Free Soul Catcher by Frank Herbert Page B

flung by the river into the canyon’s gloom he saw a
brown deer swimming, its head thrusting at the far shore. The light
and sound and animal movement roaring together dazzled his
mind.
    There was a dark chill in the wind, and as
they left the spring David sensed the quick silence of the forest
birds. More clouds had accumulated. A deerfly crouched on his arm.
He watched it pause and take flight. He had long since given up
hope that Katsuk would produce food from this wilderness. It had
been talk, just talk—all those words about food in this place.
Katsuk had said it himself: Words fooled you.
    David’s eye was caught by the venturesome
racing of a squirrel’s feet along a high limb. He wondered only if
the creature could be caught and eaten.
    The day wore on. Sometimes Katsuk talked
about himself and his people, fanciful stories indistinguishable
from reality. They moved through damp woods, through sunlit
clearings, beneath clouds, beneath dripping leaves. Always, there
was the sound of their own footsteps.
    David forgot about his hunger in the
presence of great weariness. Where were they going? Why were there
no more aircraft?
    Katsuk did not think of a destination,
saying, “Now we are here, and we will go there.” He felt himself
changing, sensed the ancient instincts taking over. He sensed blank
places growing in his memory, things he no longer knew in the ways
this hoquat world accepted.
    Where would the changes in him lead?
    The answer unfolded in his mind, the spirits
revealing their wisdom: The workings of his brain would go through
a deep metamorphosis until, at last, his mind lay like a drunk
within his driven self. He would be Soul Catcher entirely.
    There was a spring shadowed by a giant
cottonwood. Deer tracks led up to it and all around. Katsuk stopped
and they drank. The boy splashed his face and collar.
    Katsuk watched him, thinking: How
powerful, this young human, how strange, drinking from that spring
with his hands. What would his people think of such a lad in such a
pose?
    There was a new grace in things the boy did.
He was fitting himself into this life. When it was time for
silence, he was silent. When it was time to drink, he drank. Hunger
came upon him in its proper order. The spirit of the wilderness had
seeped into him, beginning to say that it was right for such a one
to be here. The rightness of it had not yet become complete,
though. This was still a hoquat lad. The cells of his flesh
whispered rebellion and rejection of the earth around him. At any
moment he might strike out and become once more the total alien to
this place. The thing lay in delicate balance.
    Katsuk imagined himself then as a person who
adjusted that balance. The boy must not demand food before its
time. Thirst must be quenched only in the rhythm of thirst. The
shattering intrusion of a voice must be prevented by willing it not
to happen.
    Bees weighted with pollen were working in
fireweed on the slope below the spring. Katsuk thought: They
watch us. They are the spirit eyes from which we never
escape.
    He stared through leaf-tattered light at the
working creatures. They were fitted into the orderliness of this
place. They were not many creatures, but one single organism. They
were Bee, the spirit messenger who had brought him here.
    The boy finished drinking at the spring, sat
back on his heels, watchful, waiting.
    For a glimmering instant, something in the
set of the boy’s head opened for Katsuk a glimpse of the man who
had fathered this human. The adult peered out of youthful eyes,
weighing, judging, planning.
    Momentarily, it unnerved Katsuk to think of
that man-and-father here. The father was no innocent. He would have
all of the hoquat vices. He would have the powers, evil and good,
which had given the hoquat dominion over the primitive world. That
one must be kept in the background, suppressed.
    How could it be done? The boy’s flesh could
not be separated from that which gave it life. A spirit power must
be