Prologue

... Four stones were heated by the fire inside the sweathouse ... The others sang songs of healing on the outside, until it was time for the sweat to be finished...

~ Excerpt from Apache Creation Story ~

The tired shaman straightened as he exited the wickiup, glad to be out in the fresh evening air. The worry etched deeply into every line on his face was all-encompassing as he stared off into the distance.

Four times he’d failed. Four, a powerful number; he couldn’t, wouldn’t, fail a fifth time.

He’d had an extraordinary number of visions in the last handful of years. A long, glorious string of visions that had proved to be accurate. More than in all the previous years combined. He thought he’d been blessed. Instead he’d learned he’d been cursed. Perhaps Raven, the great trickster, was behind these last four visions. Regardless, instead of assisting his people with spirit contact, he’d hurt them.

He’d counseled for a large raid on a white man’s town. He’d been assured of a large victory, succeeding where so many others had failed, with few loses among his warriors. The victory would be the beginning of the death knell for white men in Apacheria.

Instead of victory his warriors had been decimated with nothing to show for the effort and loss. The hated white man only increased his numbers as more and more arrived to stake out the land so precious to his group; Failure Number One.

To make up for that failure, he’d been given a vision of a great victory against the most hated of his people’s enemies, the Navajo. That vision too proved to have been false, as again his warriors were decimated with nothing in return except the death wails of the women; Failure Number Two.

He’d been warned during a vision in the sweathouse over a year ago that his future and that of his family lay in the North. He’d convinced his leader of this even after a lengthy visit to a promising area in the South. He now knew his vision had been wrong; Failure Number Three.

The last failure was the most immediately dangerous for his people by far. He’d missed all the warning signs, signs which every shaman was trained from youth to recognize; yet, he’d missed them. And because he missed them, the leader of his people was now dead. He went to sleep last night an apparently healthy man, an old man to be sure, but healthy enough. The leader died in his sleep without a sound. If he’d been paying more attention, instead of worrying about failures, he could have interceded with the spirit world before it was too late and likely the leader would still be alive; Failure Number Four.

Four! A powerful number indeed.

He came out of his reverie to find his apprentice standing in front of him, looking at him with concern.

Ignoring his apprentice, he stalked to the sweathouse still deep in thought. Removing his clothes, he entered the small hut, immediately breaking into a heavy sweat from the cloying heat and humidity.

As he settled himself, he hoped the spirits would hear his prayers for counsel and bless him with a visit. Without thought to the activity going on outside the sweathouse he took a deep steadying breath and began the focus chant.

Almost immediately he felt himself enter the serene peaceful existence of the spirit world. A world he knew well from his previous visions. This time, though, there were differences from the previous visits he could remember. Subtle differences, most of which he couldn’t quite put his fingers on, but they were there.

The difference he could identify was the ease with which he’d entered. He couldn’t remember a faster or smoother transition from the world of man to the world of the spirits. He pondered this for some time before becoming aware of a nebulous presence nearing him.