Under the twin attacks of discomfort and sun, the Indian tried as he had tried so many times to put his memory chains together. But they lay apart, separated by bloody gaps. Here he saw a piece of hospital sheet, there a fragment of a troop carrier. And further over there was his grandfather sitting before an orange fire, rocking in his chair and talking to him. He was trying to say something, but no words came out of his mouth.
The sun climbed higher.
The Indian wondered if he was out of his own time. Perhaps the spirits had been chased away by automobiles and machinery. But he did not really believe that. He knew they lived. He knew they had lived long before the white man came into the land. They had lived long before that man was nailed to a cross. They still lived.
On the third day, flies circled the Indian’s head, attracted by the possibility of death. The Indian did not swat them. He had been drenched by a passing thunderstorm, and now it was a race between enlightenment and death by exhaustion. His mouth had dried and his tongue was swelling with thirst. The Montana valley folded upon itself and spun around. He was in a perpetual daze, in which time had slowed down and he was no longer bound to reality. His body had begun to assume the shape of the ground on which he lay. A hornet landed on his exposed skin and sank its stinger in without acknowledging him. Doomed by the loss of its single weapon, the hornet staggered back into flight.
The Indian wondered if his own existence were as futile as the hornet’s. At the instant of defiance, it had killed itself.
In the woods above he heard the whistle of a marmot. He waited for it to come and speak to him. He waited as the sun slid over the sky and darkened the valley. The Indian knew he would not see it come up again unless his spirit came. He was too weak to wave at the flies now.
A velvet shroud settled over his eyes, blocking the sky. He thought about the sun. He cried for it. But all he saw was the hot orange glow through his eyelids. The sun’s heat was heavy, like earth being piled on top of him. Soon the Indian was unaware of even that.
Something seemed to crackle in the air over his chest. The Indian awoke to find it was night. Standing in the grass below the boulders was a small, mottled mongrel dog with a face like a cat’s and patches of skin showing through its tattered coat.
The Indian and the dog regarded each other with alert, unfrightened eyes. The marmot sounded again in the trees. The dog glanced toward the sound.
The dog said, Follow me.
With the aid of his rifle, the Indian unhinged his body section by section and painfully stood upright. He leaned on the gun. Corn spilled from his medicine bundle. The flap was open. The dog must have been sniffing at it. Thoughtlessly the Indian raised corn to his lips.
Don’t eat, said the dog. Your spirit is waiting.
The animal scampered up to the edge of the woods and paused until the Indian caught up. The trees closed around him like a warm coat. The woods were silent. All of the animals were gone except for the marmot, which whistled again, summoning the dog. The Indian tottered through the trees after it.
Seated on a log in a clearing bounded by Douglas firs was a man, his back to the Indian. He was digging with large, oddly shaped hands at a pile of rocks and stacking them, one on top of another, in a pyramid. The Indian saw a field mouse run from under one of the rocks. The man grabbed it and popped it into his mouth.
The dog barked at the man.
The man grabbed a rock in each hand. He stood up and faced the Indian. He was at least seven feet tall. He wore no clothes. A thick coat of black fur covered him from head to ankle and curtained his face. His chest was fat and massive, his legs were short, and he had almost no neck. Because of the gloom, the Indian could not see the man’s face clearly.
He was not a man. Not really. Such men had never lived. He was somewhere between man and beast. He was a spirit.
The Indian put his rifle against a tree.
The spirit set down his rocks.
The Indian waited for his name.
The spirit did not speak it. Instead, he blended into the slanted grays and blacks of the woods, heading toward the northern peaks and leaving the Indian alone with the dog.
The dog said, He wants you to follow him.
The Indian had no family, no job, no place to go. Nobody would miss him. He checked his clothes. He wore a tough Army jacket and moccasins. His pants were heavy corduroy, and there was a scarf around his neck. He dug out a handful of corn and hungrily ate it. The pain in his wracked body lessened; his joints filled with rigidity and strength that brought color to his face.
“I will come,” he said.
1
The Central States Wildlife Fund was a Kansas-based tax haven supported by numerous businessmen who claim to be conservationists. For four years straight they had sent out expeditions to Canada to check out the caribou and moose herds. These expeditions consisted of two men from Kansas City, George Nicolson and Roy Curtis, who geared up in Calgary with a Land Rover and supplies, tranquilizer guns, directional-antennae devices, and a helicopter. Dennis Hill was the owner and pilot of this helicopter.
This year things were different. A herd of musk oxen had been spotted far south of their Arctic habitat, and Nicolson and Curtis wanted to tag a couple of them to see where they would go. In addition, there was a new member of the group, an edgy forty-three-year-old man named Raymond Jason. Jason was a tall, powerfully built man, who demonstrated his strength in a Calgary bar by bending a quarter between his thumb and first two fingers. He unconsciously practiced isometric exercises over his entire body. His robustness was a product of will, he said, necessary for camping weeks on end. He was a wealthy man who had worked hard for his money. Too hard, in Hill’s opinion.
Hill knew why Nicolson and Curtis came on these trips. Nicolson was a sometime big-game hunter and fisherman. Roy Curtis was a veterinarian.
Raymond Jason packaged and sold pet food. For the life of him, Dennis Hill could not understand why Raymond Jason came to Canada, or why he made him so nervous.
Raymond Jason stroked the stubble of his new beard and peered out the plexiglass bubble of the helicopter at the lakes far below. Between them were craggy forested hills, a part of the wrinkled, tormented West Canadian Rockies. As the copter turned, fire from the sun sheeted off the silver surfaces.
This was one of the comparatively flat areas of the Rockies, and Hill’s main concern was that Jason not direct him to some goddamned peaks or something before they ran out of fuel.
“Go on up a little higher!” cried Jason. “I think the hills are blocking the signal.” Jason adjusted a tuner on the radio before him. The Land Rover, with Nicolson and Curtis in it, was down there somewhere in that lacework of streams, concealed under the timbers that whiskered the heaving land.
The speaker crackled, and Hill answered. It was Nicolson with his complaining voice. “Hill, it’s almost eight o’clock. Maybe we should think about camping. What does Jason think?”
In spite of this being his first trip, Jason had somehow taken over the group. Hill was amazed at how Nicolson deferred to him. It was Jason who darted the musk ox leader with a perfect shot from the helicopter, and Jason who guessed correctly where the animals were heading. Things had gone fine until the day before yesterday, when the leader cut off from the herd and headed for the lakes. Around his neck was a collar with a beacon that transmitted signals to both Land Rover and helicopter. They had not heard a peep from it until this morning. Jason had seen the huge, brown, shaggy animal for a split second under the tree cover, running as fast as it could. Now it was gone again.