Free Edgewise by Graham Masterton

that my services to the media were no longer required. You have to play the game if you live in a city like Minneapolis, Mrs. Blake. All your readers want to know is how lucky they are to live in such a prosperous, happy, morally uplifting place.”
    â€œYou have Native American blood in you. That’s really interesting.”
    â€œYou think so? I’m only about an eighth Native. Like, my left leg is Sioux and the rest of me is German and Canadian. And I find it irksome, more than interesting.”
    â€œYou can do that incredible thing with the voices.”
    â€œOh, sure. And I can always tell when the wind’s going to swivel around, hours before it actually does. But my Sioux relatives all expect me to feel as resentful of the white man as they do, and my white relatives all think that I’m one-eighth inferior.”
    They were driving due westward now, along the south side of the Minnesota River, though the blizzard was so intense that Lily could see nothing but the pines that bordered the highway, shaggy with snow. After twenty minutes, without any warning, Shooks turned off 101 and headed along a narrow, bumpy road that ran alongside an ever-thickening forest. The road looked as if it had been cleared that morning by a snow plow, but fresh snow was already beginning to drift across it and clog up the tire tracks.
    â€œNot too far now,” said Shooks, as the Buick bounced and creaked over the furrows.
    â€œIt’s not getting there I’m concerned about,” said Lily. “It’s getting back.”
    â€œWe’ll be okay. Besides, we could do worse things than spend the night in the company of George Iron Walker. He’s a fascinating man, George, especially when it comes to Native American culture. He knows it all: how the beavers all got together and made the world ready for men to live in—all that stuff.”
    â€œThe beavers did that? I thought it was God.”
    â€œIt’s just one of those Mdewakanton legends. But George takes it all very seriously. He’s very political, too, when it comes to Native American affairs. You know the casino at Thunder Falls? It was George who was mainly responsible for getting that built, and, believe me, the reservation was transformed overnight. All of those millions of dollars of gambling money . . . the Mdewakanton got themselves power, sewage, health centers . . . an indoor swimming pool. There’s even a George Iron Walker Orthodontic Clinic.”
    Lily looked out of the window. Ahead of them, on their left, the forest began to rise higher. It may have been an optical illusion, but she was sure that she could see ten or eleven pale-gray animals running between the trees.
    â€œAre those
wolves
?” she said.
    John Shooks peered in the direction that she was pointing. “I don’t see anything.”
    â€œI could have sworn they were wolves.”
    â€œHmm, well. Maybe they were stray dogs. You get a lot of stray dogs around this area, scavenging for scraps.”
    â€œThey looked way too big for dogs.”
    â€œMaybe they were witches.”
    â€œ
Witches?
”
    â€œMany Native Americans used to believe that wolves were witches in animal form. In the Lakota language, the word for
wolf
and
witch
is the same.”
    The Buick began to slide sideways and he had to spin the wheel left and then right to correct it. Then he said, “Actually, we’d be much less at risk if they
were
wolves. There isn’t a single recorded instance in North America of a wolf killing a human being, ever. But there are plenty of stories in Native American mythology about witches who could burn down people’s lodges from fifty miles away, just by thinking angry thoughts about them, or skin human babies like rabbits.”
    Lily didn’t say anything. She didn’t like to talk about fire, or mutilated children. She still woke up in the middle of the night gasping for air, thinking that her skin