His finger rubbed at it lightly, almost as if the answer were yes.

‘I took up with a preacher who was on the reserve trying to save us Indians. He liked me. Used to give me money for odd jobs, clearing the snow from the yard, painting the fence, that kind of Huckleberry Finn shit. And I guessed he thought that if he couldn’t save me, he would try and educate me. He taught me to ski at Tamarack. Once we even went as far away as Lake Louise to ski the back bowls.

‘And he made me stop speaking like an Indian and made me think it would maybe be okay not to live on the reserve.’ He opened his eyes and looked at Katie, whose eyes were tiny with her silent crying. ‘’Cause you know most Kinchuinicks think like they’ll die or something the moment they step off reserve. Think that there’s no oxygen out here in the white man’s land. But after his daughter Darcy jumped me – okay maybe I was willing too, but anyway I figured the Reverend Jenkins might not want to see me around so much after that – I learned you could live and breathe here, and nothing would ever make me go back there. Nothing.’

He squeezed her hand.

‘I didn’t want that shit’s name, so I just dropped the Wolf bit and hey presto, at least when I phoned up for a job they said they’d see me. Course their faces fell when I turned up, and somehow the position had always just been filled a moment before I got there. But I kept at it and eventually Jim Henderson at Fox Line gave me a job in Silver.’

Katie smiled weakly. ‘God bless him.’

‘For sure.’

‘What happened to your father?’

So it was over then. The honesty. Thus far and no further. The lies would have to start again, and he fell into the pit that he knew had sides of glass.

‘Don’t know. People say they think he went to Calgary. Probably died drunk in an alley someplace.’ Oh God, that he should lie to her again.

Katie detected the change of tone in Sam’s voice and rubbed his hand to get him back before he slipped from her again. She sniffed and changed her tone too. ‘So your amulet was your grandfather’s.’ She just caught him.

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s a very old, and very rare symbol. Called an Isksaksin, meaning line or boundary. But I guess you know all about it.’

Sam couldn’t help his tone, that of a man who had just heard a child recite the alphabet. ‘How’d you know that?’