White Dancer

About the Book

White Dancer combines a murder mystery with the sacred lore of the Coast Salish. Set on and around the waters of Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, it brings new light to one of the world’s finest ancient cultures. Lew Emery returned from Desert Storm a wounded man. Wounded in spirit and in body. He took the job as a forest ranger on remote Midnight Island to find the time to heal. He had no idea that Chuckanut Johnny, the last of the Lamish shamans had plans to wound him deeper than he could imagine.

Lew Emery is as unlikely a candidate to become a Lamish shaman as anyone on the planet. Neither Lamishan nor particularly religious, his main concern is keeping a grasp on his current lifestyle, which consists of his job in the forest service and an assortment of occasional women friends in ports around Puget Sound. No, the only thing that qualified Lew for this election was proximity. He was a white man who happened to be in precisely the wrong place in exactly the right time.

Becoming a shaman is unusually difficult even for an adept Lamish youth, trained from birth in the ways of traditional knowledge. But Lew was ambushed into it, cajoled, caressed, and bludgeoned, until this became the only possible road back to sanity. A road-trip orchestrated by Chuckanut Johnny, the only surviving Lamish shaman, and the last person on the planet any would have guessed would give up his knowledge to a white man.

Chuckanut Johnny is one of those folks that people warn their kids about. Mothers hide their babies when he enters a room. Fathers curse his name behind his back. Sheriffs keep a cell waiting for Chuckanut Johnny. Johnny is so old that even the oldest of his tribe remember him only as an old man, back when they were kids. But even those who would spit on his grave, assuming he ever died, would have expected him to keep the sacred knowledge of the Lamish intact and safe from the whites, who could never understand it anyhow.

But Johnny knows his days are few. And when the last of the Lamishan youth failed in the quest, it was time to try the unthinkable.  Besides the worst that could happen is the white man would die, or end up screaming and drooling at the state asylum that unfortunate Lamishan teenager now calls home. This downside was no problem for Johnny. He had more immediate problems, in the form of the three Jacobs brothers, who had recently added their names to the expanding list of those were looking to kill him.

This story of the old white dancer begins with murder, and it ends where no white man had gone before, deep into the lore and the mystery of Coast Salish mysticism. Somewhere between Tony Hillerman and Carlos Casteñeda, the story of Chuckanut Johnny brings to life the sacred wisdom of a people lost to the world of today.

About the Author

Bryce Reede grew up in Washington State, on the Columbia River. A cultural anthropologist by training, his research has taken him to India and Japan. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, and at several universities in Japan. His travel writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle. He currently lives in Santa Barbara, California.