And then compressed by Sam, by his guilt, to try and forget. But like peat, it was still there, its energy intact. Now it was time for Sam to dig into it and remember.

He had no choice. It seemed like there were cops everywhere. The brushwood by the rail track was cover for now, but the moment he stepped out onto that wide road that led up towards town, they would see him. He’d watched two patrol cars glide by already and he knew they would be all over town. Sure. They’d see him all right.

How could they not? Sam Hunting Wolf looked like a madman. His jacket was torn and filthy, and his face was a mass of cuts and grazes from his scramble through a dense piece of birch-scrub in the dark.

Yes, that had been dumb. Running like that from the figure of Marlene that stepped out in front of him between those dark trees. Her eye had hung from its socket, dangling on a sallow sunken cheek, and when she had put a hand out to touch his face and rasped my baby at him, he had run. A mistake. But he was ready for its tricks now. He wouldn’t run again.

At least under cover of night he’d been able to walk almost the whole way along the tracks, falling to his stomach between the rails when a car on the Trans-Canada briefly lit up the track with its headlights. His detour through the dense pines and back down that wall of rock was not necessary.

But now he was back in Silver and it offered little cover for a six-foot-tall Indian with a bloody face and the clothes of a bum.

Go unseen, Calvin had said, and he knew Sam had the power to do just that, stored somewhere in his dark locker of a brain.

Calvin. Where was he? Sam could barely contemplate the options. He had no time to think about it. He had a task, and the difficulty of that task was the thing that was keeping him sane.

Sam closed his eyes and reached into his mind. The prayer he offered was a chant in his head, a mesmerizing, droning thing that dulled the edges round his conscious mind and pushed him nearer that well of knowledge and piety that he used to draw from unthinkingly as a teenager. Droning on and on and on until his eyes rolled back in his head and his breath came in short, panting bursts. He was numb now, oblivious to the outside world, where the snow fell on his concealed body behind the bushes and the wind howled through the telegraph lines above him. His mind felt sharp, alive, refreshed, and he saw as clearly as though it were yesterday, the way to go unseen.