The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville

father had done the unspeakable: taken as his new wife an Anglo woman (Jersey) who drank too much firewater. No one was deceived when she showed up with a daughter of her own, stopped drinking, and insisted in a spirit of generosity that both children spend each summer with Sam’s grandparents on the reservation. No one was deceived by tricks like these.
    The tiwa-titmas was the most important event to a Nez Percé youth. It was his or her initiation into life and the universe. Strong measures were taken to ensure that one could receive the vision—hot baths, steamings in the mud hut, purgation with birchbark sticks inserted in the throat—especially if the vision was a long time in coming, or if it took many trials.
    Sam had grown up in these mountains, and was able to greet each rock, brook, and tree as if it were an individual, as if it were a friend. Furthermore, having been on four such quests before, he knew how to find the place by himself whether in darkness or blindfolded—while I, bloody little idiot that I was, couldn’t even find the trail.
    So here I was: deplorably lost, soaked through from a sudden mountain shower, cold and hungry and weary and footsore and small and young—and terrified by my own stupidity. I sat on a rock to consider my situation.
    The sun hovered at the lip of the far range, barely visible through the thick fringe of trees. When it set, I’d swiftly find myself in total blackness, ten miles or more, as near as I could guess, from the place I’d left this morning. I had no sleeping bag, waterproof clothes, matches, or extra food. If I’d brought a compass I wouldn’t know how to use it. Worse yet, I knew that when the sun vanished, there would be rodents and snakes and insects and wild beasts moving in the darkness beside me. As the sun sank lower the temperature dropped quickly and the damp chill began to penetrate my bones. I started to cry—huge, hot sobs of unleashed fear and anger and desperation.
    The only skill I had, which Sam had taught me, was to send and receive coded messages as the Indians had always done: by smoke signals or flashing mirrors against the sun. Now that it was nearly dark these talents were useless. Or were they?
    I gulped back my sobs and peered through my tears at the bicycling reflector strips on my little backpack. Wiping my eyes with my hand, my nose with my sleeve, I stood on wobbly legs and looked around.
    Through the darkening forest mist I saw that the sun was not yet gone. But it soon would be. If I could get up high enough before the last beams departed, I’d be able to see a great distance. I could scan the hilltops for the kind of place, the high place, that I knew Sam himself must reach before sunset: the magic circle. It was a wild scheme, but it seemed the only chance I might have to reflect a message from the last light, to send my code into the heart of the magic circle. Forgetting how tired and frightened I was—forgetting that Sam had told me it was more dangerous above timberline at night than here in the protection of the wood—I raced on my little legs uphill, high into the rocky crags that rose above timberline. I raced against the setting sun.
    In the dream, I hear the sounds of the forest closing around me as I scramble frantically over rocks, cut by twigs and grasses, the crunch of something large moving behind a tree. In the dream, the forest grows darker and darker, but at last I reach the high ground and clamber to the very top of the highest point. I flatten myself to crawl to the edge, and I peer out across the mountain peaks below.
    And there on a mountaintop beneath me, across a wide abyss, is the magic circle. At its very center is Sam. In the dream, he sits on the ground in his fringed buckskins, his hair tumbling loose about his shoulders, his legs and arms folded in meditation—but his back is to me! He is facing the setting sun. He can’t see my signal.
    So I shout his name aloud, over and over, hoping an echo