“The whole shebang” began with a three-day fast, punctuated with sweatlodge ceremonies, which honestly was something he had expected. He wasn’t completely ignorant of Medicine Ways after all.

Grandfather Talldeer—who he was now supposed to refer to as either “Mooncrow” or “Little Old Man”—insisted that he move into Jennie’s spare room for the duration of the ceremony. But he was to bring nothing, not even clothing, other than what he had on his back.

The first day of his fast he didn’t see Jennie at all; Mooncrow led him through a special bath, followed by a long stint in the sauna-cum-sweatlodge. The old man was a lot more pragmatic than David had expected, handling things very calmly, as if he did this sort of thing every day.

“In the old days,” Mooncrow said, as he took a seat on the floor of the sauna, and poured a dipperful of water over the heated rocks, “we’d have a drummer and a singer in here, chanting to put your mind on the right path. But these days—well, my drummer’s in Talequah running his gas station, and my singer’s splitting his time between classes and asking ‘do you want fries with that?’ So we’ll have to make do.”

“Make do?” David asked, wondering what the old man had in mind.

Mooncrow grinned, and took a towel off a bright yellow sports-model cassette player. “Got to deal with modern ways, sometimes. This thing doesn’t mind the heat, and doesn’t have a job and a mortgage and kids to feed. Doesn’t get tired, either.”

David raised a skeptical eyebrow. If it had been his call, he would have thought this was way too much like buying a videotape of enlightenment … but if Mooncrow approved it. …

But the tape Mooncrow started was not some synthesizer and Pan-flute, white-bread version of a drum chant. This was the real thing, recorded in a drum-circle, not a studio; it went straight into his chest and vibrated his entire body. His heart throbbed in time with it; his whole body swayed in time to it, and as Mooncrow lit a bundle of sweetgrass for smoke, David did not find it at all difficult to fall into the meditative state the old man demanded of him.

Three days of sweats and ritual baths, of tales and instruction, and in the end, it came down to this; standing barefoot in the middle of a clearing on some friend of Mooncrow’s private land, wearing nothing but a loincloth of the old style and a medicine-bag Jennie had made for him. Mooncrow had awakened him this morning long before dawn, put him in his old pickup truck, and had left him here before the sun rose. David was light-headed from fasting, but his mind was clear, as clear as the sky overhead, and the breeze that brushed his body.

He felt like an entirely new and different person—one with more patience, fewer prejudices, and the wisdom to know he wasn’t perfect. If this was a religious revelation—well—he figured he could get to like his “new self” in a hurry.