Only the Dead Read Online Free

apparently unable to move. He opened the tailgate, using the beam of the flashlight to look through the junk inside. A big wrench was the best thing he could find. Lance grabbed it and went over to the cat, which was staring up at him and hissing. Then he leaned down as he raised the wrench. He was so close that he could clearly see the cat’s face. Its lips were drawn back, its teeth gleamed white in the glow from the flashlight. Just as he was about to bring down the wrench, the cat uttered another shriek, loud and shrill. For a moment fear seized him. Then he struck.
    The wrench hit something soft. The shrieking stopped abruptly, then started up again, even louder. He struck again, but it was impossible to hold the beam steady as he slammed the wrench down, and this time it hit the asphalt. Pain shot up into his shoulder. He tossed the flashlight aside and began pounding with the heavy wrench. The feel of the soft body under the blows of the wrench made him furious. The animal offered no resistance, and yet it refused to die, continuing to howl. Then he became aware of the sound of a car approaching, and he looked up. The car came driving along the flat clearing, gradually slowing its speed. Finally it stopped right next to the Jeep, only a few yards away. A gurgling sound came from the cat as he kept on hitting it. The stranger in the other car didn’t move, and Lance had the feeling he was being watched as he delivered one blow after another, faster and faster. After a moment the car drove off, and he was alone. The only sound was his own breathing, and the blows that kept on striking the cat’s body in the dark.
    “I DREAMED that I found a wooden figure of two people holding hands,” said Willy Dupree. He was sitting there with his eyes closed, looking as if he were asleep.
    “Over near the lake, after a storm. I went there as I always do, to see what might have drifted ashore this time, and that’s when I caught sight of that wooden figure lying there. It wasn’t much bigger than a grown man’s fist. I picked it up to take a closer look. It was a tree root, or . . . it was both a root and something that someone had carved. It was both things at the same time. That’s possible in dreams, you know. It was smooth, as if newly whittled or as if the bark had just been stripped off. Totally new and fresh. And as I said, it looked like two people holding hands.”
    Lance waited for him to go on, but the old man just sat there with his eyes closed and his hands clasped over his stomach. Had he dozed off?
    “Did anything else happen?” Lance ventured.
    Willy opened his eyes. “No. Then I woke up.”
    “And this is why I had to drive all the way out here? To hear this?”
    “No. My dream reminded me of something. That’s why I called you, but you didn’t answer the phone. You were out hunting.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Alone?”
    “No, with Andy. I was on post when you called. Andy was driving.”
    “I thought these days everybody shot deer from platforms up in the trees.”
    “Not us.”
    “It’s supposed to be much easier. That’s what I’ve heard.”
    “But hunting isn’t supposed to be easy.”
    “No, no, I guess not . . .”
    “So what did you want to tell me?’
    “Well, you know the spirit huts that we build over our graves?”
    Lance nodded. He’d seen the small wooden structures erected in old Ojibwe cemeteries, built to cover the whole length of the grave.
    “People used to put things inside that the dead person might need on the journey to the realm of the dead. Food and tobacco, for instance. Preferably something that the deceased was particularly fond of when he was alive. A special pipe, maybe, or a gun. Swamper Caribou was a great medicine man, a sort of priest, if you will. There’s no doubt that he would have been given a traditional burial, but no one ever found his body. When I was young, I heard an old man talk about Swamper disappearing. He remembered when it happened, you