But Mooncrow kept peering around, and finally looked down through the mat of willow roots. And then he blanched.

“What’s wrong, Little Old Man?” Jennie asked quickly. “What have you found?”

“It is what I have not found, Kestrel,” he replied, as David reached out to steady him. His voice was strong, but his hands were shaking. “It is what I have not found.”

He sat down then, on the roots of the willow; Jennie joined him, with David on the other side. “You know that I told you how Watches-Over-The-Land had defeated an evil man,” he said. Jennie nodded; this was for David’s benefit, for he had not heard the story. “It was needful for him to drown that evil man, and then bury him. Needful to drown him so that his blood could not touch the earth, escape, and take his spirit with it; needful to bury him, so that his spirit could not wander, so that it would be held in place by the earth. If that man had become like the mi-ah-luschka, he could have found others to work through. It was here that our ancestor buried that man, with a willow planted over his body to hold him there.” Mooncrow’s face grew bleak. “But nothing lasts forever, and the willow did not hold him. Look—”

He pointed down below, where the creek had obviously changed its course and undercut the willow. “See, how the water came and washed everything from under the roots? The willow, I think, ate most of the bones, as Watches-Over-The-Land intended, but the evil one’s spirit-bundle was buried there with him, and it—it is gone. I can feel it.”

David shook his head, but Jennie felt the blood draining out of her face as well.

“These things, these spirit-bundles, can be doorways,” Mooncrow explained for David’s sake. “They can allow things through them. So now the bundle is loose in the world, and so is the spirit of that evil man. He can work through whoever takes up the bundle; and the longer he works through that person, the more likely it is that he will be able to take the place of anyone who touches it. This is something that he was working toward, to be able to live on this earth forever, by sending others through his spirit-door and taking their place.”

David’s forehead wrinkled. “But—I don’t see the point—”

Mooncrow stared down at the water, as if he was demanding that it give up its secret and tell him where the bundle was now. “The point is that this evil one wanted life forever, and power, and he got his power through hate. He will make that hate grow, here and now. He will poison the earth to give him power over it. So wicked was he that he had no spirit-animal; he created his own, neither bird nor insect, neither animal nor serpent. He made it out of all of these things, so that it would serve him rather than guide him. And he made it corrupt, so that it would poison all that it touched. That is what made him so evil. That he would corrupt anything, so long as he had dominion over it.”