A contemporary medicine woman tells her story Mavis McCovey makes no exotic claims about her powers, but describes those functions as seamlessly integrated in Karuk culture. More importantly, she describes a living contemporary culture, enriching the melancholy beauty of our shared world. Freeman House, from the foreword Sometime in 1933, in Northern California s lush Humboldt County, a Karuk medicine woman named Daisy Jones had a vision identifying the tribe s next medicine woman. Later that year, Mavis Smither (McCovey) was born, and in the first twelve years of her life she was groomed by a designated group of medicine women to become a spiritual healer. Medicine Trails is Mavis McCovey s honest and lively account of the many worlds in which she moves: the Indian and white cultural worlds, and the day-to-day and visionary reality of the medicine woman s world, as well as trips to what she calls the other side : one of the responsibilities of a medicine woman is to bring back a medicine man s soul if he gets lost on the trails of the world beyond a task McCovey has been called upon to do. One of very few first-person accounts of Native American healers, Medicine Trails is invaluable for its insights into the experiences of a modern-day medicine woman. And McCovey is a warm and engaging guide not only to her life, but also her family s history and the history of the Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa peoples of the region....