The mess was unreal. Broad daylight, and it looked like a regiment of Samurai soldiers had waded into these guys. And then there was Wilber. The parts had fucked each other like he’d feared. And some. There, of course, was the animal. A cat this time, twisted and misshapen, its spewed guts lying around it on the hood of the car like an offering.

He watched Becker and his men circle the sight like mating birds, stepping carefully and almost ritually around the pieces of human that littered the snow. The woman who’d stumbled across the carnage on her way into the lane with some trash was under sedation. But she’d recover and soon she’d be bleating her horror story out on national TV, her hand clutching her breast.

And what could they do now, these policemen with their guns and radios and cars, that couldn’t keep Wilber alive?

They could roll tanks down Silver’s Main Street if they wanted but Craig knew it wouldn’t stop whatever did this. Above them the chopper thundered back and forward in the thick snow clouds in its fruitless search for a culprit, and the roadblocks were up again like a sick practical joke on the public.

He didn’t need to ask the tail on Hunt where he was. He knew he’d have been somewhere else when these choice cuts were happening.

He bent down and clasped his hands across his knees. The snow fell like Christmas card snow, oblivious to the fact that it fell on entrails, severed limbs and naked bone.

How do you tail a man’s soul, thought Craig, and he was glad no one could read the crazy question in his mind.

42

Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Hunting Wolf would come no further. Henderson stopped, surprised. He beckoned to the man who had paused in the snow behind him, his eyes fixing on the railway encampment like a hawk fixing on a rat.

‘Come. Fear nothing.’

But it was not as Henderson thought. It was not the retribution of the white men that Hunting Wolf feared. It was the man the minister had described as being in their midst. Singing Tree had all but swooned when Henderson pronounced their dead child’s name. Snowchild. Born to her in the snows of winter, crying by the fire, or nursing at her breast as the wind howled outside and the animals pawed the ground and starved for want of food. The sweet Snowchild who survived the cruellest of biting cold and then saw but one more winter because of Hunting Wolf’s carelessness.

Henderson walked back to him, turning his face from the snow-filled wind that stung him. He touched the chief’s arm under his blanket, trying to see into his black eyes beneath the huge-brimmed wool hat he wore with an eagle feather stuck in its head-band like a jest.

‘They must see you not the man kill McEwan. We tell them.’