He squatted against the rough wall now, fighting to compose himself. At the end of the street the barely visible Wolf Mountain stood like a portcullis. He narrowed his eyes at its grey, misty bulk, the top lost in the clouds of the snowstorm and remembered a dream he’d had in which this mountain he loved became his captor. It was like he was in that dream now, but it couldn’t be. He was not a prisoner. He was free. Free and completely barking crazy. Sam ground his back teeth together and concentrated on truth.

His heart was speaking to him now, and it was telling him that the thing in the bedroom was no trick. Yes, his Indian heart knew that much. He’d known long ago that the things he saw and touched and spoke to in Calvin’s sweat-lodges were no trick either. Sure he’d wanted to believe they were fake, particularly when they scared him, but his heart told him things back then too.

But his head told him like it had done for decades, that the Trickster was not real. Sam had battled his whole adult life to be more than a superstitious spirit-fearing Indian. More than his parents. More than the heritage of misery and deprivation that formed him. To believe in the Trickster would be to believe in Sam Hunting Wolf the Indian, and in some ways that would be the worst part. Look what happened to Indians who believed in themselves, believed in their proud past and their spirit world: the gaols were full of them and only liquor-store keepers rubbed their hands in glee when they saw them coming. He wasn’t one of them. Not Sam.

He had a head that reasoned and saw the world the way it was, and it told him that things like that monster, that face in the crowd, couldn’t and didn’t exist.