Soul Catcher Read Free

his innermost being he knew that
intellect and education, even the white education, had been his
first guides on this ordeal.
    He thought how, as Charles Hobuhet, he had
begun this thing. He had waited for the full moon and cleansed his
intestines by drinking seawater. He had found a land otter and cut
out its tongue.
    Kuschtaliute—the symbol tongue!
    His grandfather had explained the way of it
long ago, describing the ancient lore. Grandfather had said: “The
shaman becomes the spirit-animal-man. God won’t let animals make
the mistakes men make.”
    That was the way of it.
    He had carried Kuschtaliute in a deer
scrotum pouch around his neck. He had come into these mountains. He
had followed an old elk trail grown over with alder and fir and
cotton wood. The setting sun had been at his back when he had
buried Kuschtaliute beneath a rotten log. He had buried
Kuschtaliute in a place he never again could find, there to become
the symbol tongue.
    All of this in anguish of spirit.
    He thought: It began because of the rape
and pointless death of my sister. The death of Janiktaht ... little
Jan.
    He shook his head, confused by an onslaught
of memories. Somewhere a gang of drunken loggers had found
Janiktaht walking alone, her teenaged body full of spring
happiness, and they had raped her and changed her and she had
killed herself.
    And her brother had become a
walker-in-the-mountains.
    The other self within him, the one which
must be reasoned with and understood, sneered at him and said:
“Rape and suicide are as old as mankind. Besides, that was Charles
Hobuhet’s sister. You are Katsuk.”
    He thought then as Katsuk: Lucretius was
a liar! Science doesn’t liberate man from the terror of the
gods!
    Everything around him revealed this
truth—the sun moving across the ridges, the ranges of drifting
clouds, the rank vegetation.
    White science had begun with magic and never
moved far from it. Science continually failed to learn from lack of
results. The ancient ways retained their potency. Despite sneers
and calumny, the old ways achieved what the legends said they
would.
    His grandmother had been of the Eagle
Phratry. And a bee had spoken to him. He had scrubbed his body with
hemlock twigs until the skin was raw. He had caught his hair in a
headband of red cedar bark. He had eaten only the roots of devil’s
club until the ribs poked from his flesh.
    How long had he been walking in these
mountains?
    He thought back to all the distance he had
covered: ground so sodden that water oozed up at each step, heavy
branches overhead that shut out the sun, undergrowth so thick he
could see only a few body lengths in any direction. Somewhere, he
had come through a tangled salmonberry thicket to a stream flowing
in a canyon, deep and silent. He had followed that stream upward to
vaporous heights ... upward ... upward. The stream had become a
creek, this creek below him.
    This place.
    Something real was living in him now.
    Abruptly, he sensed all of his dead
ancestors lusting after this living experience. His mind lay
pierced by sudden belief, by unending movement beneath the common
places of life, by an alertness which never varied, night or day.
He knew this bee!
    He said: “You are Kwatee, the Changer.”
    “And what are you?”
    “I am Katsuk.”
    “ What are you?” The question
thundered at him.
    He put down terror, thought: Thunder is
not angry. What frightens animals need not frighten a man. What am
I?
    The answer came to him as one of his
ancestors would have known it. He said: “I am one who followed the
ritual with care. I am one who did not really expect to find the
spirit power.”
    “Now you know.”
    All of his thinking turned over, became as
unsettled as a pool muddied by a big fish. What do I
know?
    The air around him continued full of dappled
sunlight and the noise and spray from the creek. The mushroom-punk
smell of a rotten log filled his nostrils. A stately, swaying leaf
shadow brushed purple across the bee on