The land has begun to forget her own song.

In response, she calls - quietly, the way she calls when she needs to be remembered - and the ones who hear her are not the strongest or the fastest, but the ones whose hearts already have a small crack. A great old bear. A wolf with a tightening pack. A deer whose grace has gone unkind. A snake. A clever raccoon. Two eagles. A hawk. An owl. A small squirrel named Saloli. A bat the others will not yet name. And a boy called Tsigilli, the one who watches, who does not know yet that he has been called too.

They gather at a clearing where the trees do not grow, to play a game older than any of them - the game the Cherokee call anetsa, the little brother of war, the game that was first played, the elders say, not between human beings but between the four-legged and the winged.

The Medicine Game is the ancient Cherokee mythology of lacrosse, set down in the long line of Tsalagi storytellers who carried it before there was paper to carry it on. The prose may remind some readers of Coelho or Gibran. The lineage is older. The lineage is the grandmothers at the fire, and the grandmothers before them, and the small ones who have always been the first to hear when the land begins to call.