The canoe as it lay on the shore was a thing of strange beauty. It had been initially made as a dugout craft from a single, straight-grain, no-knotted cedar log. Fire and iron axes had carved out the insides. But after the dugout portion had been completed, the men who made the canoe went back to it from the outside and sculpted it into a lovely, thin-walled, flowing body with a prow formed in the graceful shape of a head showing two carved spirit eyes. The wood on the sides was so carefully carved down that sunlight shone through in a warm red-pink cast, which made it seem almost alive.

If the outside of the canoe was a thing of beauty and graceful joy, its interior was something out of a grotesque nightmare.

Jammed in paralyzed rigour into the bow was the deceased body of the small boy – Little Carl – covered in released stomach and anal gore. While further back, pushed equally hard into the stern, Leif huddled and, though he was panting shallowly, breathing with great effort in short, soft gasps – he was lying on his face, unconscious, and appeared to be equally dead. As in the bow, the stern’s horror-mess around Leif was made up of what had been in his stomach, faint streaks of blood, bile, and bits of smoked fish.

A time passed when Leif could not remember if he had crossed with his ghost over the spirit bridge. Moments when he could not understand what it was to be alive. There would come to be times when he thought of Little Carl, dead, and all the others in the camp, dead, but not him, not fully gone as he knew them to be gone and he felt dipped in shame because he lived while the others died.

In the swirling mass of his fevered madness, living dreams, living nightmares, he thought he might actually be dead, and he did not mind. Could not mind. He believed in the burning guilt of his brain that he was dead and he did not care and he welcomed the end.

Then it began to rain.

This was of course rain country, with thick, dark forests and huge trees, with lush growth so tight you could walk for days without seeing the sky. And streams of fresh, cold water gushed from every opening along the rocky shore, all fed and kept fed by the rains. From autumn into winter, rain fell constantly, and unless it turned to snow, the downpour never seemed to stop.

But in late spring and summer, while a heavy rain might sometimes come, generally it did not last long. What fell that day on the canoe was such a rain.

Clean, washing clean, the downpour rinsed everything before it. Leif, struggling to find consciousness, was brought initially to life by the cleaning, cooling rain, and after some small time became more fully awake.

Aware.