Shadow's Story

A few days after his trip, Shadow visits Hinzelmann’s store. Every year, he parks an old car on the frozen lake. When the ice begins to melt, the car breaks through and sinks. People make bets about when this will happen, and they buy raffle tickets from Hinzelmann—each ticket tied to a five-minute window of time when the car might fall through the ice. Whoever guesses the closest time wins some money.

Shadow buys raffle tickets for a thirty-minute time window on a morning in March, and afterward, he tells the lake to melt that day, the same way he once told the sky to bring snow. But he doesn’t really believe it will work.  

After chatting with Hinzelmann, Shadow goes to the library to look up eagle stones and thunderbirds. There he learns that Native Americans believed thunderbirds were giant birds that caused thunder and lightning. This is all he can find on the subject.

The library is holding a book sale to raise money, so Shadow buys a couple of books. The only one he wants is Herodotus’s Histories, which he has read before, but the sale allows him to take two books for the price of one. He grabs the one book he thinks other people are least likely to want—a record of Lakeside City Council meetings from the 1800s.

In the library, Shadow sees his next-door neighbor, Marguerite Olsen. He has met her before, and she reminds him of someone—but he can’t think who. He asks the police chief, Chad Mulligan, about her. Mulligan tells a sad story about Marguerite’s failed marriage. Some time after she and her husband divorced, her son Sandy disappeared. Everyone thinks the father kidnapped him, but nobody can prove it. Marguerite has been sad ever since. As Mulligan tells this story, Shadow begins to suspect that Mulligan is in love with Marguerite.

That afternoon, Shadow falls asleep and dreams about a tower of skulls, which he climbs toward a flock of enormous, circling birds. This dream is interrupted by Wednesday, who calls and demands to know what Shadow is doing. Shadow stammers about the dream, and Wednesday says:

I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming…What’s the point in hiding you, if you’re going to start to...advertise?

Shadow has no idea what this means, but he agrees to go to San Francisco with Wednesday tomorrow. There, the two of them meet a heavyset but sexy woman named Easter who brags that she is not in danger from the coming storm. When she says people in America celebrate her, Wednesday laughs. He points out that nobody in America actually worships her; they only use her name while they worship a different god. This makes her cry, but she agrees to help.

When Shadow returns to Lakeside, he finds out a child has disappeared: Alison McGovern, the animal-loving girl he saw on the bus. He helps search for her, and afterward he chats with her friend, who says tearfully that she is leaving Lakeside so she does not disappear, too. She lists off the kids who have vanished recently—a steady pattern of one child per year.

Coming to America, 1778

In Africa, a girl named Wututu and her twin brother Agasu are sold by their uncle. They make the long trek to America, where they are separated and sold to different owners. Agasu becomes a slave in the islands, where he cuts cane and later plays a role in a slave rebellion. Wututu works in the fields at a series of southern farms, and eventually she becomes a house slave in New Orleans. She teaches her charms and her religion to a younger woman named Mama Paris. Mama Paris fails to understand the importance of the beliefs—but the charms have arrived in America nonetheless.