The Purification Ceremony

by Mark T Sullivan

  Arnie tore headlong off the porch into the snow, stumbled, tried to rise and stumbled again. I swung my rifle toward Arnie, then the door, then back to Arnie. The powder snow clung to his eyebrows and around his nostrils. His mouth, pinked by the wet snow, arched open. He tried to scream, but made no noise.

  I was up and running, foolishly trying to zigzag across the clearing. But after fifty yards in that white quicksand, I was too tired to do anything but plow on in a straight line, exposed, vulnerable. By the time I reached the Quonset hut, Arnie had dragged himself over next to the storage shed, where he cowered.

  I went up the front steps slowly, then ducked into the murky interior with the gun before me. It was colder inside than out. Breath came like clouds from Griff and Cantrell, floated and disappeared in the rafters. The outfitter slouched on a broken couch. His eyes were closed. His pistol was tossed beside him. Griff was on the floor, his back to the wall, his head in his hands.

  There was a third man inside, a man with a splotchy gray beard looking at me with open, filmy eyes. He was rocked back on his knees in the far corner, hands gripping the vanes and nock of a cedar arrow which showed at his throat. The broadhead was lodged behind his neck in the wall. Hoar coated his skin. Made him perfectly white. Except for the dull red crystals frozen in a downward stream from the corners of his lips.

  I was unable to let my attention wander from the dead man, unable even to shiver. It occurred to me that if my children were to know what I was facing at this moment, they would never sleep again. I suppose this is the terror we all eventually confront.

  With luck, it does not occur until we are past caring. What frightened me more than the dead man was the fact that I was nowhere near as horrified as I’d been finding Patterson and Grover. Was I approaching the point of being past caring?

  “Who is he?” I asked weakly.

  Cantrell didn’t open his eyes. “Must be Pawlett, the trapper that Barney, the floatplane pilot, said was missing.”

  “How long’s he been like that?”

  “Cold as it is, two, maybe three weeks.”

  “Radiophone?”

  “Smashed. Looks like he was going for it when they caught up to him.”

  Griff picked his head up. He’d aged in the past half hour. “We don’t know if it was them. I mean, he’s not scalped. And there’s no feather in his mouth.”

  “Because he’s not a hunter, not one of us,” I said. I told them the theory that Kurant and I had come up with earlier that morning. “I think this guy may have just gotten in the way.”

  Cantrell rubbed his sleeve along his beard. “Then they’ve been in here, in the forest here, for a long time, planning this.”

  “Not planning,” I said. “Scouting.”

  I regretted saying that the moment the words passed my lips. The idea that two, maybe more, people had been roaming the woods looking for places they might kill us was as debilitating a thought as I’d ever had.

  A floorboard grumbled behind me. Cantrell lunged for his pistol. Griff scrambled to stand. I spun, my gun rising toward the silhouetted figure in the doorway. Arnie dropped his rifle on the stoop and threw his hands up.

  “Don’t shoot! Jesus, don’t!”

  My throat choked with heat. And I knew I wasn’t past caring. Not yet anyway. I let down my rifle. “Don’t ever do that again, Doctor,” I whispered.

  Arnie didn’t move for a second. He blinked several times, groping at control. He stared down at his pants. “I pissed myself,” he said meekly.

  I saw his humiliation and said, “Who wouldn’t with three guns pointing at them?”

  The pediatrician attempted a weak smile. “I want to go back. We’re going back, right?’:

  “Soon,” Cantrell said.

  “It will be dark in a couple of hours,” Arnie said.

  “I know,” Cantrell said.

  “But…”

  “Soon.”

  “What about him?” Griff asked, gesturing toward Pawlett.

  “Leave him,” Cantrell said. “We’ve got nowhere to put him and I don’t think he minds.”

  “I mind,” Griff said. He walked over to the trapper and, grimacing, reached behind Pawlett’s head to take hold of the arrow shaft below the broadhead. Griff gave a tremendous tug that freed the steel from the wood. He put Pawlett, still in that praying position, on his side. “There a blanket or a tarp or something we can cover him with?”

  Cantrell looked around, then headed off toward a door in the corner. Without prompting, we all followed.

  In the kitchen, rancid grease coated the cast-iron skillet on the cookstove. Griff tugged on a heavy door across from the sink. The carcass of a spike buck stripped of meat hung from a rafter inside the cold-storage locker.

  “They were living here for a while if they ate all of that,” Griff said.

  Cantrell knelt, reached into the corner beyond the deer and brought out what looked like a dog’s leg. He studied it, his nostrils flaring. “Timber wolf,” he said. “Gray phase.”

  Without another word, Cantrell tossed the leg back inside the locker. He went out into the main room and crossed to a latched door next to the entryway. I was right behind him. The others lagged. Narrow beams of light, barely enough to let us know this was the bunkroom, shone through canvas that had been nailed about the window frames.

  In the darkness I kicked something. It fell and there was a flash of phosphorescent light and a ringing explosion. I dove to the ground expecting more gunfire, frantically trying to get my safety off and figure out where it had come from. Now Arnie and Griff were shouting outside the door. I boxed at my ears, trying to get the ringing to stop. We lay there for what seemed a long time.

  “Diana, you all right?” Cantrell whispered at last.

  “Yes; you?”

  “Still breathing. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see where the shot came from.” Behind me, the door cracked open and I cringed. A shaft of light cut into the room. Cantrell squirmed forward on his belly to get behind a bunk bed. I was scrambling back into the shadows when I saw what it was that I’d kicked: a lever-action rifle still smoking from discharge.

  “It’s all right,” I called to Cantrell. I pointed at the gun. He shut his eyes. “I thought I was a goner.”

  I yelled to Griff and Arnie. “C’mon, I kicked over a loaded gun.”

  Griff had a flashlight in his hand. Arnie came in behind him, pale and shaking. “I want to go,” he said. “Right now.”

  Griff patted him on the shoulder. “Let me get a blanket and we’re out of here.”

  Griff stepped inside. He cast the beam around the room. He found a blanket on the nearest bunk and went out. I had Arnie train his flashlight on the gun, a model 94 with a chipped stock and faded bluing. And next to it, a pack stained with tobacco juice and other grimes. There was little in the pack: a mess kit, a knife, .30-.30 shells, some jerky, dried fruit and a rain poncho.

  “Probably Pawlett’s,” I said.

  “Why would he leave his gun in here?” Arnie asked, gripping his own rifle a little tighter.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I took the flashlight from Arnie and shone it deep into the room. The dust had been disturbed back there and I walked over to a heavy oak table against the wall. Several pools of white candle wax caked the tabletop. And between them, quivering in the wind blowing through the open door, were bits of bird down.

  “It’s them, all right,” I said. I squinted at a chunk of something black lying on the table against the wall.

  I set my gun against the table and reached out to it, immediately recoiling at the thin, soft bristle that brushed my palm. I turned with realization and, choking, I elbowed my way past Cantrell and Arnie. I ran now toward the kitchen, holding my hand before me as if I’d burned it on hot embers. The hand pump in the sink was rusty and it shrieked when I worked it, even after the icy water erupted over my skin.

  Griff found me there. My hand was turning a purplish color fro
m the frigid bath and the scrubbing I was giving it with the coarse dishcloth. He took the cloth and drew me away from the sink. My knees threatened to buckle and he grabbed me.

  “That was human hair, a scalp… ” I whimpered.

  “I know,” Griff said. “There was blood on the table, too.”

  The implication set in and I held tighter to him and closed my eyes. I wanted to be anywhere but British Columbia. I wanted to be home, normal, listening to Kevin prattle about his latest publishing coup.

  “Hour of daylight left,” Cantrell called grimly. “Better we start hoofing for the snowmobiles or we’ll get caught out here.”

  They say time accelerates in the presence of danger, but for me the opposite was true; the three-hour trip back to the Metcalfe Estate plodded. I could not shake the sensation of the hair and dried flesh against my skin. It had awakened something in me, something I didn’t know I could feel. I knew that no matter what happened, I would not allow myself to be disfigured like that. It was that realization that made me understand for the first time that I might have to kill a human to survive this ordeal. I wondered if I could.

  The creeping effect of this confrontation was a winding of my intestines and a knot at my scapula. On the phone one night about a month after my forced exile from our home, Kevin and I had had a vicious argument about the trip to Metcalfe. He accused me of barbarism. I told him the hunt was an ancient tradition with a stiff moral underpinning; unlike him, a commercial carnivore, I accepted the moral weight of my canine teeth. Kevin claimed it was a savage act, no different from killing a human, maybe worse, in fact, because the motivations were so suspect in this day and age.

  But killing a human was different. I knew it was true and yet I couldn’t tell Kevin why I knew it was true; that wound, scabbed over for nearly fifteen years, was still festering and continued to fester on the ride back to the estate.

  Overlying all of that was the knowledge that we were trapped in here, that my life might no longer be measured in decades, but in days. For an instant I allowed myself to consider how Patrick and Emily would deal with my dying out here.

  The idea so sickened me that I quashed it immediately; such thinking could corrode resolve, make me less than the woman I would have to be to survive the coming days.

  Whether it was emotional fatigue or an instinctual need to retreat, I somehow slept on the back of the snowmobile for the last ten miles to the lodge. Griff nudged me awake as we entered the yard. A single light glowed through the stained-glass window of the stags on the second floor of the lodge. The lower windows were dark.

  The kitchen door opened and now we could see them all crowded at it. Our faces said enough.

  “They’re not coming, are they?” Theresa said.

  Cantrell shook his head. “Radio’s smashed.”

  “Phil’s been shot,” Butch said.

  “What?” Arnie cried. “Is he okay? Don’t tell me he’s not okay!”

  “Flesh wound,” Butch said. “He’s upstairs, locked in the middle bedroom.”

  The pediatrician bulled his way inside. The others pressed in around us, jabbing the air with questions. Sheila forced her way to the front and told the others to let us in out of the cold. I stepped inside the kitchen, instantly surrounded by the odor of frying onions and garlic. I’d forgotten how enveloping warmth and scent can be. I soaked in it, oblivious to the anxious chatter about me. I limped forward into the great room and slumped into one of the overstuffed chairs by the fire. The others trickled in.

  In turns, Griff, Arnie and Cantrell laid out what had happened. Kurant peppered them with questions. I was so tired I couldn’t speak.

  When Griff described Pawlett’s fate, they became visibly shaken. Even Nelson reached out to the wall for support. After it had sunk in, Butch slapped his hand on his thigh. “Philly was shot at with a cedar arrow, too.”

  “What happened?” Cantrell demanded of his guide.

  Nelson held his palms up. “I ordered everyone to stay here in the lodge for the day. But the guy’s got his own mind. He managed to slip out around midmorning. He says he just meant to hunt around the camp — ”

  “Where is he?” Cantrell jumped in. “I want to hear it from him.”

  Nelson motioned up the staircase toward the second floor. “He’s a stubborn bastard, eh? Couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t try to go out again, especially after what happened. Took his gun away and locked him up there in the old man’s bedroom.”

  “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?”