Chapter 12
Jake was three quarters of the way up the ascent when he felt the first trickle of blood on his feet. Ahead of him, Warren and Rachel moved up the narrow ridge of stone at a measured pace, using their hands as well as their feet to climb. It was not a difficult path except when you were barefoot. He considered wrapping something around his feet, then decided to wait until he reached the top. At least he could feel the rocks with his toes and heels, could anchor himself by digging his toes into the small crevices. It was a long tumble back to the bottom of the valley.
He paused on a small, flat bench and inspected his feet. The blood wasn’t from a serious wound, just a ruptured blister on the pad of his big toe. His socks had worn away, and he kept thinking of Jaimie, of her mutilated feet. She had somehow worn through boots—good ones, too; Jake had seen the Red Wing insignia—and her lightweight socks, and then the skin on the bottoms of her feet. Running, she had said, but where? And with whom?
“Almost there,” Warren called out from above. “Easy, now. We don’t want to rush it.”
Our fearless leader, Jake thought. Back in control. The thought didn’t have much venom behind it. There were, he thought, worse things to deal with than this particular asshole.
Rachel looked down at Jake and saw him inspecting the bottoms of his feet. “How bad?”
“Fine,” Jake said. He twisted his socks around, so the unworn tops were now on the bottom. It would help sop up the blood, keep his footing from getting any more slippery. No need to think about the consequences. Lose his footing and slide back down there, leg busted. Or spine. Lay there on that little shelf of a beach between the river and the bluff, and wait.
“Do you think it can climb up here?” he asked.
She glanced downward. There was no movement, but the cuts in the earth had not closed over, and the vegetation was marked by dozens of muddy washes where the larger tendrils had carved tracks. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Is there more than one?”
She shrugged. “It could be just the one. That honey mushroom I mentioned, in the Willamette Valley? It extends for miles.”
He thought about that for a moment, all those tendrils leading back to something at the core, a central mass deep in the spongy earth. “Rachel?”
“Yes?”
“Let’s keep going.”
Warren was already climbing again, sending the occasional pebble cascading down on them. The grade was steepening a bit near the top, and Jake winced as he wedged his foot into a fissure and pushed upward. Above him, Rachel’s legs flexed and bunched. In another place and time he supposed he would have been more appreciative of the view.
Concentrate, Jake. Get to the top, then allow yourself the luxury of distraction. Not a second sooner. He slipped a fraction of an inch, then wedged his toe into a crack in the rock. Or, he thought, how about you just skip the distractions?
Warren said something ahead of them, his voice muffled. Jake glanced up. He couldn’t see Warren, who had reached the lip of the bluff and pulled himself over. Ten more yards to go. Warren spoke again, his voice indistinct as it deflected back over the open valley. Rachel paused as she swung herself over the lip, her elbows on the flat ground at chest level, her head framed in the gray sky between two large balsams. She stayed like that for a moment, then swung her leg over and disappeared from his view.
Something was wrong. The alternative was to stay here, clinging to the lichen-covered rocks, or retreat down to the valley.
He reached the lip, paused for a second, and then swung himself over. The first thing he saw when he looked up from where he lay on a bed of balsam needles was that there were way too many legs in his view. He looked up and saw an old Cree man peering down at him, his lined face impassive, his eyes assessing, cool to the point of coldness. Behind him, four other men, all Cree with the exception of a small, pale man, were arranged in a loose semicircle, with Warren and Rachel in the middle.
Well, he thought. They aren’t tendrils, at least.
Jake pushed himself to his feet and faced the older man. The wind was blowing toward him and he could smell the men’s wet clothes, their wet hair. Warren, his face red with exertion, was tight-lipped, his eyes flitting from man to man.
Jake wiped away the balsam needles that were stuck to his cheek. They cascaded down the front of his shirt and fell soundlessly to the forest floor.
“Hey, Uncle Henry.”
The old man’s face didn’t change expression. “Hello, Jake.”
* * *
He wasn’t really an uncle.
When Jake had been seven years old, he woke in the middle of the night to the sound of his mother screaming. She was screaming at his father, and Jake, though no stranger to the occasional argument between his parents, had never heard anything quite this intense. It was a one-sided argument, and Dawn, his mother, was beseeching Martin, Jake’s father, not to do something. Jake couldn’t understand what it was, only that his father could not do it, according to his mother, at least, who was shrieking over and over again the same plea:
“Don’t! Please Martin, don’t!”
He had scrambled to his feet, his blankets pooling behind him. It was mid-February, the worst of the long winter months, and the house was cold. The wood fire in the Franklin stove had dwindled to embers, and the wooden floorboards were cold on his bare feet. Outside, the night was blue-black, sprinkled with brilliant cold pinpricks of light from the northern constellations. Ten feet away, through the uninsulated interior walls that separated his bedroom from theirs, Jake’s father was doing whatever it was his mother did not want him to, and Jake, only seven, was torn, unsure of what might or might not be happening in his parents’ bedroom, and equally unsure of his own ability to step in and assist. But as his mind cleared and he registered the emotion in his mother’s voice as what it was—terror, not outrage—he raced out his doorway and through the next, and found out that what Martin was doing was convulsing on his bed, his mother shaking his shoulders to stop him from doing what he was very nearly done with. Which was dying, at the age of thirty-one, from a brain aneurysm. And so Jake began his new life of being a son without a father, standing in a shaft of starlight filtering through the window and watching his mother shake his father’s shoulders as the lights in Martin’s blood-soaked brain blinked out one by one.
He and his mother went through hard times after that, and although others did their best to help, there was not much in the community to share. Martin had worked in the timber camps, and he had also been a good hunter and an excellent trapper; Jake could still remember the silky marten pelts hanging on the wall, the occasional wolf or wolverine, the beautiful, tawny lynx hides. He knew his father loved the animals and did not like to kill them, but he liked to understand them, and catching them in his snares and leghold traps was one way of knowing the world in which they lived. It had not made perfect sense to Jake, not until he grew a bit older, but he had understood that the pelts brought in money. Money helped with store-bought food, and clothes, and sometimes Christmas presents. After Martin died there was no life insurance and no income, and when Jake turned nine his mother had conceded to several months of what passed for courtship and married Darren Lecoux, known locally as Coop.
Coop had broken his right leg while working on the BNSF rail gang in southern Ontario a few years earlier. Apparently, it was negligence on the railroad’s part; the gang boss had sent Coop and his coworker in to uncouple a section of cars without informing the trainmaster and the brakeman that maintenance was being performed. It was cold, and the diesel engines were still running, and when the trainmaster put the engine in reverse, the hitch of the newly uncoupled car had caught Coop’s leg just above the knee, pulverizing the femur so quickly that there had been no pain, just the absence of structural strength, and Coop had fallen down onto the cold tracks, the skin on his cheek freezing to the rail before his good friend Max could pry him out of the way of the rolling car. The damage to his face had required skin grafts, and the damage to his leg had required eight surgeries, all so that Coop might be able to limp his way through the rest of his life.
So there was a check, every month, and while Coop was not rich by most standards outside of Highbanks, he had a nice home, a nice truck, and even a Phowler johnboat with a surface-drive outboard that only required six inches of draft and could navigate all the backwaters and shallow streams up and down the Big and Little Glutton Rivers. He also had a fine collection of semiautomatic shotguns and bolt action rifles, which Jake was forbidden to use and would not have used if he had been granted access. He had kept his father’s rifles and the lone shotgun in the small closet of his new bedroom, and although they were older and of inferior quality to Coop’s, they were rust free and the barrels were not pitted nor scored. Coop’s arsenal, in comparison, was corroded and scratched, although the inherent quality of the firearms—and his ability to get into the backwaters where game wasn’t nearly as wary—meant his lack of attention to detail did not matter much.
His mother was a good-looking woman, and for a while Coop had seemed a decent, if somewhat reserved, stepfather who was pleased with his catch (Dawn) if not the baggage (Jake). It was not until the great gears of the railroad bureaucracy got around to grinding away at Coop’s situation that things began to change. It seemed a Pinkerton detective had been dispatched to gauge Coop’s level of disability. The agent had been disguised as a tourist hunter, and Coop had taken the man’s five hundred dollars to deposit him on a sandbar where moose were known to cross the river. He had taken another five hundred to help haul the man’s moose back into Highbanks, and a photograph of Coop straining to lift the hindquarters of the bull moose over the gunnels of his johnboat had accompanied the letter informing him that his 75 percent disability had been reduced to 15 percent.
Jake measured their deteriorating home life by the lines of color under his mother’s eyes. First it was just smudges of magenta from the all-night arguing sessions, then darker purple and black, the yellow bruises sometimes framing the more recent, vibrantly colored shiners. Empty cases of Silver Wolf vodka, which sold for six dollars, Canadian, for a 1.75 liter bottle, stacked up in the garage. Jake tried to help, his efforts culminating in a stint at the juvenile detention center in Potowatik. That had been the result of holding his skinning knife to Coop’s throat one night, the blade smeared with blood from skinning muskrats, Jake promising Coop that he would slide the point in right now if Coop didn’t promise to stop hitting his mother now and forevermore. Words to that effect. Coop had agreed, and the next morning the constable had been drinking coffee at the kitchen table with his mother when Jake came in from his trapline.
Jake had come back from Potowatik with a very clear plan, and he was on his best behavior. He had learned in the detention center that he had a very deep pool of patience he could rely on, as long as it helped to deliver results. It was what had made him one of the best trappers around, and so what if the money from his lines, the early waterline for mink and the long landline he ran through the bitter winter, so what if that all went to his mother as her part of the rent? That the house was paid for didn’t matter; there was a cost to life, and Jake understood this now, or thought he did.
Henry was Dawn’s sister’s ex-husband. He was not truly a friend of the family, but he had been good friends with Martin. He had been there when Jake, at age six, had leveled the little single-shot Rossi .410 at a ruffed grouse and made his first kill. Henry saw the change when Jake returned from Potowatik, saw something in Jake’s pleasant new behavior that Coop missed. Jake was never sure if his mother was as oblivious to his intentions as it seemed, or if she was simply waiting. Waiting for him to do something that his father would have wanted his son to do long ago.
That fall, as Jake paddled up to check his pocket set for mink at the mouth of a small feeder stream, his plans nearly complete, he was surprised to see Henry sitting on the bank. Jake paused ten yards out in the river, feathering his paddle in the current. He had only a lone muskrat in the bow of the canoe; as his mind dwelled on plans for revenge, the concentration needed for making an animal place its paw on a one-inch circle of steel that formed a trap’s pan had waned.
“You didn’t catch nothing in this one,” Henry had said, motioning toward the pocket set, a hole Jake had dug in the bank, baited with a chunk of fish and guarded with a 1½ coilspring trap. “But you got a nice buck mink in that blind set, down behind the big rock downriver.”
Jake, now sixteen and broad-shouldered like his father, stared impassively at Henry, giving him the stink-eye, but not as upset as he would normally be. A year or two earlier he would have been furious at Henry, at anyone, for mussing up his sets. Mink did not have a great sense of smell, but other creatures did, and occasionally he pulled in a red fox or a fisher on his waterline. And everybody knew it was terribly bad manners—some thought downright criminal—to mess with another man’s trapline.
“What are you doing here?”
Henry stood. “What you mean is, how’d I know where you set your traps.”
Jake frowned, started to reply, then stayed silent. He was normally a very good trapper; he took a lot of pelts and made a lot of money. There were others, mostly boys but a few men as well, who tried to follow him, perhaps to learn his secrets, perhaps to steal what he had taken. They were unsuccessful. Now, sitting in his canoe with the sun barely over the eastern horizon, he watched Henry, a man he knew and respected, and felt as though a great spotlight had been trained on him.
“I know how trappers think,” Henry said. He motioned to the trap at his feet. “This one’s okay, it’ll take some fur. But that blind set—the one by the boulder? That’s craft, right there. That old boar mink, he thought he was all nice and safe where the boulder separated from the bank. Crawl back there, get him a mouse or a frog and—wham!” Henry snapped his fingers. “You get them when they aren’t expecting it, just like all the good ones do. Right? Yeah, you’re a good trapper, Jake. Martin would be proud.”
Jake could feel the river, pulsing against the aluminum at his feet, vibrating up through the canoe’s ribs.
“You stick with animals, Jake,” Henry said. He leaned down and brushed the dirt from his knees. “Mink and muskrats and fox. I can’t see like Elsie, but I see something bad in your eyes, the way you clench your fists around certain men.” He held up a hand. “Don’t say nothing, just listen. I don’t care what your life is like, if you go through with it I’ll tell on you. Do you understand? I’ll tell on you.”
After a moment Jake let the river carry him downstream. His arms felt numb as he dipped the paddle in, drifting down the river, a boy-man who was simultaneously furious, confused, and terrified. Not terrified that Henry would do anything, or say anything, because Jake hadn’t actually done anything wrong, except, perhaps, in his heart. But in a way that was enough, because in his heart and his mind and his soul he had already committed to murdering his stepfather. The truly frightening part was that he had been so sure his well-thought-out plans were confined to his own mind that he had believed the consequences would be minimal, that nobody would even suspect, much less know. It was the great fear that comes to many teenagers when they realize that grown-ups are not nearly so dumb as they seem to be, and it came to Jake fairly early in his life and all at once, and on a subject that had consumed his past eighteen months.
I’ll tell on you. It was a childish threat, and yet it had resonated deeply. As Henry must have known it would.
When Jake reached the blind set there was indeed a dead mink in the Conibear 120, the bodycatch trap’s jaws nestled around the big boar’s throat. The animal was bent into an arch from rigor mortis, and its beady black eyes were open, tacky from the air. Jake pulled the trap free, the mink still attached, and went on to pull the rest of the fifty-one traps he had laid along clay banks of the streams and marshes of the northern wilderness.
Three days later he left Highbanks.
* * *
Jake didn’t know the other men with Henry, and he avoided making eye contact with them. He wasn’t terribly surprised. Even without the smoke from the drill rig fire, it was only a matter of time before Warren’s activities would be found out. Hence the desire to get in and out, Jake supposed.
“You lost your boots,” Henry said.
Jake looked down. What was left of his socks was smeared with dirt and blood. He looked up. “What are you doing out here, Henry?”
Henry shook his head. “This is the point where I tell you—we’re the ones asking the questions.”
“You know this guy, Henry?” This question came from the man with a scar running through his eyebrow. They weren’t armed, but Jake could see the indents on their jackets where their rifle straps had been placed not very long ago. The absence of rifles, the thought that they might have hidden them, worried him more than if the four men had been carrying. This far out in the brush, almost everyone carried a rifle. He shifted a little, feeling the Winchester slide across his back. He had repositioned his sling on the climb up to run across his body, the strap running from his left shoulder across to his right hip. Instead of being able to simply shrug the rifle off his shoulder, he would have to pull it over his head,.
“He’s a Trueblood,” Henry said. “I used to run with his old man. His ma is Dawn Lecoux.”
“That old white lady?”
“Yes,” Henry said. He turned back to Jake, his eyes flitting over the valley behind them. “What are you doing out here with them, Jake?”
Jake glanced at the other four men. The one with the scar called Darius he didn’t know, and he didn’t know the beefy one. The younger man, Billy, was a Martineau, and the small, vicious-looking man stepping lightly from foot to foot he did know. Weasel had threatened to cut Jake’s throat once, when Jake was about five years old and had stepped out onto the muddy road by his house to retrieve a wooden arrow. Weasel had been driving his ATV down the road at about fifty kilometers per hour, a bottle of Labatt’s in one hand, the other pressed to the throttle. He had to brake hard and swerve into the ditch to avoid hitting Jake, nearly rolling the four-wheeler, his beer bottle shattering on the muddy road.
“Carve yer goddamn Adam’s apple out, kid,” Weasel had said.
“Answer him,” Darius said. “What are you doing out here?”
Jake looked behind him, into the river valley. The river had come up several feet already, the soil too saturated to absorb any more moisture. The valley floor was scarred and marked by long, muddy fissures, but there was no movement. Darius stepped forward, unexpectedly quick for a large man. There was no time for Jake to do anything, not with his knife or his rifle. He expected some sort of violence, and it would be almost refreshing at this point; he might get his ass beat, if not by Darius then by his buddies, but at least that was something he could get his hands around.
Darius looked at him from a distance of two feet, and Jake saw something else mixed in with the latent violence of the man: intelligence, and a healthy dose of curiosity. “You know what they call this valley in Cree, Trueblood?” His voice was low, not much louder than a whisper.
“Sure. Asiskiwiw.”
“The muddy valley,” Darius said. “You’re their guide, eh? What you guiding them for?”
Jake stood eye-to-eye with Darius. There was no way to back up, because the edge of the cliff was just a few yards behind him. And he didn’t want to retreat, Jake realized. He was sick of running, more than a little tired of getting pushed around. He studied Darius’s face, then smiled.
“Something funny?”
“When you shoot up, say at a helicopter, it shrinks the relief distance.” Jake pantomimed bringing a rifle to his shoulder, jerking it up into the gray sky. Darius didn’t flinch. Jake brought the imaginary rifle down and rubbed at his eyebrow. “We learned that at Dwyer Hill. You’ve got to adjust for a target flying overhead when you got a scoped rifle, pull your head back a little more than you would with a shotgun. It’s not like duck hunting.”
“Dwyer Hill?” Darius asked.
“Sure.”
“It’s a training base,” Henry said behind him. “For Joint Task Force 2 special ops. It was in the papers. K-Bar, all of that.”
“You were with K-Bar?”
Jake nodded, not sure why he brought it up. Dwyer Hill. He was surprised at the memories the name brought back. Not the bad memories—those came later. But the good ones, when they were all in it together, running and hiking and crawling, dehydrated and exhausted and sometimes triumphant. Later they were dehydrated and exhausted again, but that was when the killing had begun, deaths on both sides. Rather than triumph, he’d felt a slow deadening, his core calcifying in the world of blood and sand and shit.
“You think that you were some special forces asshole scares me?”
“Scare you?” Jake said. “I was just trying to teach you how to shoot.”
Darius laughed and took a step back. “You aren’t going to provoke me that easy, Special Ops. We got all kinds of time, though . . .” His words trailed off, and he made a motion to his men. “I’d prefer not to waste any more. What was his mom’s name again, Henry? Dawn?”
Henry nodded, slowly.
“An old lady back in my village,” Darius mused. “What you guiding them for, Trueblood?”
Jake felt a series of emotions swirl through him when Darius said his mother’s name. First came anger, cold and focusing, at the implied threat to his mother. Close on the heels of the anger was a deep sense of irony. He had spent the last five years deliberately distancing himself from everything and everybody. Even taking this job was a way of separating himself from his upbringing, working for a group that knew nothing about this land, a group that he had always suspected wasn’t playing by the rules. Now he was here, at the perfect place and time to be able to take unencumbered action, and the people he had run up against knew his mother, were threatening to hurt her if he didn’t cooperate. And if he was reading Darius’s eyes correctly, it wasn’t an idle threat.
Nor, he supposed, was the threat confined to just his mother.
He glanced at Rachel, tense and watchful where she still sat on the ground. He could tuck and roll and have the Winchester up and firing in a few seconds—if he didn’t get tangled up. This group, as vicious as they looked, probably hadn’t taken any fire in their lives. They might panic. But they would probably only panic after he started firing, and maybe only after he hit one of them. Part of him marveled at the ease with which his mind reverted back to the logistics around killing, just fell back into step with it, like walking with an old acquaintance. Not an old friend, maybe, but close. He wished he had a bit more real estate to work with.
“He’s with us,” Rachel said. “Our guide.”
“Rachel,” Warren warned.
She went on. “We have a mineral lease for exploration. Our drill rig is down there. You probably saw the smoke.”
“You have a lease,” Darius said. “From who?”
Rachel turned to Warren. He shook his head.
Darius motioned to Billy, and the younger man pulled an object from his belt—it wasn’t a pistol, but rather a short war club Jake recalled being referred to as a mistik—and brought it down hard between Warren’s shoulder blades. Warren staggered forward and fell to his knees, his eyes widening in pain. Here we go, Jake thought. Welcome to our little woodsy corner of the world, Mr. Campbell. How do you like the view?
“You want another?” Billy asked.
“It’s . . .” Warren started to say, trying to catch his breath. “It’s from the provincial government.”
“Oh yeah?” Darius said. “That’s real nice, I’m happy for you. There’s some guy from Winnipeg with you, can show us this provincial lease? ’Cause I seem to remember, we’re supposed to have some say in the matter. What they call us down there, First Nations?” Jake noticed that he had quite suddenly and neatly been excised from the conversation. That was fine. He was just a guide, after all, and the brains of the outfit was sitting over there in the pine needles.
“It’s all legit,” Warren said.
“I think we better start having a better conversation,” Darius said. “Because I’m getting frustrated. Three people for an exploratory lease? Billy, you got something sharper than that mistik in your pack? He ain’t listening too good.”
Billy drew a hunting knife out of his backpack, the blade bright as he tapped it against the side of his leg. Warren’s throat convulsed once, twice, but his lips remained set. Billy leaned down, the blade glittering.
“There were five more of us,” Rachel said.
Billy paused, the knife a foot from Warren’s face. Darius held up a hand to Billy and turned to her. “Where are they?”
“There was an earthquake,” she said. “A bad one. That’s when the drill rig tipped over and caught on fire.” She went on in a rush. “The ground split open, blocked us from going back to our campsite. Some of the people fell into the openings, and one man, Greer, hit his head. Another man drowned crossing the river, less than an hour ago. We’re the only ones left.”
“An earthquake?” Garney said. “Darius, let me use Billy’s knife. I’ll cut through the bullshit real quick.”
Good thing she left a few choice parts out, Jake thought. They’d really want to do some cutting.
“Not now,” Darius said, turning to address Jake. “You understand that if somebody pops up out of the woodwork, or we cut the tracks of somebody else, the girl pays.”
“We’re all that’s left.”
Darius walked over to Warren and toed him in the ribs. Warren jerked as though shocked with an electric prod. He glared up at Darius, his expression bright with hate. He had been trying to reach the spot between his shoulder blades where he’d been struck with the mistik and couldn’t quite reach it, much to the amusement of Weasel and Garney. “The girl pays,” Darius repeated. “That’s a core drilling rig. For samples?”
Warren blinked. “Yes.”
“And you have an exploration lease?”
Warren paused, wiped the sweat from his brow. “Yes.”
Darius nodded, walked over to Rachel, and punched her in the face. She crumpled, and when Jake looked up he saw that Billy had the knife raised slightly. Rachel twisted in the pine needles, gasping. Darius watched her squirm for a moment, then held up a hand. Billy tossed him the knife and Darius knelt over Rachel, his hand curling into the blond hair on the back of her head.
“The lease?”
Warren’s face had gone pale. “I don’t have one.”
“What did you find?”
When Warren didn’t answer right away, Darius pressed a forearm across the back of Rachel’s neck, smashing her face into the forest floor. He wiped aside her spray of hair and positioned the tip of the knife on the back of her neck, twisting the blade back and forth lightly, almost playfully. Rachel let out a low moan of pain, her fists clenched around handfuls of pine needles.
“I . . .”
Darius looked up. “Well?”
“We didn’t find anything,” Warren said. “The earthquake destroyed the rig before we could extract samples.”
Darius shook his head, as though disappointed, then turned to look at Jake. “Unsling your carbine, Special Ops.” He turned his head a fraction of an inch. “Henry, he plays hero, you shoot him in the belly.”
Jake cut his eyes to the left. A few yards away, Henry had pulled a Walther pistol out of his backpack. The muzzle, which had been trained on Jake’s chest, dropped a fraction of an inch. Jake shrugged off the Winchester rifle, keeping his fingers away from the trigger. He held the rifle out in front of him and laid it down on the pine needles, the muzzle facing into the trees.
“The knife,” Darius said.
Jake pulled his knife, the handle streaked with mud and gore, out of its sheath. He tossed it to the ground next to the rifle.
Darius pressed his own knife deeper into the back of Rachel’s neck, his mouth set in concentration. Jake cut his eyes to Warren, who was shaking his head rapidly, trying to protest, to stall. Rachel let out a muffled scream, her legs thrashing. Darius’s hand applied more pressure, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth.
“They have samples,” Jake said. “I saw them.”
Darius turned to him. The muscles and ligaments in his forearm stood out like cables. “Samples of what?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “But they found what they were looking for.”
Darius turned down to look at the back of Rachel’s neck. There was a thin trickle of blood curving down, and she had gone very still. He cocked his head to the side, staring at the blood as it trickled a path through the pine needles. He was breathing heavily, not from exertion.
“Darius.” Henry was still looking at Jake as he spoke, the muzzle of the gun never wavering. “She might be useful.”
Darius paused, still watching the trickle of blood where it welled out of Rachel’s skin. Then, abruptly, he stood and turned to Jake. “Okay.” His breathing had returned to almost normal. “Now you guide us,” Darius said, pointing down into the valley. “Down there, across the river and over to your camp. Understand?”
Before Jake could answer Garney stepped forward. “You serious? We don’t need to cross another goddamn river.”
Darius stared at the large man. Garney swallowed once, twice, then cast his eyes downward but did not retreat. Jake alternated glances at the other men. Billy seemed disappointed, either by the lack of action or by the prospect of going down into the valley. Probably both. Weasel had drifted out of sight, somewhere off to the side of the semicircle. Henry seemed lost in thought, his forehead set in deep lines as he glanced down into the valley and then back at Jake. The Winchester was only a few feet away, and Jake only needed a second or two of distraction. Where was Weasel?
“What would you have us do?” Darius asked.
Garney toed a line in the pine needles. “We already did it. We found them, stopped them. Now we just need to finish up.”
Darius rubbed at the side of his face. “And the samples? The data they might have collected already?”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t come in here blind. They found something, by satellite or maybe from all those planes we’ve been seeing. You think there won’t be others?”
“But they can’t just start mining,” Garney said. “They’re here illegally.”
“Yes,” Darius said, the contempt thick in his voice. “That will stop them. ”
“Garney’s right.” Weasel’s voice came from behind Jake, just a few yards away. “Finish it right here. Look at that rig—they didn’t get nothing out of the ground.”
“We don’t know that,” Darius said, still patient, waiting for the others to come around. Billy got it, Jake could tell. The younger man’s face had lost all sense of playfulness, and he kept looking down into the valley, same as Henry. Stopping them—Rachel, Warren, and himself—didn’t end the project. Someone would come looking for them, would find the samples . . . and maybe would find out just how effective the promethium was in animating tissue. If anything, that would give them even more reason to want to pull this particular form of promethium out of the wet ground. Biomedical applications, military enhancements . . . the sky was the limit.
Keep looking at the river like that, Jake thought. I’ll take that little popgun away from you, Uncle, and see what happens next.
“We don’t have any samples,” Warren said. “We didn’t log anything, either. There’s no reason to go down there.”
“Darius?”
“What, Henry?”
“You’re right,” Henry said. He was still looking down at the valley. “We need to go down. Whatever is there . . .” he paused, looking from Warren to Rachel, then to Jake. “It doesn’t belong to them.”
Darius cocked an eyebrow. “You’re with me, old man?”
“Yes,” Henry said. “But we go in and out, fast as we can. All of us, in and out. Understand?”
“In and out,” Darius said. “Yes, okay.”
Jake stared at the man he used to call Uncle. There was murder in his eyes, murder in all their eyes. Behind him, Weasel stepped lightly in the pine needles, his breath coming in quick little pants, waiting for the nod. On the forest floor, Rachel had twisted her head and was looking at Jake, the side of her neck covered in blood. Warren was on his knees, staring at the knife still in Darius’s hand.
Henry took a step closer. There seemed to be, at least for the moment, some kind of transfer of power in the group from Darius to Henry. “What did they find, Jake?”
Overhead, the wind blew softly through the balsams. Jake could almost hear Jaimie’s monotone chant in the breeze: In the treetops, in the treetops.
“Just samples,” he said. “They collected them yesterday morning, before the earthquake. I know where they put them.” He paused, aware that beneath the adrenaline and the fear and the sharp, biting pain of his lacerated feet was the beginning of something thin and tenuous as a cobweb. Up here, the only thing he could expect was a bullet. That was the logical conclusion to this interaction, a knife or a bullet, an orderly end to a disorganized life. But down there, in Asiskiwiw, chaos reigned.
“Sample bottles?” Darius asked.
“Yes,” Jake said. “They seemed excited about them. He”—Jake nodded at Warren—“said something about this being exactly what they were looking for.”
Warren seemed about to protest, but stopped himself before he spoke. Something was registering in his eyes, a comprehension.
Just be quiet, Jake thought. Act pissed and scared. Be your normal asshole self.
“Where?” Darius asked.
“They’re hidden pretty good,” Jake said. “Way back in the woods. I don’t think I could tell you if I tried.”
Darius held his eyes for a long time. “Okay, Special Ops,” he said after a minute. “Let’s see what you can find us.”
* * *
Jake went down the hogback first, followed by Darius. Warren and Rachel were positioned between Garney and Weasel, with Billy close behind. It was more difficult for Jake going downhill than it had been going up, partially due to his feet—and partially because they had tied his wrists together.
Henry remained standing at the edge of the cliff for a long time, rubbing his hands over each other as though his fingers were cold, watching them descend. He was chewing on a maple twig, stripping the thin bark off and spitting it aside until the twig was a bright white. After a while, Henry flung the skinned twig to the ground and swung himself over the edge, catching up with the rest of the group just as they were dropping down the last little section of the hogback onto the narrow beach.
The river had gone up several more feet, shrinking the cobble beach to only a few yards wide. The water was the color of chocolate milk, racing downstream and carrying a plethora of logs and branches with it. A bird’s nest made of woven grass went spinning by, turning around and around in the current.
“How deep?” Darius asked.
“Over our heads,” Jake said. “It was lower than this when we crossed it. I don’t know if we can make it across until it drops.”
“Try,” Darius said. “We’ll give you a rope. You make a wrong move, I’ll shoot you in the ass.” The men had retrieved their rifles from the brush before starting down, and Garney had pulled out his compound bow with the six broadhead arrows. Weasel had taken Jake’s Winchester, and it pained Jake to hear his rifle banging carelessly off the rocks on their descent. It had suffered its fair share of dents and scratches over the years, and the bluing had all but disappeared from the barrel and receiver, but those were his marks, and marks from his father.
“This one’s loaded with 200-grain Nosler partitions,” Darius said, patting his rifle. “Put a hole in you big enough to watch TV through. Give me your rope, Henry.”
Jake studied the river, trying not to think about getting shot, or stabbed. Trying to think about how this would work if he crossed first, and alone.
“I thought you wanted me to show you where the sample bottles were,” Jake said. “I can’t do that if I drown.”
“I told you, we have rope,” Darius said. “Besides, the girl will tell us if you don’t. Garney and Weasel know how to get people to talk.”
“She doesn’t know where—”
Darius shook his head. “Swim, Special Ops. They taught you that at Dwyer Hill, didn’t they?”
“The river will go down,” Jake said, speaking loud enough for the others to hear. “A few hours, it’ll be down three, four feet, and the current will be way slower than it is now.” He held up his wrists. “I’m not going anywhere.” As he spoke, a log drifted by in the river, a massive black spruce with limbs and needles still intact. Darius watched it, then turned to look at his men, who were watching the river as well.
“Let’s wait,” Billy said. “Build a fire, rest a little. We’ve been running hard.”
“That’s exactly what he wants,” Darius said, jerking his head toward Jake. “Give them time to wiggle free.”
Billy snorted. “The day I worry about some wannabe city Indian getting out of my knots is the day I throw my rifle into the Little Glutton. Come on, Darius. A little fire, a little rest, an easy swim in the morning.” The rest of the men were nodding behind him.
Jake watched Darius, knowing he had won another small stay, probably worthless, but perhaps not. Before, on top of the cliff, he had postponed the death he’d read in their eyes. Now, he may have done something more; applied a bit of pressure to a crack he hadn’t even known was there, a fracture within this group. Darius’s eyes remained locked on Billy. Finally he nodded.
“I’ll get the firewood,” Garney said.
* * *
There was little room on the beach to segregate the prisoners (and there was no other way to think of themselves, Jake thought; all three of them were bound hand and foot), so they all shared in the warmth of the fire as the sun went down. A stash of driftwood had lodged in a small natural alcove a few feet up the side of the bluff face, and the wood had been sheltered from most of the rain. The seasoned wood made for a hot, nearly smokeless fire. Jake positioned himself at various angles on the rocks, trying to let the heat bake some of the pain out of his stiffening joints.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel whispered. Above them, on the other side of the river, Venus hung low in the southeastern sky. Warren was a few yards away.
“Nothing.”
“You hiss each time you move.”
Jake turned to her, the dismissive reply withering in the back of his throat. She was scared, he could see that, but she had hope, too—a foolish hope, but since he clung to one himself he could hardly fault her for it. There was a large mark on her right cheek, and crusted blood had collected at the bottom of her nostrils from where Darius had punched her, and at the base of her collar where he had cut her. Her eyes reflected tiny orange triangles from the campfire.
“My joints.”
“Arthritis?”
“I’m not that old.” He shifted so he was facing a bit more toward her, a bit more away from the rest of the group. “I went to college after the military, in Minnesota. Some of it, the northern parts especially, are a lot like this.” He motioned with his bound hands to indicate the wilderness around them. “Well, not quite like this, but close. My wife . . . my wife and I weren’t together anymore, and I stayed out in the woods for a long time. Into the wild, I guess. Not for adventure. A couple weeks, maybe a month. It was early spring, and there were a lot of deer ticks around. I picked off most of them in the evenings. Some of the baby ticks, the nymphs, weren’t much bigger than the head of a pin. I missed one.”
“Lyme disease?”
He nodded. “I didn’t know what was wrong for a few months. Didn’t care, either. By that time it had settled into my bones, into my lymph system. Once it’s inside you, it’s hard to control. I have flare-ups.”
“Are you . . . is it bad?”
He shrugged. “There’s a new treatment for chronic cases like mine, not much different from chemo. I’d have to be in the hospital for a few weeks.”
“Why didn’t you go in?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I don’t like hospitals much.”
She was silent, studying his face. “Did you get divorced?”
“No,” he said. “She . . . there was an accident.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. She died?”
“No,” he said. “Not quite.”
He waited for the follow-up questions, but they didn’t come. Instead, she turned to look at the river, at the dark land beyond it. In the starlight, it looked like a disorganized graveyard, the scattered boulders tilted at strange angles. When she spoke her voice was barely a whisper. “We’re going back over there.”
“It’s all I could think of.”
“It was the right thing to do,” she said. “But I still don’t want to.”
Her face looked incredibly delicate, finely drawn in the starlight and flickers from the embers. Vulnerable and courageous at the same time. “Just stay by me,” he said. “No matter what.”
Before she could reply a shadow fell over them, and Jake twisted around to see Weasel standing a few feet away. He had taken his damp shirt off to dry next to the fire, and his bare torso was almost hairless, thin to the point of gauntness. Jake could see bumps along his ribs where they had been broken, and the raised skin of an appendectomy scar. He was holding a Buck 110 folding knife, the wood handle framed by brass ends. Weasel flicked the knife open, closed it. Opened it again and squatted down, looking at them as he ran the blade up and down his pant leg. Jake looked away. After a while, Weasel straightened and went back to the fire, where Henry and Darius were talking.
“You know where I heard it?” Henry was saying. “That same old lady that you’ve been running with.” He paused. “And I’m not scared, I’m just telling you we should be careful. Thoughtful.”
“Elsie said something similar to me,” Darius murmured.
Henry looked up. “Did she tell you about the old priest, the old maskih?”
Darius shook his head. “She didn’t say much. Didn’t want to talk about it.”
Henry poked at the fire with a stick, sending a cloud of sparks drifting upward. The northwest wind had strengthened, and although they could hear it rushing overhead they were sheltered in the lee of the cliff. Garney tossed another chunk of driftwood onto the coals. The wood popped and spat, dried resins and sap making tiny explosions in the seasoned spruce. Billy sat a few yards off, his back to the river. It had already dropped several feet, but the current continued to carry sticks and logs downstream behind him, silhouettes that caught the firelight for an instant before winking out of sight.
“Some people,” Henry said, his cadence punctuated by the pops and hisses of the burning wood, “think there are times, and places, where certain actions—violent actions—can cause a reaction. An amplified reaction.”
“Fairy tales,” Darius said.
“Someone shoots an archduke,” Henry said, “and twenty million people die. That’s not a fairy tale.”
“That’s war,” Darius said. “And it was about money, and power. Not an amplified reaction.”
Henry stared blearily at the fire, his eyelids drooping. He’s tired, Jake thought, a tired old man who pushed himself to his limit getting out here. He doesn’t want to argue, he doesn’t want to debate. He wants to get a bit of sleep, but there’s something he wants them to know. Behind Billy, a large log rolled in the current like an alligator surfacing, and just as quickly disappeared.
“Their people died over there, according to them,” Darius said. “Whatever you’re worried about has already happened.”
“They died. They weren’t killed.”
“Whatever.”
“Did anybody ever try to appease their god by letting someone die of natural causes, Darius? I’m talking about deliberate action. That’s what wakes things up, gets their attention.”
Darius sighed. “Just tell us, then. Or go to sleep.”
Henry tapped the charred end of his stick on a flat rock absently, leaving a series of black marks. He pushed an unburned piece of wood deeper into the fire. Overhead, the wind moaned and sighed. Henry tossed his stick into the fire, the stars blazing above him. “Have any of you ever wondered,” he said, “why we never come here anymore?”
* * *
Pierre twisted and moaned on his death bed. Then Henry’s dying father opened his pain-addled eyes, saw his son sitting next to him, and continued his story.
It was the spring following the third bad winter, and there were only a few children left in Highbanks.
The local community, sparsely populated to begin with, had shrunk by roughly half. Of those who remained, perhaps a quarter were suffering with what researchers would half a century later term Seasonal Affective Disorder. At that time, the whites called it by a simpler term: cabin fever. The Cree had other names for the malady, most lost to history. Regardless of the label it bore, the effects of long periods of cold, darkness, and malnutrition were well known and well feared. Three winters where the snow came early and departed late, three winters where thirty-below-zero temperatures were routinely coupled with winds so intense that any exposed skin felt as though it had been seared by an open flame. In a way, three bad winters were viewed with a bit of relief, as three was the number known to break cycles, the number of change.
But these past few winters had been different for the people who called themselves the Swampy Cree. First and foremost there were the whites, with their foreign language and their often-wondrous tools and their strange ways. There was talk about great palaces and buildings to the south and east, structures that defied description. They brought with them steel and religion and evil vapors that caused many of the Swampy Cree to die, coughing out their lifeblood, their bodies wracked by fever. It was an intrusion, an opening up of their world to forces unknown. And with this intrusion came a deadening of something intangible, a softening. Suddenly, the unbelievably complex challenges like building a fire or killing a moose were now reduced to mere flicks of the wrist.
And during those winters, at the confluence of bad winters and the dwindling of something – of Something—the children had begun to disappear. Only one or two that first year, but even more the next, and by the time the ground had begun to thaw in May of the third year, over twenty children, Cree and white, had disappeared into the green tangle of the Canadian wilderness.
It was the grandparents who were the most scared, even more so than the distraught parents and siblings. For the oldest of them remembered the last cycle, when their cribmates had disappeared, the times when the snow in the spruce was crisscrossed with the great and shaggy tracks of the Whitigo.
But it had never been quite this bad, and the children continued to go missing well into May. Several were pulled back at their doors or shelter flaps by their parents, the children blinking, fully awake and invariably crying because they couldn’t go outside, couldn’t join their friend who had promised them warmth and food and fun as they had never known. Squirming and writhing in their parent’s grasp, stomachs bloated from malnutrition, and their arms and legs thin as twigs, screaming to be let go so they could run barefoot into the woods. And as often as not, when the child was put back to bed and the father awoke from where he lay sleeping in front of the door, to venture outside into the thin and uncertain light of the northern dawn, the tracks would be there. Pressed into the snow, not quite as large as someone wearing snowshoes, but many times larger than the boot prints of a man, indistinct in shape but always with the same smell, the odor of a denned animal mixed with the damp smell of moss. The tracks were spaced ten or twenty feet apart in places, sometimes disappearing for the length of an entire valley only to reappear on the far side.
The local maskihkîwiyiniwiw, an aged man named Kiwiw, held a council. It was a fact that the people were dying, he said. He read in the spring winds that another bad winter was coming, perhaps worse than the other three. They could not continue on in this place; they needed to leave their home, to scratch out a new existence somewhere else. But they had settled in this cold, mosquito-infested region for a reason: it was also a place of unbelievable bounty and beauty, and it was just as much a part of their souls as the children they had lost. Yet Kiwiw said it was clear that their home had been usurped, that the great wanderer had either taken offense or had become infatuated with them. Neither scenario was tenable.
At this point there were two versions of how Frederick, the excommunicated priest who had settled in the area a few years earlier, became involved. Some said it was voluntary, that he had witnessed the despair and desperation of his fellow men, that this manifestation of evil had rekindled his soul and his faith. The other story was that some of the men had decided that perhaps the reason they had been the subject of such intense attention in recent years was because of Frederick’s faith, supposedly discarded long ago but still clinging to the man—along with the near constant odor of cheap whiskey—which may have given offense to the great wanderer. These men had decided that tying Frederick up in the woods, perhaps with a belly wound or two, might be a good way to appease their tormentor.
Wherever the truth lay regarding his entry into the desperate situation, there seemed to be agreement that, for all his faults, Frederick still possessed great oratory skill. Whether it was out of compassion or self-preservation, he used that skill to insert himself into the drama unfolding that spring in an Indian encampment, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest Catholic church.
Frederick told Kiwiw and the elders of the group a story, reading out of a tattered and soiled Bible. It was a story of another group of people tormented by another demon, and he talked of a man who cast that demon into a herd of swine. He had to explain what swine were, as well as many other things, and his command of Cree was tenuous at best, so there was much lost in translation. But he must have made a convincing case, and the elders agreed that it had to be tried, even though none trusted Frederick . . . and what he proposed was terribly risky. Still, there was little choice. Their land had turned sour, perhaps because the old ways were dying, perhaps only because of bad luck. And the Swampy Cree did not want to leave their home.
Two days later, Frederick, Kiwiw, and three elders stood in the bottomlands of Asiskiwiw. They had no swine in Highbanks, and the only domesticated animals were a few scruffy dogs that were now as wild as wolves. The few horses and the lone ox in the region had been butchered and eaten long ago. But the Cree knew of a place where the earth was filled with a presence, a dark and moldy life that had the size and the substance to act as a suitable proxy for a herd of swine. And there, in the center of a muddy valley bordered by a steep rock bluff on one side, a spruce post had been pounded deep into the soft ground. Tied to the post were three emaciated children, two of them crying. The third stared vacantly into the sky, as he had done since his second year. Some of the crueler people in the village simply referred to him as metoni, the idiot. In actuality, he was terminally ill with some unnamed brain disease, which robbed him of first his language and now most of his motor skills. He had only months, perhaps weeks, to live. None of this was a comfort to his parents as Kiwiw took him from their arms the evening before, Frederick mumbling something about Abraham behind him as they left.
The evening waned. The sun set; the fingernail moon rose above the balsams ringing the valley, a cold, white curl of light reflecting on the last patches of snow. The two healthy children were still snuffling and occasionally crying out for help, asking for a blanket, for water. The five men stood some distance away, Kiwiw with a staff adorned with raven feathers, Frederick with a canteen of water he had pulled from the Little Glutton River, murmuring over it and making motions with his hands. The Cree watched this, impassive. They were no strangers to ceremony.
Then it was deep in the night and the men were talking, speaking in hushed whispers just loud enough to hear each other over the children’s whimpers. They were divided on whether or not they should continue. It was conceded that the wanderer was devious as well as deviant, and such a simple trick, such a simple trap, had been doomed to failure from the start. Their words came out in steaming puffs of air that dissipated a few feet above them. After a particularly heated exchange, Kiwiw noticed that the children had stopped crying. They were all looking to the east, their heads cocked slightly. One of the children smiled, another—the one who was sick—laughed for the first time in over a year. They began pulling at their ropes again, tugging harder and harder, stopping their struggles only long enough to cast their eyes into the blackness of the forest. The night had gone absolutely still and the only sound was the children’s struggling, the rough rope scraping against the spruce pole, their breathing growing ragged from exertion.
Then their efforts stopped, and the children settled back to the ground. Above them, at the edge of the forest, something stepped out of the woods.
Three of the Cree men turned and ran. Kiwiw dug his staff into the soft ground and pressed his bony chest against it, wrapping his arms around the thin wood. Frederick watched the creature approach with a rapturous expression, his fingers clenched around his Bible in one hand and the canteen in the other. It seemed made of darkness, a massive shape with a dancer’s grace, twisting and winding its way down the valley slope, its long hair catching the weak moonlight in long wisps of silver. It leapt over a boulder, springing so high that Frederick thought it might not come back to earth. But it landed and continued on, and the children giggled and squealed with pleasure.
It stopped a few yards away from them. For a moment, it resembled nothing more than an enormous spring bear, hungry for meat. Frederick blinked several times, for now it seemed to resemble a massive bull moose, perhaps crazy with brainworm. Then a cloud passed over the moon, and the images of bear and moose dissolved into features less distinct, half-formed and wild, framed by long tendrils of hair.
It opened its mouth, and above them a loon cried out, the mad cackle of the fish-eater. The creature turned to the children, who were jostling for position to better see their visitor, then back to Kiwiw and Frederick. It took a step back, suddenly cautious, and one of the children cried out in dismay. The creature paused, looking back at the ragged assortment of children. A long and tortured moan came from above them, far above the trees on either side of the valley, the sound of a creature whose intense desire was struggling against its innate caution.
Then it stepped forward with a rush, crossing over the rough circle Kiwiw had drawn in the soil eleven hours earlier, and bent over the children. A series of wet slopping and grinding noises came from the circle, and Kiwiw shoved Frederick forward.
Frederick shook his head, his movements stiff as he began sprinkling water from his canteen around the edge of the circle Kiwiw had drawn, speaking Latin for the first time in more than a decade. The creature was still huddled over the children. One of the children was laughing, another was crying out in pain. The last seemed to be doing both at once.
The creature straightened just as Frederick came back to his starting point, as though it were going to bolt, but it was a fraction of a second too late. It stopped at the edge of the circle as though chained, the long hair around its mouth caked with gore. Its eyes caught the reflection of the moon, and for a moment Kiwiw thought he saw something Cree, something that resembled his father’s proud and haughty features, in its terrible visage.
Frederick spoke in Latin. “In the name of the Father and the Son, I cast thee out.” He paused, poured a palmful of water into his hand, and threw it at the creature. It did not react to the water, nor change its appearance to Kiwiw or Frederick. But one of the children at its feet, who had been reaching out to caress its great furry leg, drew his hand back in horror and began to scream.
“I cast thee into the ground, unclean one,” Frederick said, “into the dust from whence you came.”
With that, Frederick stepped forward and shook out the rest of the contents of the canteen onto the creature’s hide. It stood impassively, not struggling nor reacting, until Kiwiw stepped forward. He said something in Cree, his voice as clean and joyful as the song of a spring robin, and struck the creature with his staff.
“Now you take what you have stolen,” Kiwiw said. He looked down at the small corpse of the one some in his village called metoni. “Take it and run with it.”
From above them came another twisted cry, the tone alternating between pain and rage in discordant timbres.
The creature did not disappear but dwindled, shrinking and twisting, the hair changing, what appeared to be a face lengthening and dissolving. It dropped from two legs down to all fours, then back to two legs, then finally settled on four legs. It spun in a tight circle like an ass-shot dog, twisting down next to the children, its jaws popping. It fell to the ground, snorting in ragged breaths. Kiwiw drew a short copper knife from his belt and plunged it deep into the ruff of hair at the base of the creature’s head. It slumped to the ground, silent.
When the three elders who had fled returned the next morning, Kiwiw and Frederick sat slumped against the pole. At their feet was an ancient-looking black bear, as emaciated as the children, its ribs pressing against the mangy fur. Its yellowed teeth were worn down to nubs, and the retractable claws were dull and chipped. There was little that was unique about it, save for the knife still buried in the back of its neck. Its gray muzzle was streaked with gore, and in between its back molars were the masticated remains of moss it had been chewing on.
The children were dead.
The men returned to the village, dragging the bodies of the children in a hastily built travois. They left the bear where it was.
Nobody went back to look at the bear, to check on their story, not even the parents of the dead children. It was a well-known fact that black bears would sometimes revert to human prey when they grew too old and weak to chase their usual prey. Of course, the attacks had happened largely in winter over the past three years, when bears would be hibernating. Of course, the gaunt carcass slumped near the spruce pole could not make such large tracks in the snow, nor go dozens of yards between strides. But it was a relief to be able to say it was a bear, to say it and mourn and go on living. They could feel spring in the air for the first time, could feel the lifting of the biting cold.
The following winter would be mild, as would the next several. In a couple of years, the sound of children could be heard again along the banks of the Little Glutton River, and they were not troubled by any more bears.
The fates of Frederick and Kiwiw were largely lost in the tangles of time, but they passed the story on, Kiwiw to the new maskihkîwiyiniwiw, and Frederick to the Catholic church in Winnipeg, where he traveled over the course of several months to let them know what had transpired in the great wilderness to the north, of the power of the Lamb even in the savage woods, a power that had been matched, perhaps exceeded, by that unnamed Cree religion. The acolyte and priest who heard his tale were pleasant and accommodating to this stinking, wild-eyed, obviously insane man who claimed to have once been a priest himself, and sent him to the local house for the destitute for a bath and a meal, after which he disappeared and was never heard from again.
The story was spoken of rarely, just enough so that it was remembered, the tale like a hibernating bear that rouses itself just enough to keep from slipping into eternity.