Journal of John Winchester (Supernatural)

July 4

This is how you spend your holiday weekends when you’re a

hunter.

I got Sammy and Dean into a day camp not too far from

Blue Earth, so I could consult with Pastor Jim about a few

things while the boys got to be regular kids for a while. Should

have known that not even summer camp could be normal for

the Winchesters. On the fth day of the camp, Dean was canoeing through an easy rapids on the Blue Earth River. Things

went bad. Dean swore to me when he came back that he’d seen

something—only he said “someone”—capsize the canoe. I

didn’t think about it too much . . . until the next week, when

another canoe went over and the counselor paddling it died. I

spent a couple of days looking into it, and ran across a Cree

legend about humanoid tricksters called mannegishi. They

live in river rapids and like to tip canoes, but they usually don’t

get malevolent unless the locals do something to make them

angry. So what was it?

Turns out the camp is expanding, and part of the work

involved blasting some riverside rock formations that used to

have pictographs showing the Cree’s reverence for the little

bastards. The mannegishi didn’t like having those gone, and

started to take it out on the campers.

I’d have killed every one of them for coming after Dean,

but the truth is they had a right to be mad. So I kept my head

and got Jim to put me in touch with a Cree medicine man who

lived over in South Dakota. I complained about the distance,

and Jim told me to shut up and be happy I didn't have to go to Montana or Saskatchewan, where most of the Cree lives now .The medicine man called himself Joey Tall Pine, which I gure is a moniker he took on for the tourists, but after the last six years, I’m the last guy in the who gets to complain about someone using an alias. I gave him a ride back to Blue Earth and we went down to the rapids that nigjt (now two days ago). He talked things with the mannegishi, and they struck a bargain. They’d stop going after kids at the camp if Joey redid some of the pictographs somewhere and guaranteed that they wouldn’t be destroyed. Jim stepped in and said, hey, I don’t

have nearly enough aquatic tricksters in the creek behind my

house. Presto—mannegishi in Jim’s creek, and Joey Tall Pine

got to exercise his pictographic talent.

Part of me still wants to kill them, because of what happened to Dean, but when I take a minute to cool off I realize

that it’s the camp’s fault. Some day camp, wrecking pictographs so they can expand their boat launch. The boys are

going someplace else next week, for as long as we can stay.

Anyway, it’s over now. Fireworks going off, I’ve got a

couple of beers in me, the boys are asleep in a tent out in Jim’s

backyard. For the moment, the battle pauses. Mary, I can’t

ght every minute.