Slowly he had turned round to face the darkness at his back, his eyes swivelling in their sockets, fighting to see in the blackness of the cave. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw, and he was only half-seeing it in the darkness. He had muttered then, through his blind terror, ‘Great Spirit save me.’

Forming itself out of the ice in the black shadows was a thing so huge, misshapen and abominable, that Hunting Wolf fought to remain conscious against the forces that would have him swoon. It reeked like rotting flesh, and its grotesque form crackled under its icy sheath as it shifted in an unholy mockery of life.

Then it had spoken to him. Though the thick rasping sound seemed to come from both it and Hunting Wolf himself.

‘Do you know my name?’

Hunting Wolf knew its name. He had always known its name. He prayed for the power to speak. His bladder had emptied down his leg, and the sordid sensation of the hot, acidic urine running over his knee had granted him that power.

‘You are Inktumi.’

It laughed: a foul sound that he felt at the back of his own throat while it continued. He fought back a retch as it replied.

‘Am I?’

‘And you are Inktomi.’

It was breathing and rasping in the dark. Waiting.

‘And you are Inktomni.’

It waited still.

‘And you are Sitkonski.’

Silence sat thick and vile in that rock prison. The power of the spirit was overwhelming. It pulsated. It throbbed. Hunting Wolf’s mind had raced then, sifting through the knowledge his father had given him, searching for escape. Nothing had prepared him for this. This was an invincible spirit, not a lowly spirit of the kind that any medicine man can call for his own mundane uses. They were easily tamed and dispatched: this was something he had never encountered, a spirit of such malice and power that it baffled him as to why it addressed him at all rather than crushing him like a fly.

It spoke again. ‘And you are the shit your mother squirts in the dirt of her grave.’

It laughed again, a sound like a man dying on his own vomit. Then, a pause, a long pause followed by a new voice. A voice of kindness and gentle love. His father’s.

‘Boy? Are you there? Are you there, my smiling boy?’

Hunting Wolf’s heart soared. His father. Back from the spirit world to save his son. Hope had entered his soul.

‘Father. Help me, Father.’

His father’s voice had then spoken about the things it would like to have done to his son. The things no man should say and live. This was not his father. The abomination was playing with him.