Calvin lit the fungus, purified his hands and prayed. Then he purified the axe and laid down the tobacco he’d carried for nearly eighty miles, offering it to the spirit of the willow. He crouched for a moment to gather his strength and then set to cutting the willow saplings. He cut twenty, leaving the shiny red branches on near the tips, and laid them in a stack. His breathing was laboured at the effort, panting out of him in great whirling clouds of steam, and he pulled his mutilated hand over his face to wipe away the sweat.

This was as nothing compared to what he would endure when he started. How was this abused old body going to take the strain? He thought little of this preparation when he was young. To prepare, and prepare correctly, was vital, but back then, with the Hunting Wolf boy busying round, assisting him in that earnest and eager way, it had seemed a joy building the sweat-lodges in the clearing between the delicate dancing aspens.

He was in just such a clearing of birch, aspen and willow now, all slumbering beneath their false winter masks of death. Those brittle black branches, bowing and snapping beneath the weight of the snow, held soft tiny green miracles of buds that would cease to be secret when spring unlocked them. Calvin touched a frozen birch branch with a cold finger and closed his eyes as he felt a subtle and deep tingle of its life-force enter him. The tenuous pulse of life, shivering inside a wooden husk.

He prayed again, left the branch and bent to start collecting rocks. He would need twenty-five. One for each of the willow saplings, and five for the five most important Grandfathers: Earth, Water, Lightning, Thunder and Wind. Scraping at the snow with naked fingers, he felt around and selected his stones. There were logs ready to receive them when he had found the rocks that pleased his hands, and he knelt forwards to allow a wider sweep of his arms under the white, freezing blanket that concealed them. Since dawn he had been collecting and gathering the tools of his art, clearing snow to clear the site and dig for roots, and walking far and deep into this forest, searching out the few lichens and grey-green stalks of plant life that he knew thrived beneath the winter layer of white.

Of course there was no buffalo skull and that would make his altar weak. But there had been a gift in the night as he slept in his snow-hole. An eagle feather. He had awoken to find it on his breast, a brown-and-white miracle trembling with the slightest movement of air as though it wished to fly again. A gift indeed. But one that mutely spelled the impossibility of escaping his duty.