On the outskirts of the city where she has stayed hidden from her tribe, the Raindancer walks the stones looking for snakeskins and shark's teeth. She doesn't use them for medicinal purposes, but as adornments to her studio. She sleeps touching shell and stone. She doesn't mind my camera, as long as I stay on the valley floor, away from the snakes. The rockface is pocked with their lairs.

She's on the run and has been for a long time. Her branch of the Cherokee nation appointed her their medicine charm in 2007. She had a college degree and was off to get her masters when the nation decided she should represent them in negotiations with a shale mining operation called Mansoto Bedrock Inc. For reasons best explained in the book she is producing with Blue, the Raindancer disrupted negotiations and left Las Vegas with the police ready to charge her with aggravated assault. Charges have not been filed. And she is still in hiding, revealing herself here as the actor and performer she has always wanted to be: part shock, part spear.

The Raindancer takes us to the shores of Lake Mead for an outdoor shoot. She is radiant and vigorous beneath the Sun, and soon it is Ingo and me and Sandie who are melting, not just from the rays falling upon us from the solar system, but from the energy swirling from her skin, flames of desire and ambition. I once said of her that she was "mildly ambitious" and these words inflamed her. She throws them back at me whenever she can: She wants to make a movie this weekend and she's waiting on me, she says. It's all about you, she says, repeatedly, smiling or frowning, "And there better be a payoff if I take all this tease, because my frustration if your teasing falls through might get you hurt."