Soul Catcher Read Free Page A

his hand, withdrew.
    He emptied his mind of everything except
what he needed to know from the spirit poised upon his hand. He lay
frozen in the-moment-of-the-bee. Bee was graceful, fat, and funny.
Bee aroused a qualm of restless memories, rendered his senses
abnormally acute. Bee ...
    An image of Janiktaht overcame his mind.
Misery filled him right out to the skin. Janiktaht—sixty nights
dead. Sixty nights since she had ended her shame and hopelessness
in the sea.
    He had a vision of himself moaning besides
Janiktaht’s open grave, drunk with anguish, the swaying wind of the
forest all through his flesh.
    Awareness recoiled. He thought of himself as
he had been once, as a boy heedlessly happy on the beach, following
the tide mark. He remembered a piece of driftwood like a dead hand
outspread on the sand.
    Had that been driftwood?
    He felt the peril of letting his thoughts
flow. Who knew where they might go? Janiktaht’s image faded,
vanished as though of its own accord. He tried to recall her face.
It fled him through a blurred vision of young hemlocks ... a
moss-floored stand of trees where nine drunken loggers had dragged
her to ... one after another, to ...
    Something had happened to flesh which his
mind no longer could contemplate without being scoured out, denuded
of everything except a misshapen object that the ocean had cast up
on a curve of beach where once he had played.
    He felt like an old pot, all emotion scraped
out. Everything eluded him except the spirit on the back of his
hand. He thought:
    We are like bees, my people—broken into many
pieces, but the pieces remain dangerous.
    In that instant, he realized that this
creature on his hand must be much more than Changer—far, far more
than Kwatee.
    It is Soul Catcher!
    Terror and elation warred within him. This
was the greatest of the spirits. It had only to sting him and he
would be invaded by a terrible thing. He would become the bee of
his people. He would do a terrifying thing, a dangerous thing, a
deadly thing.
    Hardly daring to breathe, he waited.
    Would Bee never move? Would they remain this
way for all eternity? His mind felt drawn tight, as tense as a bow
pulled to its utmost breaking point. All of his emotions lay closed
up in blackness without inner light or outer light—a sky of
nothingness within him.
    He thought: How strange for a creature so
tiny to exist as such spirit power, to be such spirit power—Soul
Catcher!
    One moment there had been no bee on his
flesh. Now, it stood there as though flung into creation by a spray
of sunlight, brushed by leaf shadow, the shape of it across a vein,
darkness of the spirit against dark skin.
    A shadow across his being.
    He saw Bee with intense clarity: the swollen
abdomen, the stretched gossamer of wings, the pollen dust on the
legs, the barbed arrow of the stinger.
    The message of this moment floated through
his awareness, a clear flute sound. If the spirit went away
peacefully, that would signal reprieve. He could return to the
university. Another year, in the week of his twenty-sixth birthday,
he would take his doctorate in anthropology. He would shake off
this terrifying wildness which had invaded him at Janiktaht’s
death. He would become the imitation white man, lost to these
mountains and the needs of his people.
    This thought saddened him. If the spirit
left him, it would take both of his souls. Without souls, he would
die. He could not outlast the sorrows which engulfed him.
    Slowly, with ancient deliberation, Bee
turned short of his knuckles. It was the movement of an orator
gauging his audience. Faceted eyes included the human in their
focus. Bee’s thorax arched, abdomen tipped, and he knew a surge of
terror in the realization that he had been chosen ...
    The stinger slipped casually into his
nerves, drawing his thoughts, inward, inward ...
    He heard the message of Tamanawis, the
greatest of spirits, as a drumbeat matching the beat of his heart:
“You must find a white. You must find a