Calvin turned away, looked casually out of the window and sipped from his hot refreshed coffee. When he spoke, it was in the ancient tongue, that long-forgotten form of Cree that only a very few elders and shamans can recognize, and fewer still can use. ‘No more than I like what I see when I watch the dung that falls from my shit-hole.’

Although Calvin was not looking at the creature, he could feel the air moving with its ire. The waitress was back with its coffee, and he saw in the reflection of the glass that it smiled at her with that false face as she placed the mug in front of it. Great Spirit, if she could only see what she had served. Its blackness seemed infinite, pornographic in its lust for itself and everything it wished to consume. He turned to look at it again, knowing what would come next, and he prayed to the Thunder Spirit that he was right, that a Trickster could be tricked.

It gathered itself, and Calvin knew that somewhere Sam Hunting Wolf’s body would be getting ready, against its owner’s will, to lose consciousness. His heart had started to beat a little faster now at that prospect.

‘Do you know my name?’

Calvin looked into its blackness. ‘You have no name. You are nameless.’

He felt it falter. It swirled like mud stirred, and gathered again in a concentration of hatred.

‘Do you know my name?’

Calvin laughed bitterly and with every nerve in his body telling him not to, turned and looked away again as though the question was of little consequence. ‘You are nothing.’

Dark tendrils reached out for him in the moving air and stopped as he’d prayed they would at the invisible barrier that circled the shaman. There was a roar from the thing behind the mask that could, and should, have stopped Calvin’s heart with its sudden volume and ferocity. But he had been prepared for its rage, and had focused his old eyes on a young couple enjoying ice-cream and each other’s love at a table far down the restaurant. They heard nothing, for as Calvin was repeating over and over to himself in his terrified brain, it was nothing. The couple laughed at something the young man had said, and the girl put a dab of ice-cream on his nose playfully with her spoon. Calvin shut his eyes with that vision sewn onto his lids. The love of the young. The love of life. Life must be allowed to continue. He was surviving. That was what counted.

When he opened his eyes again, his wife was sitting opposite him.

She was weeping. ‘Calvin? Will these never be full of milk?’ She was holding her naked breasts out of the buckskin dress that she had always worn covered with a greasy woollen cardigan. Dead, he knew, but back now and imploring him.