His eyes slowly lifted to the figure opposite and as he did so the heatless flames seemed to grow higher, stopping him from seeing Calvin’s face. Sam’s eyes travelled down the old shaman’s body. The wool jacket, the cord trousers, the Timberland boots. Calvin’s jacket was open, just as it was when he went to fetch wood, and from the thick leather belt around his waist, Sam could see the medicine bundle hanging. The image of this same bundle that he held in his hand now, on the other side of this pretence of a fire.

He wailed and leapt to his feet, and the height let him look directly down into the face that had been talking to him. Whorls of blackness curled behind the image of that brown lined face, and the darkness behind the eyes was deeper and more profane than any it had revealed before. It started to laugh. That filthy noise again, touching the inside of his head like a rapist stroking a tethered thigh.

Sam gaped for a moment, defiled and violated by its trickery, then ran from the tunnel, gasping in the freezing air, his eyes swivelling in the dimly snow-lit night, searching in between those dark tree-trunks for what he dared not see.

And there it was, between the trees. No more than a dark man-sized mound on the light snow that had dusted the areas under the lodgepole pines.

Sam walked forward and stepped from the white track into the gloom of the trees. Calvin’s face was twisted and grotesque, frozen in a contortion of agony, and the bloody penis that hung from his dead lips was almost comical, like a joke cigar. Sam turned away, the blood draining from his head threatening to make him swoon.

He had slept.

Sam had slept by the fire and now Calvin was dead.

He knelt down by the mutilated corpse and touched the old shaman’s face lightly.

‘Fly in the sunlight, Soaring Eagle. The Grandfathers await you.’

Sam unfurled Calvin’s good hand, clenched in a claw of pain, and placed the medicine bundle there. He bent and kissed the tortured face of his shaman tutor, then stood and walked towards the tunnel to make his preparations. It would take many hours. He must begin.

As Sam entered the dark arch, the snow outside stopped for a moment as a high wind blew a small parting in the clouds. For half a minute the moon shone onto the snow-covered landscape, bathing it in blue light like the ghost of daylight. Then the clouds reunited and the flakes began to spill again.

In amongst them, unseen by any living thing, riding the air with the same delicate grace as its white companions, a small eagle feather fell to earth like a tear.

58

‘Margaret?’

The voice on the end of line confirmed it was indeed Margaret.