Eden looked at Sam for a long time, then turned his attention to gazing through the window as though his tall, dirty, half-starved grandson had ceased to be of interest. Sam waited. He knew he was not forgotten. Eden was either thinking, or remembering.

They sat in silence for a minute, until Eden spoke again. ‘You build a lodge with Calvin, you does all the right things to purify yourself, and you be bringing the spirits to speak with you. But you just be guessing it was the Thunder Spirit?’

Sam looked at him through his long dark lashes. ‘I know it was.’

Eden nodded.

‘You knows a whole heap, boy. Beats me why you always be tellin’ yourself it ain’t so.’

Sam had shrugged, sulky like a child. Eden let go the arms of the chair and crossed his gnarled hands on his lap.

‘This here thing be real important I goin’ to tell you, and you best listen hard. Hear?’

It was Sam’s turn to nod. Eden stared into Sam’s eyes with that fearsome inky black gaze, until he saw something there that satisfied him his grandson would listen. ‘You and me and Calvin, and some others who be all around the place but we don’t knows them, we be the ones who can see it’s him when he comes playin’ around.’

Sam didn’t need to ask who he was. His grandfather was obsessed. He had sighed internally, bored with the old man’s hobby horse. ‘You see he ain’t good at makin’ human shapes. Get’s it wrong enough for a shaman to spot him like a bear in a flock of geese. Plenty be fooled by it and he be enjoyin’ himself doin’ it, but you and me, we be seein’ him right off.’

Sam humoured the old man by feigning interest. ‘So why’s he do it? Why don’t he just stay inside animals or be the shape he is?’

Eden had pursed his lips then, and scratched at something in his pants. ‘Don’t know. When I sees him he was doin’ it to hurt your Great-grandpappy. But I guess he does it sometimes to find the likes of you and me when he ain’t sure who we are.’

He never knew what it was he did wrong, but Sam’s face must have betrayed some kind of scepticism or worse, boredom, because Eden had gone crazy. He sat forward in his chair and slapped both his palms on the arms of the chair, and hollered. ‘You start actin’ like an Indian, Sam! You be born Indian, you gonna die Indian, and unless you knows that, that excuse for a face gonna come at you in a crowd some day and you gonna walk right past it. You hear?’