Primal Fear Read Online Free Page B

long.”
    “Take your time.”  Morris left him to it, but another three minutes passed in silence before John finally gave in and opened the case.
    At first he only saw the usual possessions of any elderly man: a small collection of clothing, none of it fit for the kind of exposure to the bitter Canadian winter the shaman had endured; an extra pair of glasses, probably for reading; a wrinkled map, faded and out of date. 
    He opened the map before going on, spreading it out in the middle of the desk.  It was a map of the state of New Hampshire, tattered and frayed from many years of use.  Beyond its age, he couldn’t make out anything unusual about it, and he turned his attention back to the satchel.
    And beneath the common items in Mahuk’s possession, lying securely in the bottom of the small case, he found the true tools of the shaman.
    He reached into the tangle of items arranged at the bottom of the suitcase and produced a short length of ivory, carved intricately along its inside edge with etchings of the sun and the moon and the signs of what the old man would undoubtedly think of as the Earth Mother.  A number of feathers were attached to the shaft, arranged into a loose circle, a mingling of the animals of the air and of the sea, and John realized that this would have been the shaman’s key element of ritual, his means of summoning his tornaq—his spirit familiar—to guide him into the spirit world.  Setting it aside, he reached back into the satchel and pulled out another of the items that lay within.
    It was another carving, this one of wood.  It was the figure of a woman, her arms open, as if in some generous offering, her face delicately fashioned into an expression of sadness.  John recognized the figure from his childhood studies: Mauna, the Earth-Maker.  Her sadness stemmed from the destruction man had wrought upon her beloved earth; her generosity was the spirit of giving that would preserve the earth for those who continued to live as one with the land she had provided for them.
    He stared at the figurine, remembering the old stories.  Mauna, the Earth-Maker and B’hun, the Sky-Maker, characters in the tales his grandfather had told him on the cold winter nights in his village.  As a child he’d believed in them completely; what reason would he have had to doubt the words of his grandfather?  But then, growing up . . .
    John sighed, a part of him longing for that naiveté, for the blind faith of youth.  These days, to have doubted something for so many years, and then to meet someone still so enshrouded in the old beliefs . . . it felt like an act of betrayal to him.  Betrayal to his people, to his ways.  And to his father.
    He shook his head, avoiding that line of thought.  There were enough problems, without resurrecting one that struck so close to home.
    He placed the Earth-Maker on the desk blotter and peered once more into the bag.
    The next item in the old man’s possession was a small parcel wrapped in a brittle swath of sealskin and tied with a short length of twine.  John opened it carefully, trying not to damage the wrappings, folding them slowly back as the twine fell away.
    He recoiled at the sight of what lay in the center of the parcel, coming to his feet behind Morris’ desk.
    It was a twisted shard of bone, clearly not human, tipped with a talon as sharp as a razor’s edge.  Protruding from the bone, at the point where the talon rose outward from the tip of this terrible finger, a smooth length of dark wood comprised the inner surface of the artifact.
    John stared at the relic, examining the area where the wood met the bone, looking for a flaw in its construction, even a hairline crack between the two materials.  But there was nothing.  The piece of bone had not been grafted to the wood.  There were no fasteners, no signs of adhesive, no other indication that the artifact had ever been produced from two separate carved specimens.  Each material appeared to have