Then he’d closed his eyes and lain back in that plastic chair, a sign that the evening was over.

It had been Rita Powderhand’s turn to clean next day and she found the body on the floor by his chair, with its head split open like soft fruit.

No Kinchuinick called the RCMPs, but no one moved Eden either or touched anything in the house. It only took nine hours before the news reached someone off-reserve who fetched the police. And then the place had crawled with cops, asking questions and getting no answers from anyone. They couldn’t prove it was Moses, and Calvin knew they didn’t really care. Just an old Indian. Sure they would have loved to have banged up some Kinchuinick for the murder, but it wasn’t like someone white had died. So after they’d taken Moses away to interrogate him and brought him back again, they mooched around the reserve for another six weeks before the visits started to tail off, and they went back to keeping white folk safe. The rumours were all that Moses had done it, and there was scared talk that Moses Hunting Wolf was now powerful with a bad medicine. Maybe that’s why no one challenged him. Calvin had been distraught. The RCMPs didn’t even return the body so they could lay him down in the sacred land by the river. They held on to it, and since there was no family to ask for it back, it never came back. Calvin didn’t like to think what they’d done with it, but he knew Eden’s soul was strong and pure enough to get to the spirit world without their earth-bound ceremony, though he wept that he couldn’t help it on its way with dignity.

Only six months after the murder, Calvin saw Moses wearing the keeper’s key round his neck. He was in the bar of the Craigellachie Hotel that lunchtime, drinking miserably on his own, when Moses and Buster Fishing Bear walked in like a pair of swells and ordered beers. Moses leaned on the formica counter with both elbows and looked around like a predator while his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the shabby, sour room. It had taken him a minute or two to spot Calvin, who was sitting at a table by the iron pillar, but when he did he fixed him with those narrow mean gashes of eyes and smiled. Moses said something to Buster who laughed in a high-pitched giggle, then he grabbed his beer by the bottle neck and walked over to Calvin. Moses had seemed pretty sober, when he’d pulled out the chair and sat down.

He slouched there for a moment, letting Calvin’s horrified eyes take in the sight of the ancient bone amulet sitting on his throat, then he took a swig of beer, wiped his mouth and laughed.

‘Suits me, don’t it?’