“Take this to him!”
The dog ran away, bearing the fish in its jaws. The Indian waited, his heart thudding, for the animal’s return.
What would his grandfather have done in such a situation? The Indian’s memory was treacherous; he could not retrieve things he wanted from it until too late. Those drugs the doctors had given him, the treatments, the sedatives, they had cured him up to a point but had left his memory dark. He could not remember his grandfather’s words. His grandfather had told him about Chinook the warm wind, the Blue Jay feast in the spring, and endless tales about Coyote, the laughing god who taught humans how to build tipis and use medicinal herbs. His grandfather had told him over and over about the night he went to the sacred ridge for his own spirit, who had been a human. The ghost had been his grandfather’s protector all his life. He had helped him through epidemics of flu and bitter-cold winters. He had been with the old man during the difficult transition to death, chatting with him, calming him, cheering him up, reassuring him about what was to come.
Of all the gifts a spirit bestowed, friendship and protection were the most valuable. His grandfather had never been lonely, never been lost, never been fearful about the world because of the closeness of his spirit. The Indian enjoyed thinking about his grandfather. He wished his memories were not so broken.
Not so enjoyable was the single, isolated memory of an Army doctor sitting before a sunlit window, hair waving in the draft of a small fan. “You are subject to hallucinations,” the doctor had said.
The dog returned without the fish, cheerful but yawning. That meant the spirit was going to sleep soon. Sometimes he slept for a full day. The Indian would not dream of intruding on the spirit at these periods. It would have been scandalously disrespectful. When the sleep was over, the dog would awaken the Indian with small wet licks on the ear and tell him it was time to resume the journey.
“I’ll have to make a bow and arrow,” the Indian mused to the dog. He could get ash wood from anywhere around and carve the arrows at leisure. The bowstring was another thing. He had nothing on his person that would suffice. What was needed was dried gut, as his grandfather had used.
The musk ox.
He found the carcass about a mile away, next to a Land Rover. He poked with distasteful movements inside the carcass and came out with a string of gut. He sliced a length of it with his bowie knife. The sun would dry it out, making it tensile and waterproof.
He returned to the woods, following the dog. At the mission school the Black Robes had taught him one thing of real value. Faith was a guttering candle flame that had to be cupped in the hands of the conscious mind lest the cold winds of existence blow it out. Once faith was lost, the present, the future, and even the past were yanked out from under your feet.
The Indian had to get his name. He would follow the spirit through hell itself if necessary. Occupied by questions of faith and eternity, the Indian put the helicopter incident completely out of his mind, along with all the other memories he had lost.
2
Jason awoke lying on his back, looking up at a dull gray morning sky veined by tree branches. A bird twittered from a bough somewhere up there. Buried deep in Jason’s skull was a hard sphere of pain that swelled whenever he opened his eyes to sunlight.
The morning was damp with dew that had soaked his clothes and pressed cold deep into his body. A thousand itches from the pine needles on the ground plagued his body. He rolled over onto his side and saw lying before his eyes the severed head of Dennis Hill. It had been carelessly thrown there like trash.
Jason closed his eyes, beating down the rising tide of nausea. Curtis. Where was Curtis? Jason sat up and searched for his rifle. It lay on the ground.
What else? What else?
The pictures! Curtis had photographed the prints!
Jason relaxed somewhat. The camera was at the camp, tucked away in a backpack. First he had to check the helicopter. He wanted to see what had caused the crash.
The rest of Hill was in the little hollow, with the rifle still clutched in one hand. The copter was a broken heap of aluminum plates mixed with the branches. It had literally torn itself up. The radio was dead. Jason picked the walkie-talkie off the floor. Still no Curtis. Either he had gotten away or he had fallen out. Or his body lay elsewhere.
Jason studied the curled stabilizer. The rear rotor blade was sliced to half its original circumference by the piece of the stabilizer that protruded inward.
At the joint where the stabilizer joined the fuselage, Jason found a bullet hole. It had punctured the base, weakening the cables. Maybe a smaller piece had done the original damage, but Jason knew he was right. That was not an echo he had heard last night. The Indian was a murderer, and a damned fine shot with a .30.30.
At the camp, Jason rewound Curtis’s film in his camera. He tucked the roll into a plastic sandwich bag and placed it in his zippered jacket pocket. While the gray morning melted to a golden brightness, he tramped through the woods, searching for some sign of Curtis.
It was an hour before his eyes chanced on the boot lying at the base of a tree. Curtis was upside down high up in the branches, his weight bending them. Jason wondered if Curtis’s death had been more merciful than Hill’s. He decided it had not.
The beast could still be around. Jason looked over his shoulder frequently as he walked back to the copter and from there to the camp. Had he not done that, he would have missed one final detail. A rock, its moist underside turned up, lay in the loam by Hill’s body. There was blood on one side. The thing could not have sneaked up on the pilot, so it must have thrown this rock to kill him.
Jason drove the Land Rover clear of the trees. The map showed a Canadian Ranger station not far away. He called them on the emergency frequency and told them there had been an accident and three men were dead.
Only after the voice on the other end said help was on its way did Raymond Jason dare to explore the tight, hard face of the Indian and that murderous giant locked in his memory. A hard feeling grew in his guts. He knew that feeling only too well by now. No matter how he analyzed the night’s events, he could not make the pieces fit, and he would not sleep well until he did. He worried at the cipher, he poked, prodded, and clawed at it with every rational method he could devise, but the mystery deepened, and within minutes Jason knew he would never rest until he had tracked both of them down.
Wind rustled the golden grass, splattered with brownish-red drops of his blood. Raymond Jason sat motionlessly in the Land Rover, his feet dangling outside the door, oblivious to throbbing pain and the constant trickle of blood on his clothes, his single-track mind fixed on a single project for the first time since he was young. Jason had found something to believe in.
He was flown to a hospital in Calgary and kept under treatment for two weeks. The Canadians were presented with two headless bodies, a helicopter with a hole in it, several expended cartridges, a sheaf of photos, and a baffling, disjointed tale of death and horror recited by Jason into a cassette recorder carried by a policeman who interviewed him while he was under sedation.
On the third week, Jason was released, and a policeman accompanied him to a plane for Kansas City. The policeman was polite but skeptical. “It’s not that we don’t believe your story, Mr. Jason. It’s just that there’s no proof these things exist. Besides, there are almost no reports of this kind of beast—Bigfoot, Yeti, whatever you call it—committing violence.” His face darkened. “We should very much like to find this Indian, if you know what I mean.”