Mark of the Shaman

As an infant, River McPhee was taken from his Indian village home hidden high in the mountains of Haiti where his ancestors escaped as the last of the pre-historic Indians of Florida.

He has led an uneventful life for the past 25 years in North Carolina, that is, until one fateful morning when he sees a picture in the Raleigh Times of a mysterious amulet that was found at an archaeological dig in the Tampa Bay area. His mind reels as he recognizes the image…

It is the same motif woven on the corner of his baby blanket.

He high-tails it to Florida in search of this clue to his real ancestry only to discover that he is not the only one seeking the amulet. He is soon swept-up in a tornado of conflict among many disparate parties: the local university who financed the dig, a missionary agency that took baby River from the hidden village but won’t admit it, Indian activists from the Movement to Unite Native Americans (MUNA) seeking to preserve the totems of their culture, and secret envoys from the hidden village in Haiti.

MUNA wants River to join them in their plight to regain all artifacts held in museums. River may be Indian but he was raised by a white family in a white world. He is torn between these two cultures.

He also learns that the archaeologist who discovered the amulet was murdered and a bucket of red widow spiders dumped on his head.

Soon River encounters Lo-ciolopi, a beautiful Indian maiden who arrives from River’s ancestral village in Haiti to tell him that the village is being ravaged by a deadly disease and that if left unchecked will soon drive their culture into extinction.

Village elders believe the malady is the "Curse of a Thousand Years" that was imposed on them a millennium ago by a powerful old shaman named Hangs-like-a-Spider. Lo-ciolopi tells River that he is a direct descendent of the old shaman and that the Mark of the Shaman amulet, once in his hands, would give him the power to save their culture.

Now, more than ever, River must find the Mark of the Shaman amulet before anyone else does. He rents a cottage on top of the mound just a block from where the amulet was found and from where the archaeologist was murdered.

River befriends a suspicious Indian named Early Eagle Cloud and soon after begins finding clues that someone is stalking him and leaving threatening notes that he will die if he tries to leave Florida with the amulet.

Lo-ciolopi gives River a magical elixir that sends him on a spirit journey through the underground caves of Florida, back a thousand years to meet Hangs-like-a-spider and learn what he must do to save their village and culture. But the clock is running against him; the village people are dying off every day. What River learns is alarming and when he returns to the "now" world, he wishes he hadn’t.