Too late. Too late to stop the black sleep coming over his father again. And what was the filthy thing he feared beyond reason doing with this slumber? As if to answer him, there came a noise from the tunnel that nearly stopped his heart. A human scream so shrill yet deep, of immeasurable suffering and agony, bellowed from the black arch.

The boy’s eyes were wide with terror. He kept deadly still, waiting for more, and when the silence was unbroken, he snapped his head back to his father.

Quickly he fumbled beneath the black coat that covered Hunting Wolf’s naked body and found the small medicine bundle and knife that was tied around his wrist with a thong. He fished about in the small leather sack and found the bitter leaves, the ones he had been taught about. Walks Alone placed the leaves on his father’s chest, took the knife from its sheath in two hands and raised it above his head. The prayer. How did it go? Would it work, spoken only in his brain and not out loud? He had to try. There was no more time.

He formed the words in his head, repeating them as if with his tongue and swayed his head in rhythm to his phantom chant. There was a new noise from the tunnel. A deep scraping roar. Something on the move.

He raised the knife higher and screwed his eyes tighter.

‘NO!’

His mother’s tearing scream made him open them with a start. She was yards away, her face a mask of horror. Walks Alone looked at her once, then turned his head back to his father and brought the knife down in a shining arc.

Singing Tree collapsed into the snow, wailing like a wounded animal. The boy lifted the knife and brought it down a second time. The roar in the tunnel increased.

Beneath him, his father’s chest bled from the two perfect surface cuts that described the first shape of the Thunder Spirit’s mark, the herbs at the point of the crude V it described. And as Walks Alone watched, Hunting Wolf’s eyes flickered and his mouth started to twitch and drool.

The boy looked to his gasping mother, a world away on her hands in the snow, and smiled.

When the hare opened its mouth, wider, much wider than the mechanics of the jaw had been designed for, James Henderson realized he was going to die. A paralysis came over him that was mental as well as physical, temporarily stopping his fear as well as very nearly stopping his heart. He watched almost with wonder as the mouth of the ruined animal split and burst, and the black bile burst out of a body that would have needed to have been a hundred times the volume in order to contain it.

The fingers of Henderson’s hand opened and let his crucifix drop to the ground.