‘I told him, Calvin. I told him everything and watched him prepare. He was like a kid and I still had this big dark thing sitting on my heart that was screaming I was doing wrong. But I hated him so much I just wanted to hurt and destroy. I didn’t know what I was doing. Do you understand that? I didn’t know.’

Calvin neither nodded or spoke. He watched Sam carefully, and when the scuffling started again behind them, nearer this time, he merely leaned forward and threw another branch on the fire, letting the hiss of the wet wood drown the sound of those tiny claws on rubble. He looked up from the fire at Sam’s twisted face and made a small gesture with his hand that meant continue.

‘You know how we prepared. You taught me well. It seemed like blasphemy though, letting Moses do it, and because he was doing it unpurified, making it for bad medicine, it stank of evil, of a badness I could barely comprehend. But I didn’t care. I told myself I didn’t believe in it, not really. I had decided the night before that this was all bullshit, tossed on the hard ground telling myself over and over again that my curse was not only to be born Indian but to be born at all. That this shit was all made up to keep us pegged down to our grubby beliefs, to keep us out of the white man’s hair and away from his rockets and his computers and his money. And I hated the whole fucking thing. Hated every fucking Indian ever born and every bit of our stinking, stupid clay-footed religion.

‘So I just watched him, telling him the next step each time he completed a prayer, believing nothing except that I had my Pappy in my power for the first time in my life. He was so hungry for whatever it was he thought the Isksaksin could do for him, he was like a child. Eager, wild-eyed, listening to me like I was special. I tell you, Calvin, I enjoyed it. And then we were ready. He put the Isksaksin between his teeth like I told him, and I waited for a moment before the last prayer. He looked so small and thin, Moses, standing there naked with that piece of bone gripped in his teeth. I thought about Marlene then. Wondered what she’d have been like if he hadn’t turned her on his skewer. Would she have loved me and held me, stroked my face and sung to me on the porch like I saw other Kinchuinick mothers do to their children?