I want the trees in single file; bring the corpse of something rare. Show me children who are sinners, show me mounds of human hair

At her request, we followed Didi to the home office of Dr. Alf Walker, a crusty old bastard with an infectious grin on his face. The community has a medical center, equipped for everything from bog standard common colds up to accidental amputations, with more complex cases being moved to nearby Bemidji for treatment, but traditions die especially hard in an insular community, and an old school GP sawbones like Alf who was still willing to do house calls and accept beer and homemade pie for payment was more than able to stay afloat.

It didn’t hurt that Alfred River Walker was also one of the most respected Jiisakiiwinini in the area. Jiisakiiwinini practice what’s called “shaking tent” medicine, a traditional healing and divining ceremony that is one of the staples of the indigenous people of the Midwest. I don’t have enough real knowledge even now to go into much detail about it (look it up on Wikipedia if you wanna), beyond to say that it’s a pretty big deal among the Ojibwe. The simple fact that Doc Walker was both medical doctor and witch doctor meant that he was busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

Alf seemed likable enough, when he invited us in for tea (“You want rum in yours? I’m having some in mine…”) and sat us down around his kitchen table-cum-office to discuss Charlie’s case. The joking, flirtatious old man was almost instantly replaced by a calm, serious professional as soon as he began to go over the details. “The patient was brought in to me three hours ago, presenting with signs of disassociation, memory loss, and severe dehydration. After an examination I was able to determine that the patient exhibited no injuries beyond superficial scrapes and bruises aside from the normal wear and tear one would experience from walking in the woods barefoot and naked for three days. When pressed with inquiries about his whereabouts for the last five days, Officer Laughing Fox at first expressed confusion, and then became violent and had to be restrained and sedated. He is currently being kept sedated with a banana bag IV to ameliorate the dehydration. One curious point about Officer Laughing Fox’s physical condition is that, although he appears to have not consumed a drop of liquid since his disappearance, his organ function is normal, as if the deleterious effects of dehydration were somehow kept in abeyance. In addition, the patient does not exhibit any of the signs of malnourishment that should be present in someone who has been wandering the wilderness in a fugue state.”

The old man looked up from his notes and took off his reading glasses, at which point I could almost see him swapping metaphorical hats from doctor to shaman. The transformation was sort of awe inspiring, as his shoulders and back straightened out, and his eyes developed a layer of depth that hadn’t previously been present. Aside from my time with Anwyn, this was my first time sitting down with a magical practitioner without any pretenses in their own element, and I could literally feel the power radiating off of him.

“Now for the other side of the coin. Someone or something fucked that boy up but good. Charlie has always been a good boy but he’s sort of an idiot when it comes to keeping his eyes on the material world and the hidden one at the same time, and something from the other side caught the fool slipping.” The effortless slide into 90’s jive talk was sort of discordant, but was clearly intentional. Alfred River Walker enjoyed bucking the norms. “Near as I can tell, whatever decided to fuck with him did all the fucking with on the inside rather than the outside. I can’t say if it was intentionally malicious or not, aside from the lack of obvious corruption a truly evil spirit would have left on him like soap scum at the bottom of a shower. Eliminating anything evil, that leaves us with something protecting itself or a trickster. I’m currently leaning toward the latter as there are a shit ton of trickster spirits out here in the back of beyond.”

“So no chance of a Wendigo?”

“Darlin’ if it was a Wendigo you woulda found his bones and not much else.”

“That’s what I thought.” Anwyn’s curiosity was in full swing now, her enjoyment of the puzzle fully evident. “You’re the local authority, Doctor Walker. In your expert opinion what are we dealing with?”

“First off, call me Alf, sweetheart. I hear ‘Doctor’ and I wanna look around to find my professor. Second, if I had to guess, and putting it in context with the other strange shit that’s been going on around here, I’d say we’re dealing with Memegwesi, but the implication there is that there’s been some heinous fuckery going on that’s not really visible from the surface.”

“Aren’t they just an Anishinaabe variant on the puckwudgie?”

At this point I was fairly sure someone was having a seizure, so I looked over at Didi, who had been silent this entire time. Something in her demeanor told me that this conversation struck a chord somewhere in her head and memory. Which meant, of course, that I was the only person in the room that absolutely no idea what was going on.

So just another day on the job.

The problem with not knowing shit is that you don’t know what you don’t know. “Bagwajiwinini or puckwudgie are forest spirits, and if I wasn’t looking at this in context, they’d be my first guess. Memegwesi are river and lake spirits, so again, it’s becomes a toss up, but Memegwesi also are protectors of children, so with the missing Langhorne twins in the mix, that makes them the front runner.” The old medicine man took a sip of his tea-flavored rum, and had a whole body shake as the alcohol coursed down his throat. “Which means that some of the rumors about Woody Anderson need lookin’ into. Tell me, Didi, did Charlie ever strike you as the kinda guy who…”

And Didi started crying.

(Title: “Birds With Broken Wings” by Ben Caplan)