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The storm brought an early night. Henry didn’t look for a sheltered place. He simply stopped walking and sat down in the snow. Dark settled over him, dark so thick he could hold it in his hands. Time passed.

His eyes snapped open. He realized he’d fallen asleep. The storm had ended. The clouds had moved on. The wind had ceased. A half-moon had risen. The forest around him was bone white snow and tar black shadow, and the silence was stone solid.

He knew Wellington was near. He knew it in the way he understood what weather the wind would bring or the direction in which a deer would run. It wasn’t something he had to think about. The rifle lay across his knees. His finger rested inside the trigger guard.

A cracking of branches came from his left. His eyes swung toward a gap in the pines where the half-moon floated like a silver leaf on black water.

Henry was surprised. The silhouette that appeared was much larger than a man. It didn’t worry him. He stood to meet his enemy. He reached to his belt for the knife he’d used to kill his friend, but touched only matted hair. He looked down at himself, surprised to find that his belt was gone; in fact, all his clothing was gone. His body no longer looked pale and human. He’d become a hairy beast, massive as a bear. He felt empty inside, except for an icy ball where his heart should have been. He was ravenous, hungrier than he ever remembered, and he could not wait to rip out Wellington’s heart and feast on it.

He could smell his enemy, smell the odor of carnage, the stink of rotting flesh. Far from repulsing him, it made him hungrier.

He opened his mouth to spit out a taunt. What came instead was an inhuman roar. It was answered in kind by Wellington, who was no longer Wellington but a windigo. In the moonlight, they charged at each other, kicking up an explosion of powdered snow as they attacked.

They met like mountains colliding. Henry sank his teeth into the neck of the other and tasted icy blood. The bellow of the windigo shook the snow from the trees.

They battled savagely, filling their mouths with blood, tearing out chunks of hair-covered flesh. Hunger drove Henry to a frenzy, and at last he plunged his hand into the other’s chest, grasped its heart in his claws, and ripped it out. The windigo let fly a death cry that was as appetizing to Henry as the heart on which he began to feed. He gobbled up the organ while it still beat.

He stood over the lifeless form of the windigo that had once been Wellington. He lifted his bloody face to the black sky and gave an angry howl. He’d thought that eating the man’s heart would fill him, but it didn’t. He was hungrier than ever.

THIRTY-THREE

Henry woke to the smell of sage and cedar burning. He opened his eyes and found himself in a wiigiwam, wrapped in a bearskin. A few feet away a woman sat tending a small fire. She had long gray hair woven into a single thick braid that hung over the shoulder of the plaid wool shirt she wore. When Henry stirred, she looked up.

“Where am I?” Without thinking, he’d spoken in the language of his people.

“Some men from the village found you. They brought you here.” Henry understood her words, but she said them in a way he’d never heard before.

“Are you Ojibwe?” he asked.

She shook her head and added a cedar sprig to the fire. “Odawa.” The deerskin flap that hung across the doorway was drawn aside, and an old man entered. Bright sunlight slipped into the wiigiwam with him.

“Finally awake.” He sat next to Henry. His knee joints popped like walnuts cracking. “Who are you?”

Henry said, “Niibaa-waabii.” His Ojibwe name. It meant Sees At Night.

“I am Ziibi-aawi. This is my daughter, Maanaajii-ngamo. You have been sick a long time.”

“How long?”

“Seven days ago you were brought here.”

“Fever?”

“That and other things. You are not Odawa,” the old man said.

“Ojibwe.”

“A lost Ojibwe.”

“Not lost. I was looking for the village.”

“Where you were headed, you would not have found it. You were lucky the men stumbled onto you. They thought at first you were an old man gone out into the woods to die alone.”

“Old man?” Henry said.

Ziibi-aawi waved an age-spotted hand toward Henry’s head. “Your hair.”

Henry reached up and grasped a handful of the fine black hair, which he’d let grow long since he left the boarding school. When he looked at what he held, he didn’t understand. His hand was full of strands white as spider’s silk.

“My hair,” he said. “What happened to my hair?”

“You are young for hair so old.”

“It was black,” Henry said. “Black as crow feathers.”

Ziibi-aawi gazed at him with deep interest. “What a thing it must have been.”

“My hair?”

The old man shook his head. “Whatever turned it white. It is a story I would like to hear.”

Henry told him about his battle with the windigo. The old man listened, and his daughter, too.

“Look at yourself.” Ziibi-aawi pulled away the bearskin.

Except for the wounds on his leg, which were healing, Henry saw no marks on his naked body.

“It was a vision,” the old man explained. “The windigo is a beast of the spirit. It feeds on hate, and it is never full. There is only one way to kill a windigo. You must become a windigo, too. But when the beast is dead, there is a great danger that you will stay a windigo forever. You must be fed something warm to melt the ice inside you, to melt you down to the size of other men.”

Henry looked toward Maanaajii-ngamo, who fed cleansing sage and cedar to the fire.

“I am Mide,” Ziibi-aawi said. “Maanaajii-ngamo is also Mide. You know the Grand Medicine Society?”

Henry knew of it. Healers of the body and spirit. Since the coming of the white men, those among the Ojibwe who understood the healing secrets had become few.

“This is an important vision. You have had visions before?”

Henry thought about the dream in which he was flown north by a snake with wings to a lake where a golden fire burned under the water. He thought about the kind of man Wellington was and the gold that had brought him far north, to the lake.

“Yes,” he said.

“Kitchimanidoo has guided you here. You understand?”

Henry said, “What if the windigo had eaten my heart instead?”

“You would be a different man with a different destiny.”

“Or you would be dead,” Maanaajii-ngamo said.

“You have been marked. You have been given the gift of visions,” the old man said. “You are welcome to stay with us as long as you need in order to understand this gift.”

Henry felt as if he’d already traveled to the end of the earth, but he realized he still had a very long way to go before his journey was finished.

“Migwech,” he said, and closed his eyes to rest.

PART III

THE LAKE OF FIRE
THIRTY-FOUR

By the time Meloux finished his story, it was well after midnight. We sat beside the lake, and I could see Henry clearly in the bright moon glow. He was an old man; it had been a long, hard day; he was tired. Hell, I was tired, but there were still questions left unanswered, things I needed to know.

“How long did you stay with the Mides?” I asked.

“In the spring, Ziibi-aawi traveled the Path of Souls. That summer, Maanaajii-ngamo took me down the river. We stayed with another of the Midewiwin, a good man named Waagosh. For seven years I learned from him. When I left, I was Mide, too.”

“You came back to Iron Lake?”

“Two more summers, I journeyed.”

“You were gone for almost ten years?”

Meloux looked up at the moon. The light washed over his face and made me think of a man gazing up through silver water. “When I came back, people on the rez did not recognize me. When they learned I was one of the Midewiwin, they were suspicious of me. They looked at my hair and thought of me in the way white men think of witches. Some Shinnobs still do.”