He did not ride into the yard. He stopped his pony fifty yards out on the gravel bar where the scrub walnuts grew, raising his right hand palm forward in the ancient gesture of the neutral ground.
Tala stood up, wiping her hands on her coarse canvas apron. She felt the sudden, electric tension that always came with the presence of her mother’s people—a mixture of fierce longing and the cold, instinctive wariness of one who knew that scouts and renegades often walked the same trails, driven by hunger or the promises of agency interpreters.
She walked twenty paces toward the creek and stopped. She did not speak in English; she spoke the high, guttural dialect of the White Mountain clans:
“The trail is cold, elder brother. Who do you look for among these stones?”
The old man looked at her through rheumy, dark eyes that were nearly sunken into nests of wrinkles like cracked leather. He looked at her clean moccasins, her indigo skirt, and the smoke rising from the kitchen chimney.
“I look for the daughter of Sika,” the old man said, his voice like the grinding of dry river gravel. “They told me in the agency camp at San Carlos that she was sold to the wool-merchant at Black Mesa. But in Black Mesa, the Mexican boy at the horse barn said an old American with a grey eye took the papers and brought her to the benchland.”
“I am Tala,” she said. “The daughter of Sika.”
The old man lowered his rifle across his thighs. He sat quietly on his pony for a minute, the horse hanging its head to lick at a patch of snow between the rocks.
“I am Noche,” he said. “I was with your mother’s people when the blue-coats took the horse herd on the salt fork three winters ago. I come from the mountains above Sonora.”
Tala’s heart gave a single, violent leap against her ribs, but she kept her hands motionless at her sides. “Is my mother dead?”
“No,” Noche said. “A lie is easy to tell when a man wants two hundred dollars for an empty ledger. She was not dead when the leaves fell.”
Tala took two steps forward, her boots sinking into the wet slush. “Where is she?”
Noche turned his head and spat into the mud. “She was taken with the family of Chatto down into the Sierra Madre, across the border where the American soldiers cannot ride without a treaty paper. When the winter cold came into the canyons, she left the camp. She had two pack mules and a Mexican woman who knew the trails. She was heading north, toward the high country where the red willow grows on the Gila.”
He reached inside the ragged lapel of his overcoat and drew out a small packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with a piece of dried deer tendon. He leaned down from his saddle and held it out to her.
Tala approached the horse’s flank. She took the parcel. The oilcloth was greasy, smelling of woodsmoke and the bitter, familiar scent of the mountain sage that grew only above the seven-thousand-foot line.
“She gave this to my nephew at the water-hole near Fronteras three moons ago,” Noche said. “She told him: ‘If you cross the border to trade buckskin for lead, take this to the valley where the old American Reed runs his sheep. If my daughter is alive, give it to her hand. If she is dead, throw it into the running water of the Gila so her spirit will not walk thirsty in the rocks.’”
Tala untied the tendon with her thumbnail. Inside the oilcloth was a single eagle feather, its quill wrapped in red porcupine quills, and a small, dried cake of mesquite meal mixed with crushed wild plums—the traveler’s bread that women baked for those who had a long road before them across the barren ridges.
Tala held the feather in her palms. The quill was fresh; the down at the base was white and clean, unsoiled by weather.
“She is coming north?” Tala whispered.
“She moves like the mountain cat,” the old man said. “She will not come by the road. The army has scouts at every pass from Bowie to the river, and the town people shoot any Apache who does not have an agency tag around his neck. She will wait in the high rocks of the Chiricahuas until the spring runoff is finished. If you seek her, you must look for the smoke that rises twice at sundown from the peak they call the Eagle’s Nest.”
From behind her, the heavy, measured step of Jonah sounded on the veranda gravel.