Sam scanned the Rockies remembering Eden’s observation, and knew exactly what he meant. These massive pieces of rock were the same. He knew as he looked at them that they didn’t look back, but there was something about them which reminded him that he was connected, and that they, the mountains and the man, were inseparable.

Sam pushed himself forward to the lip of the small cornice and let his eyes follow the infinity of pink peaks that stretched away to the north. The eerie clanking of empty chairlifts and the odd shout from a distant homebound skier was all that broke the silence. He had chosen the hard route from the top station, knowing that only Patrol would risk it when the sun went down.

A face in the crowd.

He was running from shadows, and the shadow he was most afraid of was his own. Big tough Sam Hunt, afraid to the point of screaming of a face in the crowd, and too scared to let his past through and pick it apart. Was he born a coward? Perhaps. But at least he’d been born a robust coward. His two other siblings had died. One born dead, the other mewling its last breath at only three weeks old. He had survived, and until he met Katie he’d wondered why. Moses had made him wonder daily why he bothered to live.

Calvin had said Moses hadn’t always been that bad, that he went bad when Eden rejected him. Said that Moses Hunting Wolf was strong and funny and good-looking in his young days, maybe with a streak of cruelty in his humour, but okay really. But if he had been okay, Sam didn’t remember it. He’d wished he’d never been born so many times it became a comforting ritual to think it instead of a cry of despair. But then came Katie. Katie, his blonde saviour, and beautiful Billy and gorgeous, chubby Jess and all the things he’d never dared dream of having back in that cabin on Redhorn. And now he was being proved right again. That those things were not for him. He could practically hear Moses’s drunken wheeze of a laugh from the grave.

Heh, heh, thought you could be havin’ what them white boys have, didn’t ya? Well like your Grandpappy says, you be born Indian and you gonna die Indian, and now there be a face in the crowd gonna make you lose your mind. Heh, heh, heh.