ChapterOne

(PROLOGUE)

Ben Gold survived two novels. One just barely, a scar he will carry until the day he dies, which might explain his reticence, his calm, his still shadow behind the scenes. Deliberate, analytical, without haste, on the plus side, but an unfortunate lack of ambition and what might appear to others as apathy on the other. A psychologist saw the scar as a fear of death, his father, an Ashkenazi, having died when Ben was young enough to remember. But that was dead wrong. Ben Gold did not fear anything. He died once before. So his life was a mulligan, and he lived every day, or tried to anyway, in awe and wonder, a poem, all too short to ruin wasting time with self-inflicted fear.

After his father died he was raised on the Menominee Tribal Reservation in North Central Wisconsin by his mother, a Menominee, and her extended family, members of the Eagle Clan. Tall, lean, with the bronze look of a bird of prey, he wore his straight black hair in a ponytail down his back, over white shirts and blue jeans. Went to college, did well, fell in love, ran into trouble, paid his dues, married Colleen Ryan, went to law school, moved to a farmhouse, had two kids, spent time farming, doing good deeds, and several years after Colleen completed her residency he and his family moved to what was for him an embarrassingly large house on the East Side of Milwaukee just two blocks from where native peoples used to scratch out a living among tall bluffs and deep ravines at the edge of the great Lake Michigan.

His mother passed years before, but he kept her alive by retelling her stories, her spirits, the mysteries of her people. Proust would appreciate the memory: to bed in a small shack among tall pines in the North Woods, his mother wrapped in blankets rocking in a chair, her face aglow in the light of a candle, her soft voice whispering tales of tears and joy, great adventures and small kindnesses, passed down from mother to mother to mother over thousands of years. But of all the stories his mother told and he, in turn, told his children, there was one of which he, his mother, and his children were particularly fond. And it went something like this:

Long, long ago, and even longer before that, there were no people on this land—just woods and rivers and mountains and lakes and beasts, large and small. Then one day, far away on the other side of the ocean, a small tribe chased by a band of warriors escaped across a forbidden bridge that led into a new world. They vowed they would not stop until they found a land where good spirits dwelled. So they asked the gods to help them find their way. And the gods sent from the heavens a large bird who told the people she would lead them to such a land but only if they came in peace and would do no harm. Convinced of their goodness, the great bird agreed to lead them to the good land, so she set off swooping and circling across the sky, and the people followed her over rivers and mountains and many years. And over time those who first crossed the forbidden bridge passed on, their legacy taken up by children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, generation after generation, and the great bird was joined by other great birds along the way, a multitude of great birds and women, men, and children flowing in processions like giant rivers across the land and sky searching for the good land across a wide continent.

At long last, after crossing plains and prairies, on a midsummer day hemmed in by cloud, the clan of eagles stepped out from deep woods into a broad oak savannah that opened onto a bluff overlooking a great lake they could not see around or across. It was there, at the edge of the bluff, that the flock of great birds circled in formation seve