharp-edged piece of obsidian the size of a quail’s egg in his hand. He gritted his teeth, hurled the rock at Katsuk with all of his strength. The rock struck a glancing blow on Katsuk’s cheek, left a red slash from which blood oozed.

  Terrified by what he had done, David stepped backward. Every muscle was in readiness to flee.

  Katsuk put a finger to the wound, brought it away, examined the blood. Curious. The cut did not hurt. What could it mean that such a blow caused no pain? There had been a brief sensation of pressure, but no pain. Ahhh, Bee had blocked off the pain. Bee had interposed a magic to make the blow ineffective. It was a message from Bee. The Innocent’s spirit would not prevail.

  “I am Tamanawis speaking to you ...”

  David said: “Katsuk? Katsuk, I’m sorry.”

  Katsuk looked up at him. Hoquat appeared ready for flight, his eyes wide and bright with fear. Katsuk nodded, said: “Now, you know a little of how I felt when I took you from the hoquat camp. What a hate that must be to want to kill an innocent for it. Did you ever think of that?”

  Kill an innocent! David thought. He said: “But you promised ...”

  “I will keep that promise. It is the way of my people. We do not tell hoquat lies. Do you know how it is?”

  “What?”

  “When we were whalers, whale had to demand the harpoon. Whale asked us to kill him.”

  “But I’d never ...”

  “Then you are safe.” Katsuk returned to his chipping.

  David ventured a step closer to Katsuk. “Does it hurt?”

  “Bee will not let it hurt. Be quiet. I must concentrate.”

  “But it’s bleeding.”

  “The bleeding will stop.”

  “Shouldn’t we put something on it?”

  “It is a small wound. Your mouth is a bigger wound. Be quiet or I will put something in your mouth.”

  David gulped, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He found it difficult not to look at the dark scratch on Katsuk’s cheek. The bleeding stopped, but coagulation formed a ragged lower edge to the wound.