“The heartbeat is growing stronger.” It vibrated in Hirata’s bones, behind his eyes.

“The Matsumae have driven Ainu Mosir’s spirit away from the coast. Her interior is where it is most powerful.”

It tantalized Hirata, beckoned him, promised him secrets. He wanted to learn more about it, but snow had begun falling. A few flakes sifting to earth rapidly became thick white veils. The hunting party would have to get to work fast or return home empty-handed. And the murder investigation was Hirata’s first priority.

“I’ve heard some things,” he began.

“People will tell you many things,” Chieftain Awetok said. “That doesn’t mean you should believe them.”

That was wise enough advice, if not the kind Hirata ultimately wanted from the man. “What I heard was about Tekare.” Although the chieftain didn’t react, Hirata felt his guard go up. “She seems to have been a bad woman.”

He described what the gold merchant had told him of Tekare’s ambitious, conniving nature. “Is that true?”

“The truth has many faces,” Awetok replied. “A man may see only one because his prejudices blind him to the others.”

Hirata noted that the chieftain could be as deliberately inscrutable and obstructive as Ozuno, his mentor. Must his fate always lie in the hands of old men who made younger ones work hard for every scrap of information doled out? Impatient, Hirata said, “Did Tekare in fact give herself to men, then climb over them to her position as Lord Matsumae’s mistress?”

“In fact, yes,” Awetok admitted. “But there is more to truth than fact. There is more to knowing Tekare than knowing what she did.

“What else is there?”

Awetok gazed through the veils of snow. Ahead of them, the Rat and Urahenka were barely visible, shadows in a whitening landscape. “Life is dangerous for our women. Japanese men like the gold merchant invade our villages and help themselves to the girls. When Tekare was fourteen years old, a band of traders caught her in the woods while she was gathering plants. She was missing three days before we found her, badly beaten and left for dead. It took months for her body to get well. Perhaps her mind never did.”

Hirata pondered this story and its relevance to the murder. “I don’t understand. If Tekare was mistreated by Japanese men, why would she want anything more to do with them? How could she bear to have them touch her? Wouldn’t she have wanted revenge instead of sex with them?”

“There is more than one kind of revenge.”

Tekare had apparently taken hers by driving the Japanese wild with her charms, extorting gifts from them, then enjoying their pain when she dumped them. But there was something else Hirata didn’t understand. “Was Tekare’s behavior considered acceptable by the Ezo-I mean, the Ainu?”

“Not at all.” The chieftain frowned, as though Hirata accused his people of condoning immorality.

“Then how could she be your village’s shamaness? Isn’t that too important a position for a woman like her?” In Hirata’s opinion, that would be akin to making a courtesan the abbess of a nunnery. “I should think you’d have chosen someone of better character.”

“We do not choose our shamaness,” Awetok said. “The spirit world does.”

“Oh? How?”

“Early in life, a girl who’s destined to be a shamaness will show a sign that the spirits have chosen her as their vessel. When Tekare was young, she caught a terrible disease. She was unconscious for a long time. But she survived. That was the sign. While she was unconscious, her soul left her body and joined with the spirits. They agreed to speak through her and none other in our village.”

Skeptical, Hirata said, “Yes, well, then, didn’t the spirits mind that she was a troublemaker? Didn’t that upset the equilibrium of the cosmos?”

Chieftain Awetok gave him a thin, sidelong smile. “I see you’re still ready to believe everything you’ve heard about us from those who would slander our people. But, yes, Tekare’s behavior did put our relations with the spirit world in danger.”

“And it was your job, as chief, to bring her back to the village and make her behave properly?”

“Yes.”

“Or to get rid of her when she wouldn’t cooperate?”

Awetok’s smile hardened into a grim fissure in his weathered face. “By ‘get rid of,” I suppose you mean ’kill.“ You misunderstand our traditions. We Ainu have no penalty of death for crimes.”

Unlike you Japanese. Hirata heard the message behind Awetok’s words: Which of our races is more barbarous?

“I would have performed an exorcism, to drive out the evil spirits that had possessed her,” the chieftain said.

“And what would that involve?”

“A ritual, not a spring-bow trap.”

Hirata wanted to believe the chieftain was innocent, but he wasn’t sure a ritual could cure a habit of causing trouble. And he mustn’t forget what Awetok had said: People will tell you many things. That doesn’t mean you should believe them. That advice applied to the chieftain as well as anyone else.

“Suppose you had performed this exorcism on Tekare,” Hirata said. “Does that mean everything bad she’d done in the past would have been forgiven?”

“All would have been forgiven,” Awetok said. “That is our custom.”

But Hirata doubted that a ritual could erase years of bad feeling. Forgiveness didn’t come that easily, and Hirata could think of one Ainu whom Tekare must have hurt the most. He peered through the snow at Urahenka. The young man had trekked so far ahead and was so covered with white flakes that he was almost invisible. Hirata sensed that Urahenka was less eager to reach the hunting grounds than determined to avoid conversation. Hirata called to him, “Hey! Wait!”

Urahenka reluctantly turned and stopped. When Hirata and the Rat caught up with him, he began walking faster, to shake them loose. He grumbled, and the Rat said, “He wants to know what you want.”

“To talk about your wife.” Hirata tried not to pant as he struggled to keep pace. Chieftain Awetok and Detective Marume had already fallen behind.

“I already told you everything yesterday.”

“Not everything,” Hirata said. The path had disappeared, and they were forging through dense woods. The slope of the terrain rose into the hills. Hirata had a sense of moving deeper out of his own element. “You said Lord Matsumae stole your wife from you. But that’s not true, is it? You didn’t tell me that she went to him voluntarily.”

A terse, defiant reply came from Urahenka. “He stole her.”

“She not only went to live with Lord Matsumae, but she had many other Japanese men before him,” Hirata said.

When the Rat translated, Urahenka didn’t answer. His mouth compressed behind his whiskers.

“Tekare left you,” Hirata goaded him. “She preferred Japanese men because they gave her more than you could. She whored herself to Lord Matsumae, the highest bidder.”

Snowflakes pelted Urahenka’s forehead and disappeared, as if vaporized by the heat of his anger. But was his anger directed at his dead wife or toward Hirata for insulting her memory? At last he began speaking rapidly. “I have nothing else to say about Tekare. It’s time to hunt now. Be quiet or you’ll scare away the deer.”

Primitive didn’t equal stupid, Hirata noted; refusal to talk was a good way for a suspect to avoid being trapped into admitting guilt, and Urahenka obviously knew it.

The chieftain and Detective Marume joined them. The Ainu men left the dogs with the sled, then led the way farther into the forest. Stay behind us so you don’t get shot,“ the chieftain told Hirata, Marume, and the Rat.

He and Urahenka carefully placed one snowshoe in front of the other, easing down their weight. Hirata and his comrades followed suit as best they could. The Ainu men aimed their bows and arrows from side to side, scanning the landscape for prey. The forest was so quiet that Hirata could hear the snow patter on a dead leaf here, plop onto the ground from a branch there. He watched and listened for movement, but the trees and the dense curtains of snow obscured his view. The land seemed empty, lifeless.