Katie walked clockwise round the cases, completing her little ritual. She wandered past the display of beaded cradle-boards, noting that the model baby, strapped into the most ornate example was starting to go yellow on one side of its face. Dummies were a pain. They never looked real, and when they did there was something frightening about them. This mangled thing wasn’t going to fool anyone, but Katie had insisted on the baby, just to educate the public about the human side of her objects. It wasn’t enough to show visitors the old crumbling piece of wood and beading and make them admire the handiwork. You had to make them stop and think. Think about what life was like. Think about how their life was much the same as our life. Even make twentieth-century Mr and Mrs Leisure Suit consider that although things were harder for the average eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kinchuinick Indian, in some ways it was better then than now. She looked at the flaky yellowing face of the plaster baby. The real thing would have been strapped into one of these cradleboards from the moment it was born and taken out occasionally to stretch and kick and be cuddled, then strapped back in and attached to its mother. Secure. Loved. Cherished. Forest moss for a diaper, with the plant’s chemicals providing a natural barrier to diaper rash and a whole tribe providing love, attention and security. Pretty different from the Kinchuinick babies now. Nothing about their modern lives would sit happily in a mahogany case. The plaster baby looked back at her as if it mourned for them too. Needs a clean, she thought. Get rid of that yellowing with some turpentine. It went on her mental list.

Then on to the medicine bundles. Strange, small leather pouches full of herbs, used by shamans for good and bad medicine. All present and correct, except maybe one of the bad medicine bundles was responsible for a label peeling off at the back of the case. Bad medicine plays havoc with glue. Note two on the list. A stroll past the eagle feather wands and pipes completed her circuit, and ended, as always, with the model.

Just before closing, before she turned the model off at the wall switch, she always pressed the Corkscrew Tunnel’s red button and smiled as the tiny train started its last journey of the day through the mountain of paper: her own ritual.

Ritual was important to Katie Hunt. Perhaps not quite as important as it had been to Katie Crosby, but it was still up there along with breathing and eating. But if that love of ritual had endured the years, lots of things had disappeared forever; and they started to disappear when the twenty-three-year-old Katie Jane Crosby had first gazed into the delicious, mischievous black eyes of Sam Hunting Wolf. Mostly bad things. Things she was glad to have shaken off like dandruff. Things like Tom.