And then he remembered Alexander. He fell back onto his hard pillow, and covered his face with his hands. Dear Jesus, he was sick. Sick and alone. He sobbed beneath his fingers, and Singing Tree threw her son a glance, nodding her head at the water boiling on the stove.

Walks Alone stood up and went to the task. He pulled his hand into the big sleeve of his wool jacket to protect his fingers from the hot metal and carried the steaming vessel to his mother.

‘Put it there.’

He laid the dull copper pan on the wooden floor at her feet.

Singing Tree opened a small leather bag and took crushed green and brown foliage from it, which she scattered on the surface of the water. Instantly, the room was filled with a thick acidic aroma which made Henderson appear from behind his hands, blink and attempt to sit up again in alarm. The small dark woman looked at him with a half-smile, ‘It is for your brow, Henderson. You do not have to drink it.’

Walks Alone opened his mouth to laugh but he did so without noise. It was a strange sight, this earnest little boy, making the motions of mirth with his face, dark eyes crinkled, but his breath coming in short soundless panting bursts.

Henderson looked at the couple as though they were his tormentors, not his comforters, as the woman bent to soak a piece of cloth in her pungent brew. ‘Where Hunting Wolf? Why …?’

‘He is building a sweat-lodge. He will call the spirits and the Grandfathers to help him.’

Henderson closed his eyes and concentrated on fighting the sharp pains of nausea in his stomach, caused only in part by Singing Tree’s aromatic concoction. His confusion was exhausting and he struggled with his eyes closed to bring together the pieces of himself that were scattered and torn.

Sick. Sick, and now being nursed by two dirty, alien individuals, who although uninvited, were welcome to Henderson for their simple human presence.

The brain was a cruel organ when it was sick, he mused. Now, with the weak grey light filtering into the cabin through slits in the wood and a clogged, drift-banked window, he could see how it had played warped tricks on him. Alexander was dead. He had never lived or breathed, or died, in this cabin. Only in the fevered imagination of his surviving brother did that little heart still beat, those liquid eyes still implore.

In the imagination of his murdering brother.

No.