Behind him, the men clattered and gabbled like farm labourers heading for the fields, but this was no happy gleaning. Their tools were on leave from digging rock and subduing steel, and there was a new ugly purpose to the way they handled these familiar implements.

Muir mused darkly on how they had arrived at such a brutal mission. But the rabble-rouser, the man who had told them to gather their wits and their picks, was forgotten. In fact, there would be none amongst them who could even remember Snowchild Sitconski’s face, let alone his sinister warnings of Kinchuinick treachery. Muir was firm that the decision had been his, and he stood by it as he cleared his throat to address the band of men who milled in the snow, a line of slow black cattle.

‘We find the savage and we deal with him humanely. You understand? He is to be killed quickly. Remember in all this depravity, we are Christian men.’

There was no response. Muir looked away, above the tall pines to the rock where he hoped in his true heart they would not find the Indian, and an unaccountable fear rose in his gullet. The muffled sound of metal clanking against a buckle moved him to action, and he gestured weakly that they should move. The weak gesture was echoed in the passive tread of the frightened and lonely men who followed him. These were not murderers or even executioners. These were men who laid shining rails and blasted deep and complex tunnels. But then everything was different now. And the falling snow, unchanged and relentless for nearly two long months, reminded them that they were prisoners in that pandemonium, until it, or an early spring, decided otherwise.

47

He should have been frightened. The figures standing around him in a half-circle were the stuff of nightmares and yet he was calm and strangely comforted by their presence. Billy looked around him with his wolf eyes and tried to make sense of the place he was in. He was sitting on his haunches in a large glade of soft sweet lemongrass, a curtain of aspens blowing gendy to his right, their shiny leaves flashing in the sunlight, and a green glacial river sparkling over smooth rocks to his left.

But in front of him, the sun behind their towering heads, stood the seven creatures who demanded his attention. The tallest figure was the most grotesque, and should have made any little boy cower or run for his life. It was at least fifteen feet high, with an eagle’s head on the oversized body of a man, and when it spoke to him again its voice was kind but fierce.

‘Why do you hesitate, Running Wolf? Do you not know us?’

The wolf that was Billy blinked up at the creature and it was Billy who answered, his voice having no sound, but coming directly from his deeply sleeping mind.