Marano respected this routine and became devoted to it as well.
At the end of their eighteenth month together on the northwestern shore of Vancouver Island, the priest began coughing. Overcome during the cold night with shaking chills, by morning he could not rise from his pallet. There was no one to send for.
The priest was dead by evening.
At first, Marano continued with his normal tasks: hunting, fishing, and trapping for two mouths to feed as he always had. But by the third day, overwhelmed by the putrefaction in the tent, he buried the priest.
The next morning, after a prolonged seizure that left him disoriented and messed, he found himself preparing for the Mass in the same manner as he had done for the past two years.
When he regained his senses, he changed out of the soiled clothing and donned the priest’s cassock. As he emerged from the tent, three aborigines confronted him. They pointed muskets at him and, after gathering up the chalice and makeshift altar, motioned him to their canoe. Their tyee, Tsa ka tien’, was dying.
The trip to the chieftain’s lodge became another starting place for Marano.
After ministering as best he could to the elderly chief and applying an improvised Extreme Unction rite, Marano Levi began a new vocation as a vagrant unordained priest, performing the semblance of a Mass and, for the families that would allow him to do so, baptizing their newborn and anointing with last rites their gravely ill.
In his wanderings through the region over the next three years, he memorized a tattered Spanish Bible and, interpreting passages randomly, became convinced that the aborigines of Vancouver Island were one of the lost tribes of Israel, his Infantes desperadoes des Juda. He was inspired by repeated epiphanies, usually occurring right after a prolonged seizure, and understood in a way no one else could that God was all around and in every living twig and hard stone.
He accepted as revelation that his mission was to convert all creatures into a harmonious peace. He was passionate about his beliefs and deeply confused most of the time, speaking in a hodgepodge of English, French, Spanish, and Chinook to whomever would listen.
And because his ceremonies were a spectacle of incantations and improvised motions that infuriated any clergy, Protestant or Catholic, who happened to witness them, word spread.
Within a short time, he was shunned.
The natives left him alone, and Marano Levi became a lonely and depressed shepherd without a flock. It was in that state of mind that he found himself in the camp of Emmy Evers.
Chapter Thirty-Two
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Emmy, Sarah and Ursa
The snow rapidly melted over the next few days under an unusually warm winter sun.
Jojo ordered the small band to break down camp in preparation for an early morning departure and asked Marano to hunt and fish to replenish their meat supplies.
In the late afternoon light, while Jojo disassembled the supply tent and packed the third canoe, Sarah and Emmy started foraging for dry wood for the night fire.
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They were not alone in the forest.
One hour before, as the late afternoon soft wind changed direction and drifted in from the water and up the hills, it had carried with it the complex smell of a downed animal.
A few miles away, a grizzly had picked up the scent and immediately moved south to the water, pushing with his big shoulders through dense undergrowth of decayed blackberry vines. Other bear and wolves would be on it soon, and the grizzly knew it might have to fight again.
This was an older bull bear that had survived every violent encounter over its many years, always emerging bolder and more confident.
Big by comparison to other grizzly in the region, it needed to feed constantly. Lean from a short hibernation, it had emerged from its den starving the week before, and since then, it had been unable to find much prey.
There were few fish in the stream. The bear knew it had to get to the dead animal first, before other predators. Last fall just before hibernation, the grizzly had been in a fight with an angry wolverine over the carcass of a moose. The disagreeable animal just wouldn’t back down and had scraped a gash through the grizzly’s right eye before the grizzly had found just the right position and swatted the wolverine with such force that it flew against a big cedar and did not get up again.
The bear gorged itself on the moose and wolverine and then settled down to sleep.
When it emerged from hibernation, it could not see from its right eye, and since then, the fighting was so much more work.
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Most of the fallen timber was wet, but as Emmy and Sarah moved up a deer trail, they entered a cove with so much canopy cover that it had been protected from the snow that still blanketed much of the area.
While Sarah laid out a drag cloth to tow the wood, Emmy began stacking semidry branches into a neat pile on the cloth.
When she returned to it with a third armful, she saw a tree stump move. But it wasn’t a tree at all.
When the massive bear stood up onto its hind legs, it appeared as big as a mountain. Sarah’s back was to the bear, and when she looked up, she saw that her mother had stopped still, staring past her.
Sarah did not turn. Both of them could hear the heavy breathing of the grizzly.
Emmy held tightly onto the branches of dry wood she carried. But not tightly enough. A heavy piece slipped, then dropped and deflected off her knee onto the ground.
The huge old silverback, hovering over the decomposing remains of an elk cow, turned to the sound, and as it did so, Emmy saw that its mouth was full of bloody carrion.
The wind was with them, and it
