“Fly, Crow,

Rise on the river air,

My eye in your claw.

Soar, Crow,

On Thunderer’s breath,

My soul in your craw.

Perch, Crow,

On the Sunset Tree,

My sorrow in your caw…”

So his song echoed from the hillsides of the Good River—echoed but barely—and his keen-eared son heard as he crept from the snow-shrouded woods. The singer was old and feeble now, his demon-wounds having held him in pain for these twenty and seven winters gone. A full moon of winters had passed since the White Demon and the two boys and the Black Ghost had been seen drifting down the Good River, along the stretch just opening up before his son’s eyes as he walked down to its banks from the Summer-side Hills...

The men had heard of the Magic Boy of Winter and his Demon and gave chase out of a mixture of reverence, curiosity and ambition. They wanted to capture the Demon and torture him, to set the Magic Boy free of its menacing presence—to adopt the Magic Boy of Winter into their growing branch of the Principal People Tree.

Disaster sang above the Good River, three tiny wings at a time.

None returned to the women and children save the Demon. The Magic Boy of Winter was gone, the men, demon-slain. The Demon though, when he returned to rub out The People, lost something of his fury—it fleeing on the instant—when he looked upon Mother’s tear-streaked face framing her painfully asking eyes.

The People shrank back.

The Demon was dumb and could not speak. He made by sign that he knew by scent—for the Demon was part wolf—Mother to be the mate of a worthy enemy who he had left wounded on the trail among the bodies of the rest. He seemed stricken by a great pain and wished to have women and young ones around him and to give away his things like an elder that knows his death is close. The terrible killer, with not a hair growing on his head, his hairy body rent with unsurvivable—yet healed—wounds, and his back painted as if by Thunderer himself, wanted only to hold hands with Acorn, son of Buffalo Hunter and White Bird of Morning.

The Demon gave his weapons, chief among them a great, unbendable bow, to Acorn, standing in the snow of his fourth winter, standing with a demon, holding hands with it which had rubbed out their men from the face of Mother Earth. Then the Demon sensed Thunderer was near and pushed them away. In great shaking pain he waited, awaited his father, his doom. Stricken by a thunderbolt come out of season from a cloudless sky, he was gone. They knew him then to have been the son of Thunderer, sent to punish it seemed.

Left behind in his bloody wake, was a warriorless people, and a boy, holding a bow unbendable by man, a boy named Stands-with-demons. Such had been the earliest coming to manhood known to The People, a happening that yet lived in his mind, haunting him for 27 winters, haunting him now as he approached Demon-singer, his father, dead to their scattered people.

As he neared the woeful place, the place where he had once stood with a demon unafraid, Demon-singer’s song came again, the song of a crazed mind echoing through an ailing chest and then out into an uncaring world:

“Come back, Demon.

Tell me why!

Tell me why, why, why!”

His own footsteps could not be heard beneath the shrill voice in the open shelter ahead, a shelter never violated by their enemies, numerous and powerful though they may be, for within it lived the insane, a man who had wrestled with a demon and lost.

Presently all that could be heard were his footsteps. Father had heard him, and awaited him, still and blind in his dreaded little place, the place from where he beseeched the Demon by day, and slept horrific dreams by night.