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was a decision that belonged to them alone. But it was a thorn in all his thinking. Just one of many these days. And it seemed to him as ifthey’d all begun to fester at once. As he walked the path toward Crow Point, he felt the poison in every part of him.
    * * *
    â€œWe have a visitor, Niece,” the old man said. “Corcoran O’Connor.”
    Rainy Bisonette had been making bread at the table in her great-uncle’s cabin. She looked up from her floured hands, out the window, across the dead grass of the meadow where the trail broke from the trees. She saw nothing but the emptiness of a land preparing for the long sleep of winter. November— Gashkadino-­Giizis, which meant the Freezing Over Moon in the language of her people, who were called Anishinaabe or Ojibwe—was always a busy month for her and for Henry. Their cabins on Crow Point had no electricity or running water. The little structures were heated by cast-iron stoves and lit by propane lanterns. There were important preparations to complete before the deep snow of winter began its work of isolation. Cord after cord of cut and dried wood had been laid up. The roof of Henry’s cabin, which had been constructed nearly a century earlier, had been repaired with new cedar shakes. The herbs that both the old man and Rainy would need for the medicines they prepared had been gathered and dried and stored. They were Mide, members of the Grand Medicine Society, traditional healers. Even in winter, even with snow as deep as a man’s thigh and cold so bitter that it froze your eyeballs, the people who needed their skills would come to them.
    This year the month of the Freezing Over Moon had special meaning. Daniel English, Rainy’s nephew, and Jenny O’Connor, Cork’s daughter, were to be married. The wedding was going to be held in the house on Gooseberry Lane. It would be a ceremony drawn from two traditions—Anishinaabe and Catholic. Father Ted Green from St. Agnes in Aurora would preside over the Catholic part; Henry was to handle the traditional Ojibwe elements. Rainy’s spirits were running high. The prospect of the marriage excited her, and she was happy for Daniel and Jenny, two people she loved fiercely. She also happened to love Jenny’s father pretty fiercely,too. And so, when Henry spoke his name, she watched for him happily out the window. But he didn’t appear.
    â€œI don’t see him, Uncle,” she said, though she knew that when the old man predicted a visitation of this kind he was seldom wrong. She’d asked him time and again how he knew this thing, but his only answer was “I listen to the spirits.”
    She had no doubt that he did.
    Henry Meloux was a hundred years old, give or take a couple of years. His hair was long and as white as moonbeams. His face was as cracked as dried desert mud. His eyes were dark brown, but there was no hardness to them. They were eyes in which you could lose yourself and let go of all fear, eyes soft with understanding.
    Henry was grinding herbs with a pestle in a clay bowl. Ember, an old Irish setter whose former owner Cork had helped put an end to, and whom Henry, out of pity, had adopted, lay at his feet, drowsing. Without looking up from his work, Henry said, “He is slow. He comes like a turtle in the mud, with no energy. Expect him to be no lover, Niece. This cabin is the only thing he will enter today.”
    â€œUncle Henry!” she said.
    The old man laughed and went on grinding.
    She saw him then, just as her great-uncle had predicted, trudging out of the woods, crossing the meadow. He wasn’t looking her way. His head was down, his eyes on the worn path. She could see from his whole aspect that he carried some crushing weight. And she thought that maybe Henry was wrong about one thing. Maybe she would take this burdened man to her bed, and in that ancient, carnal way, offer him some comfort.
    She opened the door before