‘I have not forgotten.’

‘What does the raindrop know?’

Sam looked up at the black, circling silhouette of his rejected guide and swallowed. ‘That it falls from a sky it is part of, onto a flower that it is part of, into the ground it is part of, to feed the fruit it is part of, that feeds the man it was part of long ago before it fell.’

‘And?’

‘It knows it will be a raindrop again as a man knows he will be a man again.’

‘And are your children, your wife, as nothing, like the Trickster says?’

‘No. They are everything.’

‘And you?’

‘I see my face in the raindrop. I am something.’

Eden sighed. There was a flap of wings. The eagle Sam could never quite see was so close.

‘Listen now, my Grandson. For you can stay no longer. You know I have nothing to tell you of the Isksaksin other than that you must have a pure heart to use it or you will be devoured. I know only what I saw, and that is not enough to know what the truth may be. For the truth is different for each shaman who becomes the boundary line. He calls only that which his heart can bear. But I may tell you of the Trickster.’

The sun was growing cooler. Eden was right. He knew this state would not last for long. Sam listened to Eden’s beautiful voice, although the words made no sound that ears would recognize.

‘He once had a face that he saw in the raindrop too. He was cunning and vain but he ran on the earth and moved in the heavens with other spirits of his kind before men came, before the mountains were finished and the seas had gone from the plains.

‘And when man first came he played with them as a child would play with a new-born kitten. Sometimes roughly, cruelly, sometimes with affection, but always with curiosity and astonishment. But then the kitten became a cat and man grew wise to his games. He was played with by them. They knew him and they delighted in using his other-world skills for their own amusement. The shamans amongst them learned to shape-shift from him. They learned to move things with their mind and transport themselves to the moon and the stars with their spirits as he could. They could see what he could see, both into the future and into the past, and he grew more vindictive and more angry as they toyed with his powers and tricked him for their amusement.