Hunting Wolf’s hands flew over his ears and he screamed to shut out the obscenities, but they were being spoken from inside his skull now, impossible to escape. Tears of rage, shame and terror were pouring down his cheeks. Suddenly, as he had feared he would go mad with the horror, it stopped. The crackling half-seen form shifted before him, the sound it made grating on the rocky floor only hinting at its terrifying bulk. Its voice was low and mocking this time, coming from the rock as well as the icy black form it had fashioned into a body.

‘Do I displease you, son of a diseased dog?’

Its breath was of the grave. ‘Destroy me then, vermin.’

Hunting Wolf, breathing heavily, had composed himself then to think. Destroy it? What had his father warned? No. He must not be tempted to that course of action. Above all not that. He spoke with a throat that threatened to close against the stench of decay surrounding him. ‘I will die first.’

The ice crackled and the rock began to crumble from the walls around them. It roared from the darkness, though the roar was silent. ‘Destroy me!’

He stood facing this thundering nightmare, his brow soaked with sweat, his hands clenched into useless fists. ‘No, foul spirit. I will not.’

From the darkness a huge, taloned limb shot out, its savagely curled claws made of ice, but ice that betrayed dark putrid fluid flowing beneath its sheen like black blood through rotting veins. Three huge talons slashed Hunting Wolf’s face open with an ease that was in itself an affront.

‘DESTROY ME!’

Hunting Wolf staggered backwards, his hand over the gushing wound, blood spurting between his fingers. There was a sudden shiver in the air and a tremble as though before a clap of thunder. The profanity of ice before him exploded into a thousand particles, shooting out its borrowed matter like a cannon and blowing him fifteen feet or more along the floor towards the entrance.

That was all he had recalled. Henderson had been there somehow, had picked up Hunting Wolf’s battered body and stumbled away from the tunnel with his slumped flesh held inexpertly in long, thin arms. The men had become near-hysterical when they saw the minister struggling towards them with the limp body of the bloodied shaman, and they ran from the two figures rather than rush to their aid.

Now, here by the fire, Hunting Wolf gathered his courage, assembled all the pieces of the incident and tried to make sense of it. He could make none. His body felt broken, but his spirit was wounded more severely. The ignorance. How could he fight with no knowledge of what he faced? He was impotent as a shaman, and powerless as a man. His face spoke of his terrors as Singing Tree knelt over him, a new poultice in her fist, and applied it to his face.