I knew Arnie was there, but seeing Cantrell stop made me jumpy. I slid the safety off the .35 Whelan pump I’d taken from the Metcalfe collection and brought the rifle to my shoulder. The Whelan was a brush-cutting gun with a heavy bullet that created a lot of killing energy in close. In close was where I, the shadow hunter, was likely to have an encounter with Ryan. I got up tight against a tree for stability and looked down the iron sights at Cantrell, reassured by the familiar heft of the gun; my father had used a Whelan for his hunts in the cedar swamps near our cabin near Baxter Park.
It was not my perfect little .257 Roberts, but I had shot a rifle like this many times as a girl and that was comforting.
To my relief, Cantrell continued his jerky, weakened animal stride up the slope. I eased the safety on and trailed, craning my neck to all sides, alert for any motion, any noise, any whiff of attack.
I straddled a log, cracking a branch. With a cackling that almost stopped my heart, a flock of willow ptarmigan burst from beneath the snow between my legs and flushed crazily through the trees toward the outfitter. He spun in his tracks, a long-barreled pistol thrust before him, the terror of anticipation plastered across his face. One of the birds tore by him at eight feet. Instinctively he swung the muzzle of the pistol at the bird before letting his right arm and the gun drop wearily to his thigh.
The echo of the cackling birds died. Cantrell and I ogled each other across the seventy yards that separated us.
There were no words between us, but I could feel the overwhelming pressure that had gathered around him in the past few hours; he and I were playing a game with infinitely high stakes, a game where there would only be losers. Who would lose? A question chanted by Cantrell and me and everyone else in the woods that dreary morning.
This hunt had been Cantrell’s idea. A simple variation off a tactic used by deer hunters everywhere. He and Nelson had decided to limit our options and so Ryan’s. On the map in the great room of the lodge, Cantrell had used a grease pencil to highlight a mile-long by half-mile-wide corridor north of the beaver-pond flat where Ryan had wounded Earl and south of the high ridges Nelson and I had chased him across before losing him in the feeder stream of the Sticks. The terrain was marked by four interconnected razor-backed slopes, no more than three hundred vertical feet in elevation, each no more than two hundred yards apart, all feeding onto the flat-topped rise where Arnie waited. On the map, the razor-backs looked like the gnarled, bony hand of an old man. On each of the fingers, high in a tree stand like Arnie’s, a hunter waited. Theresa sat in a hemlock about a quarter of a mile east of me, on the knuckle of the first finger. Kurant’s position was on the same finger, but well out toward the nail. Kurant hated being there, hunting, but he knew he had no choice; Ryan was unlikely to make distinctions as to who would live or die. Griff covered the first joint beyond the knuckle of the second finger, Phil the second joint of the ring finger. Nelson was west of me on the knuckle of the pinkie. Cantrell had put his wife on the nail of the shortest finger, the place he felt was strategically the safest location, the stand least likely to see action.
Once Sheila had accepted that her husband was determined to go out as bait, she demanded to be out in the woods, too.
“No,” Cantrell said. “I can’t let you go.”
But Sheila had stood her ground, showing the inner toughness that had enabled her to stand by her man even in the wake of Lizzy Ryan’s killing. “If you think I’m sitting in this lodge while you go out and try to get yourself killed, you’re out of your mind, eh?”
As it was, there was very little sleep in the hours between the planning of the hunt and the execution. Long before dawn we moved Earl and Lenore to a room on the second floor of the lodge. Arnie had changed the dressing on Earl’s back, dosed him again with antibiotics and painkillers, then handed Lenore a shotgun. As she’d closed the door behind her, I thought of her sitting in the hard wooden chair next to her husband, facing the door alone for the rest of the day, wondering at any noise in the floorboards beyond. I could not have stood it. Better to be out in the elements, moving.
We’d left the estate an hour before daylight, all of us on foot, Cantrell and I walking each stander to his tree. There we screwed in metal foot pegs to take us twenty-five feet up, then attached metal stands to the trees with chains. The shooters were in place by 8 A.M., fighting the dank cold, trying to remain motionless in the trees while Cantrell and I wandered between the finger ridges, hoping to draw Ryan into our trap.
The strategy was sound. Ryan had demonstrated with his attack on the lodge that he was willing to take almost any chance to complete his twisted ceremony. But instead of trying to cut his track and deal with him in the chaos of the open woods, the outfitter wanted to control the parameters of the hunt by restricting our setup to this small chunk of terrain. Our goal was to lure Ryan into one of the funnels between the fingers where either I or the standers could get a shot before he got to Cantrell.
Now, however, I had my first pangs of doubt. I’d been dogging the outfitter for nearly three hours and completed three loops in and around the razor-backs without sign of Ryan. On the radio there was an increase in the volume of whispered, desperate chatter: “Seen anything?” “No, you?”
“Nothing.” “I don’t like this.”
Cantrell slid the pistol into his shoulder holster. He took off his baseball cap and wiped his brow with his sleeve. He got out a water bottle from his fanny pack and drank from it. Then he nodded to me and gestured toward the ridge where Arnie waited. I signaled back that I’d be right behind him. I checked my watch 11:31 A.M.
The first shot was a flat cracking explosion behind me, over my left shoulder. And then a second and a third, all of them from the far side of the first finger, midway down the shelf.
“Theresa!” I despaired. One of the two standers we’d believed least likely to encounter Ryan had shot first. I sprinted back toward her position along the trail we’d gouged in the snow. As I ran I tugged the radio from my belt and shouted into it, “That’s Theresa shooting! Stay off the radio until I call you. Cantrell! Cantrell! Listen to me: if she’s missed, he’s going to loop. Move toward her southsoutheast. I’ll go straight at her.”
“Okay,” came the outfitter’s hoarse reply. I didn’t turn to see where he’d gone. He was on his own now. I couldn’t be the shadow anymore.
“Theresa?” I huffed into the radio. “Theresa, answer me!” “Get down here!” she whined in return. “I think I hit him, but I can’t see him anymore. Hurry!”
Theresa hugged the trunk of the fir we’d selected for her earlier that morning. Her face, barely visible under a green wool cap, had an anxious sheen to it. She tottered in the tree stand upon seeing me, then got her balance and shakily pointed the barrel of her rifle south toward the ridgeline.
“Down there, eh?” she panted. “Just on the edge of the last shelf near that blowdown larch tree I heard this godawful screaming, like a baby with colic or something. And then on the other side of the larch I see this white blob moving. You said he’d be wearing white camouflage, so I figured he was crawling along out there and I shot until I couldn’t see him moving anymore.”
She hugged the tree tighter, flattening her enormous breasts. “You don’t think I’ve killed him?”
“I don’t know, Theresa. We’ll have to go see.”
Theresa shook her head, her mouth slack and open. “I can’t go down there not knowing. If he’s dead I don’t want to see what I’ve done, no matter what he’s done to us. I.. I was never much of a hunter.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I need you to cover me.”
She nodded uncertainly, then got her arm free of the tree trunk and faced south.
Forty yards beyond Theresa’s stand, the clearing gave way to scrub spruces. Tufts of pale weeds poked through the surface of the windblown snow. I went from tree to tree, pausing behind each to scan the terrain below me.
“Diana?” Cantrell called on the radio. “I can see Theresa
in her tree and you about three hundred yards east of me.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Then come in slow toward that shelf about fifty yards south of me. That’s where she saw him before she shot.”
I edged closer, the butt of the Whelan an inch from my shoulder. I dissected the grid around the larch for any hint of motion, the barest speck of sound. Cantrell came into my field of vision, slow, rolling his toe into the snow before settling on his heel. He braced the pistol with both hands. As he came in line with the larch, he gestured to me to stop.
“There’s blood ahead of me, other side of the tree,” he whispered into the radio.
Everything changed. I searched for a crumpled figure on the forest floor. But there was only snow and ice-clad branches clawing through snow. I made it to the tree trunk and peered over, instantly sickened by the blood and the decapitated form of a giant snowshoe hare. I swallowed, got across the log and picked up the headless animal. Its back leg dangled at an obtuse angle, broken not by the impact of a rifle bullet, but by the bending force of powerful human hands.
My mind raced, trying to decide why Ryan would break the animal’s leg before throwing it onto the shelf, only to have my weakened train of thought shattered by a fourth gunshot, this one full and blasting and close. I threw myself flat behind the log, then scrambled around to see where Theresa was aiming.
“It’s not her!” Cantrell yelled. “That’s Kurant!” He ran forward, caught sight of me still holding the rabbit, hesitated, then took off to the east, calling over his shoulder, “Ryan’s looped the other way!”
I sprinted after the outfitter, the Whelan in my left hand, the radio in my right. “Kurant? Kurant?”
“He screamed and I shot!” Kurant came back. “He’s still screaming, but I can’t see him. What should I do?”
“Don’t shoot again unless you’re sure it’s him!” I called back. “No one shoot unless you’re sure it’s him. He’s using — ”
I tripped over a log in mid-stride. The radio flew from my hand and disappeared in the snow.
I didn’t have time to search for it now. I had to keep up with Cantrell. He was a possessed man, sure that he was close, that the end of his nightmare was at hand. One way or another. I got up and went after him, driven by the notion that I could save Cantrell from Ryan, or at least from himself. We endure times of crisis by telling ourselves the prettiest lies we can imagine.
The rabbit was still screaming when we came upon it in a shallow depression one hundred and ten yards east of Kurant’s stand. The rabbit writhed and squalled and spun on its side, unable to comprehend that its back leg was shattered and no good anymore. Kurant’s shot had struck two feet high, debarking a stump.
Cantrell leaned against a big boulder, kneading at his side, his breaths coming in great gasps. “What’s he doing with this rabbit shit?” Cantrell demanded. His skin was gray. His head swiveled in one direction and then another, sure that at any moment an arrow would fly at his chest.
The stitches in my palm and forearm ached. My head pounded from the exertion. But I forced out the only explanation I could come up with: “Decoy. He’s using them to figure out where we are and where we’re weakest. The rabbits scream and hobble around. We shoot and he knows where we are and what we’re capable of.”
Cantrell squinted in thought, followed immediately by a look of pure exultation. “Then he’s gonna go north toward the next finger! At Griff and then Nelson!”
Cantrell took off again, quickly finding the deep trough of a path we’d all tramped down from Kurant’s stand to Griff’s earlier that morning. I tried my best to stay with him as he poured downhill toward the swale that separated the two razor-backed ridges, but Cantrell was mad with adrenaline, sure that he was a step ahead of Ryan. By the time we reached the bottom, he was more than a hundred yards ahead of me, a ghost of a figure in the sleet and the wet snow falling. And then gone.
The pain in my hand and forearm had gotten worse. I suppose I had not physically or mentally recovered yet from my ordeals in the cave and with the wolf pack. I stopped, doubled over, trying to catch my breath.
I reached for the radio to warn Griff of what was coming and then cursed; the radio was back there in the snow below Kurant’s stand. Cantrell’s carefully thought out funnel hunt was dissolving into exactly the chaotic scene he’d hoped to avoid.
I had taken only two steps down the trail Cantrell had followed when a blip of information registered in my peripheral vision. The faint shadow of a track heading not northwest toward Griff, but true north. Toward Sheila.
“Cantrell!” I screamed. “Cantrell!”
But the wind had picked up, and with it the suffocating din of pelting snow and sleet. He would not have heard me at eighty yards, much less the two or three hundred that now separated us.
I turned, a growing knot pressing in my stomach. We’d mistaken Ryan’s ultimate goal. He didn’t want Cantrell to die more than the rest of us. He wanted the outfitter to feel the same absolute sucking vacuum of emotion he’d endured witnessing Lizzy’s last breath. He didn’t just want Cantrell to die. He wanted Cantrell to suffer before he died.
And then I was running again, true north, my stride matching the long, loping, purposeful gait echoed in the snow before me. For an instant I saw myself racing down the front lawn of my parents’ home toward the gazebo and the prone figure of my mother.
Tears flowed down my cheeks and the knot moved from my stomach to my throat as I babbled, “Don’t do it, Ryan. She’s innocent. Please don’t do it!”
By the time I made it around the tip of the third finger, I was grasping at hope, telling myself that somehow Sheila would see Ryan first, that any moment now gunfire would break the evil spell that embraced these woods. I broke away from Ryan’s track halfway across the brief dip between the third and fourth fingers and cut diagonally at Sheila’s stand. If he held to the manner of approach he’d used with Theresa and Kurant, Ryan would circle Sheila and come at her from the north.
I might have time.
The snow on the south face of Sheila’s razor-back was deep and dense with moisture. I flailed my way up the slope, frantically scanning between the trees for the open hardwood glen in which we’d placed her stand before dawn.
I couldn’t find it. I was on top now, but still surrounded by thick softwoods. And then it dawned on me: I’d misjudged my position by a good twenty degrees; I was west of Sheila by at least two hundred yards. I held the stock of the Whelan before me like a battering ram and snapped dead branches and snow-laden limbs out of my way in a pell-mell rush east.
Ryan must have heard me coming. For as I broke from the fir trees his legs and arms were already spinning in space, gyrating to keep his body vertical as he dropped the twenty feet from the metal pegs we’d screwed into Sheila’s tree. Her body swung a few feet below the base of the portable tree stand, supported and bowed by the nylonwebbing safety strap Cantrell had insisted she lash around her waist. A cedar arrow jutted from her rib cage.
I slid to one knee as Ryan landed, casting the Whelan to my shoulder, trying to find his chest in the peep sight as he struggled for footing. He had the bow in one hand and a knife in the other. He’d been trying to cut her down when I appeared.
Ryan’s head came up then and he looked right at me, comprehension followed by disbelief, followed in turn by a screwing of his gaze into a penetrating concentration. And in that instant, that instant when I should have squeezed the trigger, I felt my heart seize and I was back in the cave with him, overwhelmed by sorrow and the primitive chants and the hallucinogenic smoke. I saw Lizzy Ryan die. I saw my mother worry the hem of her nightgown on the last morning of her life.
Both images melted into a shifting kaleidoscope of refracting and reflecting images: my mother dead on the grass near the gazebo, Lizzy plucking wet clothes from a wicker basket.
“No!” I shouted, understanding suddenly that he’d used his power over me to cause the mome
nt of hesitation. But that was all he needed. Ryan dove sideways and rolled toward the bank even as I swung with him shotgun-style, fired, pumped the action and fired again.
“I missed him,” I said numbly. “I had a clear sight picture, Griff, and I missed him… twice.”
Griff had his arms around me. Cantrell knelt below the snow-coated body of his wife, which swung in the gusty wind like a weather vane. He had not uttered a sound since his arrival in the clearing. He had gone vacant, dropped to his knees and stared up at Sheila with the resigned look of the doomed.
Phil was climbing up the pegs to get her down. Arnie was helping. Kurant was off at the edge of the clearing. After he’d vomited, he’d gotten out his camera and was taking photos.
Theresa would come no closer than the edge of the clearing. As if drawing near would make her susceptible to Sheila’s fate. She kept her back turned to us, holding tight to Nelson.
“You said she was dead when you got here,” Griff soothed. “There was nothing you could do.”
I pushed back out of his grasp, seeing not Griff through my tears but a blurred, white-haired man. “I’m always late, aren’t I? Aren’t I?”
“I don’t know, Little Crow,” Griff said, confused. “Are you?”
“You know I am!” I cried. He reached for me, but I swung my arms violently as if to strike him and Sheila and everything churning in my mind. My shoulders became heavy and I wanted more than anything to lie down in the snow and sleep forever. But overriding it all was the desperate need to explain to Cantrell why I’d been unable to save his wife.
I knelt next to the outfitter. Phil had swung her body around the side of the tree. Arnie was reaching for her. Cantrell still stared upward, unseeing.
“Mike, I… I tried to get to her, but I got lost.”
He gave no indication he’d heard me and I said it again.
He turned his head and looked through me. He spoke in a flat, terrible voice. “I been losing myself since the day I helped murder Lizzy Ryan. Only thing that kept me from disappearing from this world was Sheila. Lost? It’s all lost now. All lost.”
The Purification Ceremony Page 24