The Spirit

Jason twisted free of her hands. He could hear the noise of the snowmobiles already. Maybe she was watching the fire. Maybe she was just inside the trees right now, just a few yards away. This time! This time! He felt better now with every step he took. “I’ll be back with a body in an hour,” he called cheerfully back to Martha Lucas.

“Raymond, you’ll never get them!”

She was a nice girl but she was a mystical Cassandra, which was an attitude he had never sympathized with. Not that he did not admire her still for her fortitude, but his admiration curdled a bit. He disliked being lectured.

Raymond Jason scrambled over the rocks and shattered, tumbled trees well past the fire. On a birch trunk he found a splash of blood thickened by snowflakes, and another one farther on. She had left a trail that all but glowed in the dark.

He slipped the hood over his head and followed the blood into the timbers.

The Indian ran through the bowels of the night, guiding the way with the feeble light from the smoldering branches. He did not run to escape to earth again; he ran because he would go insane in this tomb if he paused to think. He was a rat in a maze of stone, a piece of flesh who would thrash away down here, screaming away his mind, running forever into the depths of hell itself without his spirit, without a faith. His flesh-­and-­blood body would starve in darkness, sealed away forever from light and life.

Sometimes he ran full tilt into rockfalls. Sometimes he nearly broke his ankles over fallen beams. Once he nearly pitched headlong into a pit, which was actually another tunnel opening beneath him.

The tunnels held in the center of the mountain. Here the rock was so deep that surface water did not weaken it. But the collapse had filled them all with a fine soft dust, which grated the nose and lungs.

The hickory shafts smoldered ever smaller, and he stopped blowing on them in order to conserve light a little longer. When they were ashes, he decided, he would dash his head against a boulder and die quickly. He had already tried carving a piece of timber from a beam cut for a torch, but the wood was too hard to catch fire.

Sometimes he tried to pray to his grandfather for help, but he barely remembered the old man. Under the irresistible weight of his predicament, his mind was unfastening the latches to reality which the doctors in the Army had tried so hard to repair. Sometimes he thought he was back in the jungle, but more often he thought he was dead already. Perhaps he had died in Vietnam and this was where he had gone.

He thought about why the giant had killed himself. It had looked at the child’s grave before pulling out the dynamite. The last one was dead, the future was dead for its kind. Some kind of grief had consumed it. The great dim brain had concluded that life was not worth living any more. The Indian was now experiencing that kind of despair.

He was in a high-­ceilinged tunnel, running up a slight incline. The hickory sticks flared, then faded.

What was that?

The Indian halted and looked at the hickory coals. The sticks had burned down almost to his wrist. They glowed again. This time he felt the caress of cold, fresh air coming from ahead of him.

He walked slowly, holding the light high. He passed a pile of rubble on the floor.

The sticks glowed again. This time the air touched his back.

Oh God, not a trick! Not a playful wind spirit running around him.

He backtracked to the pile of rubble and touched the rocks. There was a layer of melted snow on them. Snow touched the top of his head. He looked up.

The ceiling was some eleven feet high, supported by rocky, irregular walls. In the center of it, several feet from the junctures between walls and ceiling, was a three-­foot hole.

The Indian thanked the Black Robes of the mission school. God was good, or at least encouraging. Now the only problem was to get up there. He could not exactly levitate straight up.

He found a fallen tunnel beam down the tunnel. Moving it would have been sheerest agony under any other circumstances, but hope gave him strength. He rolled it down to beneath the hole and, with an effort that should have broken his back, propped it against the wall. It was separated from the ceiling by a good six feet.

He wrestled another beam down and propped it next to the first. Then, carefully, nearly crushing his fingers in the process, the Indian moved it on top of the first. Wood against wood was slippery, and the walls were soft and gravelly. Using the first beam as a ramp for the second, the Indian braced his feet on the floor and slid the second beam’s blunt wooden end against the soft rock.

The wall crumbled out a steady stream of muck and gravel. Then bits of the ceiling fell, widening the hole until finally it touched the wall.