Safe. His father wasn’t home. Just Marlene. Watching from the field above the cabin he’d seen her come out and empty slops in the yard and Moses didn’t seem to be around. Safe. Thank you, Great Spirit. Thank you, Jesus, too.

He walked cautiously into the room and he knew by his mother’s tone that he wasn’t home. She would never be so flamboyant, never shout in case it got up the old man’s nose. She was sober. She’d tidied a little round Moses’s chair and her braids were done again with a bit of silky stuff in the ends like she’d made an effort. He looked around, checked again and went straight to the stove, trying to get some warmth back in his hands.

She was on him. Fussing, kissing, brushing imaginary objects from his dirty shoulders. ‘Sam. My baby. You can’t go doin’ this to your Mama, baby. I thinks you was dead for sure this time.’

He shrugged her off and saw her hurt. Marlene looked at him like a little girl for a while, swinging her foot behind the other, then turned back to what she was doing at the table.

‘You got nothin’ to say after it bein’ close on five weeks? You think I don’t got no heart.’

‘I don’t know, Mama. He get that too?’

She turned on him, her face full of a pleading that Sam could no longer ignore. ‘I know it’s been bad, my baby, but we ain’t gonna do the booze no more. I swear. I ain’t had nothin for weeks.’

He knew she was lying, could see it in her yellowed eyes, but he stopped rubbing his freezing hands over the oil-drum stove and stepped forward to hold her. It was like holding sticks in a sack. ‘You have to get away, Mama.’ But as he said it he knew he was lying too. She was part of it. As bad as him. That was where the pain was. She was part of Moses’s madness too, and he knew what she would say. She had said it so many times before.

This time she said it in a muffled voice into her son’s thin chest. ‘He be not such a bad guy, your Pappy, Sam. He be okay when the booze don’t hit him bad.’

He said nothing. Then that thin reedy voice again.

‘Where you been, Sam?’

The fifteen-year-old Sam Hunting Wolf had laughed sardonically to himself over her greasy black head. Where indeed? Did she think he’d wanted to build a shelter of branches and turf, high in the hills away from this torment? Living alone, off fungus, roots and rabbits, and once killing a lowly weasel in his hunger and eating its two mouthfuls of tasteless flesh like an animal himself.