Henderson was sorry to have his remark draw blood from this man but somehow the request to bury the Indians’ beliefs along with the bodies of the three men made him defensive and irritable. It was his own fault. He should never have told a man as deceitful and untrustworthy as McEwan anything about the Indians at all. If McEwan had hoped the men would find the Kinchuinicks’ legend amusing and idiotic, then it had rebounded on him.

There was irony in the fact that Henderson might even have relayed some of the details incorrectly. Trickster, for instance, was the best translation he could come up with. It was most likely incorrect. His grasp of the language, after all, was primitive in the extreme. Hunting Wolf had squatted with him for two hours one dark, cold night, explaining the nature of this thing, the four-named demon, and he thought he had mostly made sense of it. But he could not be sure.

Creator and destroyer. It could be both. There were many Tricksters apparently. Some figures of fun, who could be deceived in a hilarious fashion as well as deceive, providing endless stories of great ribaldry, almost always involving sex or defecation. Others were figures of the deepest terror, demons who destroyed and murdered as naturally as a mortal breathes in and out, clever, shape-shifting, vengeful, evil beyond imagination. Hunting Wolf told of the latter. Henderson had listened politely and not without interest. The demon described was not unlike those of early Christian belief. Certainly it was as grotesque and terrifying in its true form as those nightmares dreamed up by the medieval Jesuits to petrify their flock. The physical description Hunting Wolf gave made Henderson uncomfortable – if he were honest, made his shoulders crawl like a child being told a ghost story. But it was an animal-like cunning, twinned with human intelligence and adherence to a strict pattern of the elements, that separated the heathen demons from the Christian. Hunting Wolf explained that their Trickster was of winter. Colder than ice. A heart harder than rock. Their demon was clever to conceal its true form, enjoyed shifting shape. And it loved to taunt and tease. Oh, it could be tricked, and sometimes defeated, but only by the keeper. At that point Henderson lost his way in the maze of alien words.