Powderhand had touched a raw nerve. Why indeed could his magic not send this fiend back to the Hell whence it came? The Eagle had shown him the nature of the thing many years before this, a sight which made him shrink in terror even now as he recalled it as a distant dream-like memory. And his father, and his father before him, and every descendant since the Kinchuinicks began, had all prepared each other for the possibility of the fiend’s return. Oh, the ugly misfortune that it should have befallen him to meet this abomination that had been spoken of through the centuries. Why not his father? Why not any one of the Kinchuinick shamans that had gone before? How he envied them their lives of peace, the lives they led using their magic and calling their spirits only to perform the simplest of domestic tasks. To save the sick. To heal broken love. To find the buffalo herd. These men were the ones who knew of the Trickster, but only in fireside stories and in the darker, more secretive information passed down amongst those whose task it would be to face it. But they never faced it. He was facing it now and he was resentful and child-like in the depth of his terror.

Why had his father made Hunting Wolf know its names? He had been a conscientious student, listening to and memorizing the scanty details that were known of this dark and ancient spirit. He knew the nature of its blasphemous violence. But now, in the darkness of the night, lit only by the circle of fire, he was in despair that he knew little else. Nothing that would save them. For he was certain that it would destroy as nothing else had destroyed before were it to shake loose the fragile chains that he alone seemed to bind it with and bind it without knowledge as to how he was able to contain such a force.

What was the nature of those chains? Why did it not just kill him and be done? Today, in the tunnel, he had thought that it would kill him. His cheek began a faint throb as if wakened by the foul and almost unbearable memory.

The white men who would not work unless Hunting Wolf was present, were nevertheless resentful and suspicious of him as he had squatted by them at the rock, watching them silently with glittering eyes as they swung their picks against the stone. They were frightened men. He could not understand their clumsy guttural tongue, but Henderson had told him that the men were spreading stories that animals had spoken to them. That had made Hunting Wolf’s heart sink with dread. If he so wished he could make the very rocks speak to him. But there were methods to it, and payments due for such communing with the spirits of nature, and the white men neither knew them nor would believe in them.