To realize after all this time that his rifle had kept his spirit from him was a frustration that would have driven a less stable man to madness. After all, the Indian had been shooting meat for weeks. He sent the dog with portions of his kill to the spirit as offerings. Sometimes the spirit did his own hunting for hours on end before braining his prey with a rock and leaving a headless carcass behind for the dog and Indian. It was the Indian who had wounded that musk ox after a two-day stalk, and the spirit who had walked off with the lion’s share.
He scratched the dog’s ears. “We live and learn, eh.” A small victory had been won. A barrier between himself and his spirit had been lifted. Small victories were treasured by the Indian, and this one pleased him so much that he lost interest in whether the white man was real or an apparition.
The Indian emptied his pockets of bullets, dispersing them into the grass. He swung the rifle into the middle of the river where its splash was swallowed by foam. Then he crouched over the black, running water. He stabbed his hand deep into the icy water and emerged with a wet, flopping trout, which he killed with a blow against a rock. He pressed the fish into the dog’s mouth.
“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.
