"James Herbert - Soul Catcher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert James)

say that we do have some indications that the Indian may be mentally deranged. Let me
emphasize that this is only a possibility which we are not excluding in our assessment of
the problem. There's the equal possibility that he's pretending insanity.

***
Hands clasped behind his head, Katsuk had stretched out in the darkness of his bunk in
Cedar Cabin. Water dripped in the washbasin of the toilet across the hall. The sound
filled him with a sense of rhythmic drifting. He closed his eyes tightly and saw a purple
glow behind his eyelids. It was the spirit flame, the sign of his determination. This
room, the cabin with its sleeping boys, the camp all around -- everything went out from
the center, which was the spirit flame of Katsuk.

He drew in the shallow breaths of expectation, thought of his charges asleep in the long
barracks room down the hall outside his closed door: eight sleeping boys. Only one of
the boys concerned Katsuk. The spirits had sent him another sign: the perfect victim,
the Innocent.

The son of an important man slept out there, a person to command the widest attention. No
one would escape Katsuk's message.

To prepare for this time, he had clothed himself in a loincloth woven of white dog hair
and mountain goat wool. A belt of red cedar bark bound the waist. The belt held a soft
deerhide pouch which contained the few things he needed: a sacred twig and bone bound
with cedar string, an ancient stone arrowhead from the beach at Ozette, raven feathers to
fletch a consecrated arrow, a bowstring of twisted walrus gut, elkhide thongs to bind the
victim, a leaf packet of spruce gum . . . down from sea ducks . . . a flute. . . .

A great aunt had made the fabric of his loincloth many years ago, squatting at a flat loom
in the smoky shadows of her house at the river mouth. The pouch and the bit of down had
been blessed by a shaman of his people before the coming of the whites.

Elkhide moccasins covered his feet. They were decorated with beads and porcupine quills.
Janiktaht had made them for him two summers ago.

A lifetime past.

He could feel slow tension spreading upward from those moccasins. Janiktaht was here with
him in this room, her hands reaching out from the elk leather she had shaped. Her voice
filled the darkness with the final screech of her anguish.

Katsuk took a deep, calming breath. It was not yet time.

There had been fog in the evening, but it had cleared at nightfall on a wind blowing
strongly from the southwest. The wind sang to Katsuk in the voice of his grandfather's
flute, the flute in the pouch. Katsuk thought of his grandfather: a beaten man, thick
efface, who would have been a shaman in another time.

A beaten man, without congregation or mystery, a shadow shaman because he remembered all
the old ways.