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among the shadows.
    As a small boy, Tall Bear had worshipped his grandfather. The old man had taught him to hunt and fish, not with rifle and pole, but in the old ways of their people. His grandfather had instructed him to read trail sign, to understand what the earth said with each bent blade of grass, with the sudden silence of the insects, with the faint smells that hung on the breeze.
    So few of the young people cared to learn the old ways now. They had been seduced by the call of the white man's world, lulled by the lethargic drone of the television, hunting only on an Xbox. But Tall Bear had stayed true to his ancestors, passing the old knowledge to his own sons. Here in the dark woods, as he moved silently among the trees, the voices of the ancients whispered to him.
    The curve in the highway swept Tall Bear beyond sight of the roadblock, although a flicker of police lights lit the tips of the tallest trees. Continuing westward, the smell of cordite brought him to a halt. Someone had been blasting, although this smell was different from the dynamite used by road crews. It wasn’t gunpowder either.
    He was close now. The scent of spilled diesel told him that much. From high up on the ridge above, the sound of a helicopter rose in volume as it passed overhead before banking away to the north.
    Tall Bear stepped to the edge of the road, trying to catch sight of it, but if it was up there, it must have been flying without lights.
    Now that he had stepped out of the wood line, Tall Bear could see a light shining up into the trees from the far side of the road, no more than a hundred feet from where he now stood. It was a headlight.
    Crossing the highway, Tall Bear moved more quickly now. Whatever the danger, there had been a wreck and the possibility that someone lay injured in the wreckage pulled him forward.
    As he got closer, the extent of the accident became clear. A truck had left the highway at high speed, its momentum wrapping the cab around a tree, sending the overturned trailer sliding past the cab in a motion that had almost ripped it free of its moorings.
    In the indirect lighting provided by the one surviving headlight, Tall Bear saw two people, kneeling facedown to the ground, less than twenty feet from the mangled cab of the truck. They were not moving.
    "Hey, are you hurt?" Tall Bear yelled as he ran toward them, flipping on his flashlight as he ran.
    Two faces stared back at him, eyes reflecting in the moving beam of the flashlight, a sight that brought him to a stop, weapon drawn. The heads sat side by side, at least five feet separating them from the kneeling bodies.
    The silence of the night draped him like a blanket. Tall Bear did not bother to switch off the flashlight. If this were a trap, he would already be dead. No. Not a trap. This was a message.
    His pulse still pounding from the initial shock of the scene, Tall Bear reasserted his self-control. Death was, after all, no stranger to him.
    Moving forward once again, Tall Bear allowed the flashlight beam to sweep the bodies before returning to the two heads, each of which had a bullet wound in the forehead. As he passed the bodies, he stepped around the large pool of blood that had spread out from the twin torsos of the murder victims. The initial spurt of blood had spewed out several feet, but the heads themselves sat on the ground beyond the furthest extent of the splatter.
    Moving methodically now, Tall Bear noted the small details: The bodies were in military uniforms, both wearing side arms, military issue 9mm Beretta pistols. The torsos had been ritualistically positioned so that they knelt in the manner of Muslims at prayer oriented due west instead of east, heads facing back to the east, five feet past the bodies.
    The bullets had passed through the foreheads out the back of each head, although one of the exit wounds was much more massive, having blown out a significant portion of the skull.
    What bothered Tall Bear had nothing to do with the