Chapter 3
The Mist Wolf

Stephan A. Schwartz, a well-known writer and researcher, sent Stanley Krippner a detailed, eye-witness account of a healing session that Rolling Thunder had conducted. In Stephan Schwartz’s words:

It is 1968, and we are standing in a parking lot in gathering twilight. There are maybe twenty of us, including half a dozen physicians. Standing there, leaning in, we are watching a Shoshone shaman, Rolling Thunder, attempt to heal the wound of a teenage boy lying on a massage table. It is a painful wound, torn into the muscle of his leg, and the boy is clearly in discomfort and just as obviously medicated. He got this wound through some kind of accident. It is not healing properly, which is what has brought him to this Virginia Beach parking lot at the back of Edgar Cayce’s old hospital, now the headquarters of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.). This organization was founded in 1931 to preserve Cayce’s readings, discourses given while Cayce lay seemingly asleep but actually in a state of non-local awareness, in which time and space took on different meanings. It seems fitting to be standing here, a generation later, watching for signs of another non-local phenomenon, namely, therapeutic intent expressed as physical healing.

A small log fire that I had built earlier at Rolling Thunder’s request flickers on the ground, just below the boy’s head. I am here as a journalist. This ceremony is taking place as a part of my interview with Rolling Thunder.

Hugh Lynn Cayce, the A.R.E.’s executive director, comes over and introduces me to two of the doctors, then goes over to the vans parked nearby and talks with two women. They are the mothers who have accompanied their sons. Inside each van, one of the boys to be healed lies quietly in the back. It is twilight now, and I can see them framed in the overhead light in the vans. One of the physicians, almost in silhouette, moves between them.

Precisely at 7:00 p.m., Rolling Thunder, looking exactly as he had the prior day, walks out of the woods holding his small medicine bag. He goes up to Hugh Lynn, who, seeing him coming, calls everyone together. Hugh Lynn says a few words of introduction, during which time Rolling Thunder kneels down and pulls the breast and extended wing of a crow or raven out of the bag. The pinion feathers are spread. Seeing me, he thanks me for the fire and takes two raw steaks from a cooler. Taking one steak, he tears off the plastic wrap and the paper tray and hands it to me. He walks the few feet back to the fire and drops the steak into the gravel and dirt, next to the little fire ring of stones I have made. It is a very strange thing that he has just done.

He gestures to Hugh Lynn, who goes over to one of the vans; the boy within is brought out on a stretcher and placed on the massage table. Rolling Thunder begins a soft, slow chant. I cannot make out the words, just the rhythm of the rising and falling sounds. He begins making slow passes over the boy’s form, using the wing and breast of the raven, moving it just an inch or two above the boy’s body. I can see the feathers spread slightly against the air pressure as his arm sweeps along in long, graceful strokes. Every second or third stroke Rolling Thunder flicks the wing tip down toward the steak on the ground. As it grows darker, the fire becomes more prominent, and the boy and the man drift into shadow.

It goes on monotonously. Everything else is silent. Suddenly I notice that there is a white, mistlike form taking shape around and in front of Rolling Thunder’s body. Sometimes I can see it, sometimes not. But it becomes stronger, steadier, until it is continuously present. It is almost dark now, but the fire gives off enough light to see. Then it takes form, slowly at first, but as if gathering energ y into itself. I can clearly see that the smokelike figure is a wolf. Rolling Thunder moves as rhythmically as a clock. Sweep. Sweep. Flick. Sweep. Sweep. Flick.

After about thirty minutes the form begins to fade, first losing shape, then becoming increasingly insubstantial. Finally it is nothing more than a chimera, there and not there. Then it is gone.

Rolling Thunder straightens up and stops. He makes a kind of gesture, and somehow we are released and come forward. The boy is very peaceful. His mother also has come forward, and she leans over him, kissing his forehead. The wound is completely healed. It looks like your skin does when a scab falls off, leaving smooth, unlined pink skin, shiny in its newness. I am astonished. Clearly, so is everyone else. I go over to Hugh Lynn, who asks me, “What did you see?” I tell him, and when I say the mist took form, he says, “Was it a wolf?”