The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“I’m not worried about you, Laf. But I want to ask you about something, something involving the family. Something maybe only you know about. Something that Sam apparently also left to me—not real estate or money.”

My uncle Laf was so silent, I wasn’t sure he was still on the line. At last he spoke. “Gavroche, you do understand that international telephone calls are recorded?”

“They are?” I said, though in my profession I knew it very well. “But that doesn’t affect our conversation,” I added.

“Gavroche, there is the reason why I called,” said Uncle Laf in a voice that sounded very different than a moment ago. “I regret I could not attend the funeral of Sam. But by coincidences, I will be quite near you on the next weekend. I will come to the big hotel at the Valley of the Sun—”

“You’ll be at the Sun Valley Lodge next weekend?” I said. “You’re coming from Austria to Sun Valley?”

I mean, the routing from Vienna to Ketchum was probably not ideal under the best of circumstances—but Laf was almost ninety years old. In fact, what with high mountains and erratic weather, it was hard enough just to get there from the next state. What on earth was he thinking?

“Laf, much as I’d love to see you after all these years, I don’t think that’s a very sensible idea,” I told him. “Besides, I’ve missed a week of work already because of the funeral. I’m not sure I can get away.”

“My darling,” said Laf. “The question you want to ask me—I believe I know what it is. And also, I know the answer. So please be there.”

Just as my eyes were about to close, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years. I remembered the first time Grey Cloud cut me. I could see the thin line of beaded blood, like a necklace of tiny rubies on my leg where he drew the sharp blade. I didn’t cry, though I was very young. I recall the color: a beautiful, surprising red—the lifeblood leaving my body. But I was not afraid.

I hadn’t dreamed the dream even once since childhood. Now, as I drifted off into a troubled sleep, it came upon me unexpectedly, as if waiting all along in the shadows of my mind.…

I was alone in the forest. I had lost the way, and the dark, dripping trees closed in about me. From the steamy forest floor, smoky moisture was rising and swirling in the few remaining shafts of light. Damp pine needles formed a spongy carpet beneath my feet. I was only eight years old. I’d lost sight of Sam, then I had lost the trail. It was growing too dark to follow his markings as he’d taught me. I was alone and frightened. What was I to do?

I’d waited up for dawn to arrive that morning. My small backpack was already packed with all I knew to take along: granola, an apple, and a sweater against the cold. Though I’d never been on a serious hike, or more than backyard camping overnight, I was filled with eager excitement about following Sam secretly on this, his first day of tiwa-titmas.

Sam, only four years older than I, had started these journeys when he was the age I was right now. So at age twelve, this journey would be his fifth—and all with no results. Everyone in the tribe was praying that this time it would be successful, that he would have the vision. But few had real hope. After all, Sam’s father (Uncle Earnest) was a white face from afar. And when Sam’s mother, Bright Cloud, had died so young, the father had taken the child from the reservation at Lapwai, so he’d been unable to receive the proper training by his own people. Then the father had done the unspeakable: taken as his new wife an Anglo woman (Jersey) who drank too much firewater. No one was deceived when she showed up with a daughter of her own, stopped drinking, and insisted in a spirit of generosity that both children spend each summer with Sam’s grandparents on the reservation. No one was deceived by tricks like these.

The tiwa-titmas was the most important event to a Nez Percé youth. It was his or her initiation into life and the universe. Strong measures were taken to ensure that one could receive the vision—hot baths, steamings in the mud hut, purgation with birchbark sticks inserted in the throat—especially if the vision was a long time in coming, or if it took many trials.

Sam had grown up in these mountains, and was able to greet each rock, brook, and tree as if it were an individual, as if it were a friend. Furthermore, having been on four such quests before, he knew how to find the place by himself whether in darkness or blindfolded—while I, bloody little idiot that I was, couldn’t even find the trail.

So here I was: deplorably lost, soaked through from a sudden mountain shower, cold and hungry and weary and footsore and small and young—and terrified by my own stupidity. I sat on a rock to consider my situation.

The sun hovered at the lip of the far range, barely visible through the thick fringe of trees. When it set, I’d swiftly find myself in total blackness, ten miles or more, as near as I could guess, from the place I’d left this morning. I had no sleeping bag, waterproof clothes, matches, or extra food. If I’d brought a compass I wouldn’t know how to use it. Worse yet, I knew that when the sun vanished, there would be rodents and snakes and insects and wild beasts moving in the darkness beside me. As the sun sank lower the temperature dropped quickly and the damp chill began to penetrate my bones. I started to cry—huge, hot sobs of unleashed fear and anger and desperation.

The only skill I had, which Sam had taught me, was to send and receive coded