The Purification Ceremony Read online

  Breakfast had been a quiet affair. At Lenore's prodding, Earl had mumbled something about "going overboard" the night before. For the sake of peace, I acted the role of demure tribeswoman and asked his forgiveness as well. I told him I hoped he got his record-book buck that morning, and meant it.

  I'd forced down my breakfast, then returned to my cabin to retrieve the last of my gear. Griff came to the truck in a suit of snow camouflage. A quiver with six arrows hung from his hip. He carried a recurve bow. We waited for Patterson.

  "Are you ready?" he whispered.

  I don't know why, but you always end up whispering before you go out into the woods to hunt, the mind's instinctive reverence to the gravity of the endeavor to come.

  "As much as I'll ever be," I said.

  "I hear doubt in there," Griff said. Up close, he was a looming presence, but not threatening.

  "That's why it's hunting, isn't it?"

  "I suppose," he said thoughtfully. He hesitated, then said: "You know, I lost my wife a few years back. When your father heard, he called. And he helped me, being a widower himself."

  It took all that I had to remain in control. Patterson was coming across the yard. I said coolly, "I'm glad he was of help to you. I didn't see him much in his last years."

  I walked around to the cabin of the Piston Bully and climbed in. We rode in silence for several miles before Patterson dropped Griff next to a line of bright yellow surveyor's flagging tape that marked the trail leading to a winter lye field and a portable tree stand.

  "Be careful now, Little Crow," Griff whispered to me. "The woods can be an unforgiving place." He looked directly into my eyes and I nodded warily.

  Griff was at least three miles behind us now, probably climbing up his tree.

  Patterson's beard was caked with snow. He yelled to me above the roar of the snowcat engine. "The Sticks and the Dream meet up about five and a half miles north by northwest of where I'll drop you off. There's flats and ridges that run parallel to the Dream all the way north. The deer love it in there, especially now. The big ones are prowling for does with the rut coming on."

  "Okay." I turned on my flashlight and tugged my copy of the Metcalfe map from the pouch around my neck.

  "What's that, native or something?" Patterson asked, looking at the pouch.

  "My great-uncle's mother made it," I said. "It's Micmac quillwork on leather. Very precious to me. I've always worn it hunting. It's brought me good luck."

  "There you go, then," Patterson stated. "Gonna be a good day for you."

  I inspected the map, checked the compass pinned to the front of my green-and-black wool jacket, then got out my binoculars from the fleece backpack.

  "When you cut a track, I wouldn't press it too hard!" Patterson advised. "These deer haven't been hunted in three years, give or take, and you might find yourself right on top of them before you know it."

  He paused and looked at me sheepishly out of the corner of his eye. "Here I am trying to tell you how to run a deer. And, to be honest, I've never done it."

  He was a boy in his manners and that made me smile. "I haven't tracked in years. Probably lost my touch."

  "Nah. You get out there in the woods, you'll be right at it again, eh?"

  "I can hope. You work for Cantrell long?"

  It turned out this was his first season with the outfitter. Most people thought Tim Nelson, Theresa's husband, would get the outfitter's lease; he'd worked for Metcalfe three seasons. The word was Cantrell had secured the lease through one of his wife's relatives, who was an attorney representing the Metcalfes.

  "Like most things in life, it was rigged," Patterson said.

  "Tim's pretty easygoing about it, but Theresa thinks the whole thing stinks. Way I see it, Mike's an okay sort. From back East somewhere. And doesn't talk much about what he used to do. Knows deer, though, that's for sure. And he's paying me well, which helps."

  "And Sheila?"

  “Couldn't ask for a better person," said Patterson. "She's got a kid sister back in Ontario who's sort of a quarter shy of a buck. That's why she's so patient and good with Grover."

  "He's . . ."

  "Just kind of miswired, eh?" Patterson said. "That's all. He's real smart at some things and clueless on others."

  "But nice."

  "Yeah, unless he's forgotten your suitcase on the dock and it's fallen in the lake," Patterson said. "Which has happened. Several times. Say, did I tell you I got a new baby!"

  "No," I said, feeling the heartache well in me again. "How old?"

  Patterson fished in the top pocket of his wool jacket and pulled out a snapshot of an infant in a pink jumpsuit holding a stuffed lamb. "She'll be six months when I get back. Name's Laura, after my wife. You got kids?"

  "Boy and a girl."

  "Bet they think it's pretty cool you coming out here, eh? Mom a hunter and all."

  I bit at my lip. "I wouldn't know. I don't live with them these days."

  He heard what was inside me. "I'm sorry. Must be tough."

  "Worse."

  He downshifted again and turned the rig into what used to be a landing zone for loggers to stack their tree trunks. The snow wasn't falling as hard here. With daylight coming on, I could make out the ridges ahead of me. Patterson pointed to yellow flagging tape on the other side of the clearing. He recommended I take the trail for some distance before breaking off into big country. He'd return to the area about three o'clock to hunt himself. We'd rendezvous about four-thirty. I shook Patterson's hand, got out and shut the door.

  The rig rumbled away. From my pants pocket I got out five bullets and loaded the rifle. From the front jacket pocket I took a cigarette lighter. I rolled the mechanism to study the flame. The wind was out of the northwest and my plan was to walk into the wind or quarter to it in a great loop to learn the terrain. If I cut a big track, I would follow it. If not, I would learn the land. That would help as the rut intensified in the coming days.

  I slung the knapsack across my shoulders, then set out through eight inches of fresh snow. I wore the minimum to stay warm while moving: running tights under a pair of green wool pants, soft-sole rubber boots with leather tops, zip-neck polypropylene top under a fleece vest under a red chamois shirt and a green-and-black wool jacket. Snug wool gloves. A red felt hat. In the pack I carried extra clothes, a flashlight, a rope, a canteen, knives and survival gear.

  The first light became more light and I was walking through the falling snow, through chokes of serviceberry and poplar. The trail steepened after a quarter mile. I climbed to an open bench, almost like a park, down which I could see for some distance. Nothing moved. No sounds were made.

  For an instant I had the creepy feeling someone was watching me. I glanced around, nervous. Then, as quickly as it had come, the feeling faded. I looked down at the gun.

  The years fell away. I could have been a girl again. It's a hard thing to describe, but having the gun with me changed everything, made my every action alive with purpose.

  The wet snow helped to soften my footfalls. Still, I set my toe first, then let my weight roll back toward my heel to let me feel under the thin sole of the rubber boots for any twig or stick that might snap the woods alert to my presence. I changed the focus of my vision so it was more wide-angle, a little fuzzy, yet sensitive to movement. I pinched my nostrils shut and blew softly to open my Eustachian tubes to allow all the sound that might be made to come to me. As I moved I became aware of the slight tat of snowflakes on browned leaves still hanging from trees, and the scratching of a red squirrel on a fallen log, and now, in the distance, the rush of the Dream River flowing north.

  The first tracks I cut were those of a doe—narrow, heartshaped with a delicate pattern, different from the blunt-toed, dew-clawed, bullish quality that says buck. She had fed on brush and meandered in circles before heading east up the hill. I pulled off my glove. I squatted to touch around the edge of the track. "Twenty minutes ago, no more," I said to myself.

  In the next h
our I cut more tracks of doe, small bucks and yearlings, and finally those of a good buck. From the depth of and the gait between the hoofprints, I decided the prints' maker was of medium weight—perhaps one hundred fifty to one hundred sixty-five pounds—unlikely to be mature and carry a decent rack. For the sake of practice, however, I followed them.

  The deer tracks crossed a small stream, then ambled across a flat. They arced around a rock outcropping. They dropped downhill and ran true north.

  I had been traveling in a straight line after the deer for almost half an hour when I noticed the tracks snake and break pattern. Buds on the brush at waist level had been nipped clean. I froze, and, heart pounding, investigated the sidehill above eye level to my left. I feared I'd been scented. Nothing. Then the faintest flicker. I brought up the binoculars and trained them on the spot and soon made out the head of a buck, a spindly-racked eight-pointer. The animal was bedded, chewing its cud.

  I studied the area around the deer, found two doe below the buck, but none others. I whistled. He stood up, intent on me. I laid the crosshairs of the scope on his chest and said, "Bang!" He turned ends and bounded off, the does behind him.

  Sweat dampened the lining of my cap. My breath came hard. A cramp threatened in my thigh. But overriding all this was the elation that I had not lost all of my skills. Rusty, oh yes, they were rusty. But they were still a part of me. I sipped from my canteen, rested for a few moments, then took another compass reading and headed on.

  Within the hour I had climbed a ridge a half mile above the river bottom. The map indicated I had traveled three and a half miles from the log landing. And now I felt for the first time in so long what it was to be in a wild place. It had not to do with the old-growth trees that towered around me, though there was that. Nor with the ebb and flow of the snowstorm. Nor with the faint boil of the river, though there was that, too. How can I explain? It was the sensation of being small, of being outside myself, a stranger and yet comforted by alienation. I got out a down vest from my pack. I put it on and sat with my back to a snowcovered log on the ridge, reveling in the idea of being, after so many years, at nature's whim.

  I could hear the Dream plainly now. I closed my eyes and felt the water's rushing energy flow up the hill. It surrounded me and made me think of my mother, or Katherine, which is what I always called her at her insistence. I remember being four and sitting on the banks of the Wasataquoik Stream with my father and Mitchell in the June sunshine.

  "Watch how I do it now!" Katherine called to me. She brought the fly rod in a smooth arc back and then forward. Her full brown hair billowed out from under the silly straw hat she always wore when she took to rivers. She moved sure and powerful among the rips and eddies, casting to runs along boulders and to the deep water that cut under banks. A swirl came on the surface near the fly. She brought the tip of the rod high to set the hook. As she fought the trout into the shallows, she motioned to me to come closer. I slid down the bank and waded into the chill water.

  "Go ahead," she said. "Wet your hands and feel her belly."

  I slipped my hands underneath the fish and cradled it, inspecting the emerald speckles, the rose hue and the spots of night along its lithe back. When Katherine unhooked the fish, it flashed off into the riffles. From that point on, I believed that the brook trout contained all the colors that were my mother.

  Katherine had an undergraduate degree in chemistry, but like her father, she had gone to law school and entered politics. By the time she met Hart Jackman, my father, already an accomplished young surgeon and an activist for Native American rights, Katherine was a rising star in the State House of Representatives for her work crafting waterpurity laws. Growing up, I remembered a steady parade of Maine's high and mighty who came to call on Senator Katherine Jackman, powerful chairwoman of the Interior Committee, at our home outside Bangor.

  In the late summer afternoons Katherine held court next to the trout pond below the house. I smiled, recalling the expressions of lobbyists on their virgin trip to see her. She made them take off their shoes and socks in the gazebo, then roll up the pant legs of their suits to stand in the shallows and plead their cases while she practiced her cast.

  The summer I was eight, Katherine gave me my first fly rod. I waded into the cold spring runoffs with her to cast nymphs.

  "The idea is to present yourself, through your fly, as a part of the river," she told me. "Then the trout will accept your offering."

  Try as I might, I could not get the fly line to unwind properly. So every day that summer before leaving for work, she took me to the shallows of her pond. She stood behind me, arms around me, and let me feel the rhythm of her cast. Mitchell would rock on the porch watching us, saying nothing. Even after I'd learned and become an angler, we continued the daily habit of morning casts, April to October, rain or shine. That time was our time. Some mornings we would work out one of the problems all young girls have. Sometimes we talked about her life in Augusta. But the memories I cherish most are the silent mornings when we just shared the waters. Even now, almost two decades after her passing, I will smell rivers or see an older woman's cheeks blush with water-reflected sun and I will feel a desperate need to be nestled in the crook of a neck that smells of wild hyacinth.

  Katherine and my father were made for each other. Though I never saw it, their early life must have been difficult. My father was half Native American at a time when prejudice against Indians still ran rampant in Maine. But my father managed to bridge both worlds, practicing as a surgeon in a hospital in Bangor and as director of the medical clinic on Indian Island, the Penobscot Reservation north of Old Town.

  For many years, {Catherine's family did not speak to her. But she never bent and in the end her parents came to realize how good my father was for her. It's funny: they each had their own busy lives, but they found meaning for their lives in each other. Despite all that happened, I know they loved each other and me deeply.

  Perhaps that was the source of our final conflict. Growing up, I never thought them different from any other parent. Yet they were. They each rejected Catholicism at an early age. They followed a personally crafted religion based on Mitchell's teachings about the old ways, passed down from his Micmac and Penobscot ancestors, as well as ceremonies and prayers the woods and the rivers suggested to them. Distilled to its essence, the moral underpinning of their days was one of living in accord with the laws of nature: take only what you need, when you need; adhere to the seasons and their fruits; try to live as simply as possible, as if you were a primitive hunter and gatherer. Of course, given their respective careers, this wasn't fully possible. It was an ideal to which they aspired. The hunting of bird and deer, the casting for trout, the tending of gardens, the gathering of berries and nuts, were the rituals they celebrated. As a child, I thought it a blessed way to look at the world. I would learn, however, how harsh it could become.

  I must have dozed, for my watch said eleven-thirty when I heard the first shot. It came with a pop, followed by an expanding wind, like a gale coming down a chimney toward me, out overhead and away toward the Dream River. And then another, perhaps eight, ten miles away. And finally a third. All from the same rifle.

  In the fallaway echo of that last crack, the hairs on the back of my neck stiffened. I was being watched. I was sure of it now. I made myself settle down enough to create a mental grid on the terrain in front of me, which I dissected sector by sector. A raven hopped along the ground. A chipmunk chattered. But nothing strong enough to make me feel like this.

  I craned my head around, studying the lines and shades within the forest behind me. A doe fed farther up the ridge, but her tail ticktocked and her head was down, facing the other way; she felt secure, I looked for almost twenty minutes, the vague threat growing until my heart stammered and an aluminum taste crept up the back of my throat. And then, as suddenly as the rifle shot had come, the threat ebbed and left me quivering inside with the brackish water that lingers after an adrenaline flood.

&n
bsp; Right then I caught elastic movement in my peripheral vision. A coyote crept along the top of the rocks above the doe. She winded the dog. Her eyes bulged in terror. She bolted. The coyote ran behind her, its mouth open and salivating. I considered shooting him, then lowered the rifle. The coyote had as much right to hunt as I had. Perhaps more. I had been taught not to alter the order of things unnecessarily.

  When the coyote and the deer disappeared, I ate the apple and sandwich Sheila and Theresa had packed for me and drank again from the canteen. I unbuckled my green wool pants, squatted and peed. Relieved, I gathered my things and dropped toward the river.

  At a quarter to one, I found what I had been searching for on a flat before the water's edge. The track sank deep into the snow. The gait was long, the rounded hooves slightly splayed. Where the snow drifted, I discovered a furrow from the buck's breastbone and delicate hairs between the tracks. And then a tree six inches in diameter debarked by antlers. From the smell and the trace of sapooze, I figured the buck had come through here no more than an hour before.

  I settled the gun in my right hand and recalled some of what Mitchell had taught me before he became too sick with cancer to go into the woods to hunt.

  "On a track, stick to the downwind side," Mitchell said. "Keep one eye on the deer's direction and the other on the land ahead."

  For fifty years my great-uncle had been one of the best trackers in the North Maine woods. It was said that he could read a deer's mind, tell you its character and predict what it would do miles ahead just from following its tracks four hundred yards. It was true. I had seen it. My father could do the same.

  Three-quarters of a mile from where I cut the track, the buck mounted a knoll and encountered a rival. The snow was slashed where legs had driven hocks and hooves down and back, searching for purchase. Tufts of gray-black hair lay humped at the center of the circle. Where horn had met flesh, there were tiny specks of blood.

  Two sets of tracks left the knoll. One limped east toward the soothing waters of the river. The other, the one I was after, swaggered north again, meeting almost immediately a second track, a doe's. Her urine was pink. She was ready to breed.