The ground the body had been buried in was unusual in two ways. Firstly, in its extreme dryness – almost pure sand, in fact. A geologist would recognize it as the million-year-old, raised dry remains of the Horn River bed, whose modern course now ran peacefully only a quarter of a mile away. That had been the factor that left the poor bastard looking like Tutankhamun. Even Craig knew that extremely wet or arid land leaves bodies even hundreds of years old whole enough to shake hands with. This corpse’s skin was stretched tight like parchment with barely an inch tainted by decay or infestation, leaving the grisly evidence of what had happened to it well preserved. The other unusual factor was that the ground was sacred. That was interesting to Craig. There had been big trouble from some of the elders when the chief had chosen that ground as the sight of the rodeo centre. It had been in the local rag. Everyone knew Chief Powderhand was a corrupt old piece of ass-wipe and the money he would cream off the rodeo centre made the sacred nature of the ground a joke. What chance did the spirit world have against the mighty buck? Powderhand drove a big shiny Buick and wore suits, and no amount of protest from the elders and their supporters could stop him if he wanted to do something. He held the purse-strings and even though the visitor could be forgiven for thinking Redhorn was one of the poorest places in Canada, it was a pretty full purse. Strange how none of it got to anyone on the reserve. Not until the chief’s elections rolled round that is, when suddenly there was a lot of coinage kicking around to those who voted the right way.

He was one irritated chief though, when the white workers dug up that body. Apparently he’d offered them money to keep quiet and bury it again. The Mounties at Stoke thought about prosecuting the old stoat for that little indiscretion. Then they thought again. It didn’t do to go upsetting the chief of the local tribe. Not with the government breathing down your neck. Keep them happy, keep them poor, keep them drunk, keep them quiet. The unwritten constitution of Canada.

So the file was opened and closed. With no reported missing persons on the national computer who even remotely fitted the vital statistics of the corpse, and no one in Redhorn with anything to say at all, the file was stacked away as an unsolved.