The Purification Ceremony

by Mark T Sullivan

  “Then why?” I insisted. From his expression I could tell he was within another level of existence, in the world of hallucinogens and visions. I fought against a rising hysteria. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  “No, I have more respect for you than that.”

  “Then what — ” I began.

  He cut me off. “Don’t talk. Just do it.”

  My eyes watered as I lay down on my back on the deer hides and wrenched myself free of the waders. He took them and walked back toward the river and flung them into the darkness.

  He returned and watched without emotion as I stripped off my jacket, pants, vest, shirt and long underwear. I placed each article in front of me until there was a pile.

  “Finish,” he said.

  I slipped out of my panties and bra, but did not remove the leather-and-quillwork pouch around my neck.

  “Finish,” he said.

  “It’s the only thing I have of my family,” I said, shivering despite the intense heat coming from the fire. “I won’t take it off.”

  He threatened to explode, then went the other way and grinned. “You are very much like her,” he said.

  ‘‘Like who?” I asked, knowing already. “Was she your wife?”

  He stiffened. “She was more than my wife, she was my mate.” He walked around behind me, knelt and put his hands on my shoulders.

  I said nothing. I looked into the fire, tensing, waiting for the assault to begin. Instead, he bound my hands behind me with a thong of deer hide.

  “Do not fret,” he said. “During sacred rituals, the Mara’a-kame is forbidden from any sexual act, though I long to.”

  He crawled in front of me and looked at my body with obvious hunger. I glanced away, humiliated, as he tied my ankles together. When he was positive I couldn’t escape, he draped a hide around my shoulders and another over my legs.

  He stood back to admire his handiwork, then picked up the pile of my clothing and threw it into the fire. The gun was thrown in the river. Coming back, he turned over the charred remains of my clothes so they would burn completely, then added more wood until it sparked and shot flames toward the branches above. I turned my face away from the heat. There, protruding from the snow five feet from the edge of my shelter, was the broken femur bone of a deer. This must have been where he butchered the deer he had killed before taking the meat and the hides to the island, I thought.

  Meanwhile, he was fishing in his pack. He turned around with a smaller pipe than before, a second leather pouch with a strange blue design on it and three feathers: one black, one whitish, one copper. These he tucked into my hair.

  He sat next to me and watched the fire as he packed the pipe bowl. “This is a different mixture, Little Crow,” he announced, taking a burning stick from the fire and applying it to the bowl. “No visions. But all your senses will become razor-sharp, like a mirror reflecting perfectly all that is around you. The breath of the wolf, the hunting smoke.”

  I knew from past experience there was no fighting him, so I took the stem in my mouth and drew in a deep inhalation of the concoction.

  Inside, the smoke expanded and pressed out hot against my lungs. I coughed and hacked and teared, but took a second drag of it at his command. As he had predicted, there were none of the overpowering sensations I’d experienced earlier in the day, but the smoke had an almost immediate effect: my ears, eyes, nose, tongue and skin hummed. I could smell the river beyond the fire, and the poplar saplings on the island beyond that. I could see the shapes of trees out in what had been darkness. And then, to the west, I could hear the faint howling of wolves.

  He seemed to hear it, too, for he stood and crossed straight to his backpack. He brought out two more sacs of the deer blood. He bit at one with his teeth, then dripped some of it on the deer hide that covered my lap and continued dripping it in a diagonal line to a point about forty feet beyond the fire ring. He did the same thing in a second direction with the other sac. He threw the sacs into the fire, then hoisted the pack on his shoulder, picked up his bow and tied his quiver to his hip and leg. Even from twenty feet away I could hear his breath, shallow and quick now, the kind of breath you get when you have sighted game you wish to take.

  “You said you would not kill me.”

  “And I will not,” he answered, jerking his head west toward the Sticks River. “They will. They are my allies. They come every night and I feed them deer meat. Now they will feed on you, a sacrifice to my allies.”

  I struggled against the lashes. “You are crazy! She would think so, too!”

  Two huge strides and he was before me, his knife raised over my head. I bowed, awaiting the inevitable, preferring it to the prospect of the wolf pack.

  Instead, he knelt and said earnestly, as if he had to make me understand, as if I was the only one capable of understanding, “She loves me for what I am doing. For us the hunt was a divine ritual, a way of meeting God through the pattern of life and death that makes up this life. I am making the ritual clean again, as it was before her loss.”

  “No, you’re making it evil.”

  His expression hardened. “You don’t see, then, do you?” “I see a man gone mad from his wounds.”

  “Well, so be it,” he grunted. He stood. “I misjudged you. They are coming now. I must go to the camp of my enemy to complete the purification ceremony.”

  And then he was a form flowing into the shadow world beyond the fire and gone. The flames, leaping and sawing at the night sky just minutes ago, had waned, leaving just a crackling fire. Within minutes it would linger to embers. I twisted my arms and legs against the knots he had tied. But all I achieved was a dislodging of the deer robe from my shoulders; it sloughed off and settled around my waist. I gazed down at the ivory-and-black quills so tightly woven on the surface of my pouch and I wanted to cry.

  The wind picked up and clawed at my breasts like icy, sharp fingernails. I looked down at them in the firelight and was overcome with the vision of those late nights at home in Boston when I had held my babies and felt them draw milk from me; and all had been right and good and possible. I closed my eyes and let that sensation calm me for a few precious moments.

  I heard the first one padding toward me from my left. She traversed the drifts like coiled force, panting and lolling her tongue in anticipation. The thick hollow hairs of her winter coat caressed the willow whips along the riverbank. I smelled the blood he had dripped on me and the snow and the different, almost copper smell of the dried blood around the wolf’s muzzle from an earlier hunt. She did not come in close enough for me to see her at first.

  She waited until five others had joined her.

  A chunk of wood on the fire burned through and collapsed and the circle of light diminished. I sensed her advance, the others fanning out behind her. The clouds overhead broke and the moon shone through, bathing the crescent of land around me in a pale light.

  Two of the wolves growled and nosed the blood trail to my right. The other three sat on stumps about forty yards away, their topaz eyes reflecting the dying flames that offered my only protection.

  NOVEMBER TWENTY-SECOND

  A strange quiet swept over the midnight woods. It settled around me, raising bumps on my flesh, made me understand it was not a true quiet, more a white noise composed of monotonous rhythms, like chants or drumbeats heard from afar. The gentle din became the veil through which I watched the wolf closest to me drop its head and its center so its shoulder blades spiked above its spine, tail out straight. A hunting posture.

  I dug my heels into the deer skin and kicked back toward the rear wall of the shelter.

  The wolf growled and took two quick steps forward. The second wolf trailed the scout and stood at its hip, intent on me. Another step and suddenly a gust of wind bellowed the fire until it popped and sparked with renewed life. The smoke billowed out along the ground, grating at the eyes of the hunters. They sneezed, choked and retreated toward the rest of the pack. They would wait until the
fire died before they attacked.

  I was suddenly weaker than I’d ever been in my life, surprised I could even remain sitting upright. The vague forms watched me and I wondered if I’d have the will to die with dignity. Mitchell always maintained that death was just a passage to one of the other worlds, and what we leave behind becomes a new source of life. He buried the bones of his deer because he believed the animals would reenflesh themselves for future hunters. Would my flesh give Power to these wolves and so to the killer?

  The fire ebbed again. And in the shadows the she-wolf took a cautious stride to the right. I knew what she was doing from a story my father had told me years ago, after he’d witnessed a wolf pack take down a cow moose during a hunt he was on in northern Minnesota. She and her pack would try to flank me, to get behind me so they could tear at my back before going for my throat.

  She took another step and I flashed on my father’s body worried by scavengers and then on the bloody snow where this pack had torn at what was left of Patterson.

  The quiet started to envelop me again. Only to change its shape into seething anger when I thought of Patrick and Emily. I would not pass from this world meekly.

  I wrenched my arms and legs against the lashes, but they did not budge. The pack leader took three more steps, sinking into herself even as she moved. And the rest of them began to slowly fan out around me.

  The fire was perishing. I rolled to my side and got my feet under one of the deer hides and kicked it into the flames. The tallow and the hair sizzled, flared and sent forth an acrid, sickening smoke that forced the animals back several yards. I rolled around some more and tried to get my hands into the fire, to burn away the knots. The flames seared my palms. I screamed and threw myself forward away from the fire, facedown in the deer skins, sweating with effort despite my nakedness.

  The wolves growled behind me. My back was exposed. They wanted to attack, but the fire and the horrible smoke kept them at bay. I was struggling to get myself turned around when I saw the sharp femur bone sticking out of the snow five feet from my sanctuary.

  The killer’s smoke became my ally. I saw my escape, but the way was fraught with danger; to get to the broken bone I’d have to go away from the fire out into the snow. But there was no recourse, so I got to my knees without further thought and hopped forward to the edge of the deer skins. I sensed a wolf to my left take two steps in my direction. “Live or die,” I told myself. “Live or die.”

  With one great effort I thrust my body up and out. I came facedown on the side of the bone, feeling the jagged edge slice into my cheek. The scent of the sudden burst of my blood was blown to the wolves. They snarled. One howled. It was her, the alpha bitch; she knew I was wounded. She didn’t know how. She didn’t care. All she knew was that I was bleeding in the snow outside the heat of the dreaded fire.

  I got hold of the bone with my teeth even as the first wolf attacked from my right, then jackknifed my body, swinging my bound feet at it, feeling my heels thud against fur and the animal manage one rip at me before darting back to safety. No time now. I bent in two again, barely aware of the snow numbing my exposed skin. I rolled over and over and got back onto the deer hides.

  I spit out the bone and worked myself around to get it into my hands. I set the jagged edge into the rawhide and began sawing, only to slip and gash my left arm above the wrist. The blood ran freely down my arms, but I held tight to the bone, repositioning it on the lashes even as the increased volume of the blood scent reached the pack and the she-wolf howled as if to say time was on her side.

  “You believe I’m dying today, bitch, but I’m not,” I said, grinning wildly into the darkness. “You, on the other hand, might want to think about it.’:

  The fire retreated to the tip of a single branch as thick as my wrist.

  Twenty-five yards behind me, there was a scratching noise in the snow. I glanced over my shoulder to see the beta animal — a scrawnier, meaner version of the pack leader — gather his legs and charge. Frantic, I sawed one last time at the hide, feeling it catch, cut and break through. I rolled over and toward the wolf even as he leapt, teeth bared. I drove the tip of the broken bone into his throat.

  The impact blew me back and down. The wolf bit at my arm reflexively, not understanding what I’d done. His teeth tore a ragged gouge below my elbow before he entered his death throes and released me. He squirmed and bucked and whined.

  His nails scored my stomach before he flipped over between me and the fire. He clawed furiously at the white bone showing at his throat. His muzzle, now peppered with bright, frothy blood, jawed at the air and then stilled.

  I got to my knees in time to witness the alpha bitch utter a low-toned growl, then race forward from about fifty yards away. The others spread out and came on, too. I grabbed the closest deer hide to me with my left hand and threw myself forward across the dead wolf toward the fire. The dried fat on the back side of the hide exploded into flames even as I grabbed the last remaining burning branch. I tried to stand but couldn’t; my ankles were still tightly bound. I would fight on my knees.

  She dashed in at me from an angle. And I waited until she dipped her head, preparing for her attack bound. When she did, I stabbed forward with the glowing branch. She came up fast and hard and into the burning tip with her eye. Her screams as she writhed away into the darkness were from another realm.

  I turned and slashed with the branch at the first of the three subordinate wolves coming in behind me, then flung the flaming deer hide onto its back. It howled and spun in circles, trying to rid itself of the fire that now fed on its fur. The other two wolves jumped back at the apparition of their burning brother and turned tail after him when he fled, smoking, into the night.

  I froze next to the dead wolf, listening, looking, waiting for the forms to attack again. But the strange quiet was gone.

  There was only the normal sounds of the woods at night: the soft bumping of branches in the stiffening breeze, the hoot of the owl, the rush of the river, the rustle of dead leaves. Above me, the clouds had broken fully. The full moon bathed the forest in a gentle light. It was all familiar and comforting. Yet against and within all of this I noticed something that had the quality of a deja vu; it was an insistent, oscillating force that seemed to permeate everything around me and contained both good and evil in equal measure. I understood that it had always been there, but that I had never noticed it before.

  I broke down then, sobbing at all that I’d been through. A trembling took hold of me. My stomach contracted and I threw up the food I’d eaten in the cave not more than an hour before.

  The convulsions finally stopped, but the shuddering went on. It became more violent, and I realized I was chattering, too, and probably going into shock from exposure. I needed to warm myself or I’d die.

  I set my feet against the dead wolf and freed the femur bone and cut my ankles free. Needlelike pain shot through my feet when I stood, but I accepted it. I wrapped one of the deer hides around my waist as I would a bath towel and caped a second about my shoulders. The lower trunks of the pines around the shelter were thick with dead limbs, and within minutes I had the fire roaring again and my toes were returning to life.

  For several moments I considered trying to ride out the five hours until dawn beside the fire, but the madman’s vow to kill everyone on the estate demanded that I move. I tended to my wounds first, pressing snow into the gash on my cheek until the bleeding stopped, and then binding my left forearm with a charred strip of my shirt that had been blown clear of the fire. The teeth wounds on my shin and shoulder were superficial, but oozed. With luck they would not infect before I could get to Arnie.

  I took a rock and cracked it against the bone until a piece broke free, exposing a sharper edge. With it I sliced some of the hide into six long strips about a foot wide. These I wrapped in double thicknesses around my feet, then lashed them to just below my knee with narrower strips of hide. From there to mid-thigh I similarly fastened a single thickness of th
e hide. I cut in two the deer skin I’d been using for a skirt. I rewrapped one of the pieces around my waist — a short skirt I could run in. I hacked a slit in the center of the second piece and put my head into it. It fit like a smock. From a third hide I fashioned a long, hooded robe that I cinched at my neck and girded at my waist. I cut two smaller pieces of hide and secured them to my hands for mittens. I broke off the back portion of the deer bone, then set a pine branch up into the marrow channel and wrapped the connection tight with hide. A flimsy spear, but better than nothing.

  I was about to leave when I noticed my leather-and-quillwork pouch lying in the snow, torn from me during the fight. The woman’s photograph lay beside it, scratched and bloodied. I wanted to despise her, but I couldn’t; I’d felt the love he had for her and understood that somehow she’d been transformed from innocent victim to talisman in a psychotic’s twisted scheme of vengeance. I tucked the photo back inside the pouch, then retied it around my neck.

  I looked at the wolf already going rigid in the charcoalcolored melt by the fire ring, knowing well that wolves tend to avoid humans and only in rare instances attack them. I wondered at the swirl of pulsing energy I’d sensed after the rest of the wolves had fled. What dark corner of what plane of existence had this man tapped into with his bastardized ceremonies and the hallucinogens in his pipe? And what were the other forces he commanded that I had not yet witnessed?

  I stopped to stroke the wolf’s dense fur. “Watch over me,” I whispered.

  Then I stood, took a bearing on the log-landing where Patterson had dropped me off that first day and set off.

  The drugs that the killer had made me smoke no longer ruled my head; they had settled and become the lenses through which I viewed the world.

  The moonlight filtered angularly through the forest canopy and bounced off the snow of yesterday’s storm now firming in the frigid air, now casting the landscape before me in a troubled glow. The dark jade and hammered-iron shapes of the trees clawed at the light, broke it, made it their own.