Iron Elk did not summon Elias to the council fire that evening. He summoned him by simply standing outside Elias's lodge at dusk and waiting, silent, until Elias came out, and then walking with him across the camp without a word. The walk itself was the message. Men stopped their work to watch them pass. Women drew children closer, not in fear but in attention, because everyone in camp had heard the story of the raid by now, and everyone was asking the same question in their own way: had the trouble followed Elias from the town, and would it keep following him until it drowned them all? Elias felt the weight of those watching eyes on his back, and he kept his own eyes forward, and his hands at his sides, and he reminded himself that he had done nothing he was ashamed to have examined in the open.
The council sat in a wide circle around the fire, Iron Elk at its head, Elder Hakan beside him, Nash sitting upright despite his bound arm, Ayasha seated a little behind her father with her hands folded, and Red Hawk sitting apart, his head down, his rifle gone, his face the colour of a man who has not slept. Elias stood in the centre of the circle, because Iron Elk had gestured him there, and he waited to be spoken to, as a man waits when he has asked for judgment and means to accept it.
Iron Elk spoke first, and his voice was plain and level, without anger, which made it harder to bear than shouting would have. "You came to us measuring land," he said. "You married into this camp under our law. Now men from your town ride at night, cut our fences, and try to dam our creek. I ask you plainly, Elias Whitlock: was this your doing? Did your town follow you here, and did you bring it to our water?"
The question hung in the firelight, and Elias felt every eye on him. He answered as plainly as he had been asked, without excuses and without softening. He told them he had not sent the riders, had not drawn the map, had not promised Tanner anything, and had refused Tanner's paper to his face and told Ayasha the same night. He told them he had ridden at dawn to pull the dam apart and bring the horses home, and that he would answer for the town's paper at the hearing, as he had promised. He did not raise his voice. He did not beg. He stood there and let his life since the wedding speak for itself — the ditch he had dug, the fence he had mended, the nights he had sat at the fire and listened rather than talked.
Ayasha rose then, and the council turned to her, and she spoke with a steadiness that Elias would remember for the rest of his life. She did not plead for him as a wife pleads for a husband. She laid out evidence, the way a woman who keeps the water knowledge lays out the springs in order, one after another, so that no one can mistake the course. She held up the folded map Elias had found at the dam, and she set beside it a sheet Elias had written himself, a plain list of supplies he had made for Otis in his upright, surveyor's hand. The two hands did not match. One looped and hurried; the other stood straight. Any eye in the circle could see it. And then she held up a second thing — a small, worn ledger book, its cover dark with handling, that had been dropped by one of the raiders in the dark at the corral. She opened it, and she read aloud, in a clear voice, the entries in Tanner's own looping hand: payments to a man named for the night trail, payments for a rifle, payments for coin given to open a gate. She did not need to say the name attached to those payments. The council already knew, and every head turned, slowly, toward Red Hawk.
Red Hawk stood. He was young, and his hands shook, and his voice shook worse, but he did not lie and he did not run. He told the council, in broken, honest sentences, that Tanner had come to him with a rifle and coin, and with promises that the canyon would be opened and that Red Hawk would be remembered as a man who had helped his people by helping the town, and that he had been foolish and hungry for standing, and had shown Tanner's men the night trail to the spring and had loosed the corral rope, and had known, even as he did it, that it was wrong. He said he had left the cut rope where Nash would find it because he could not bear to hide the whole of it, and because he wanted, in some small way, to warn the camp he had endangered. He asked for no mercy. He said he would accept whatever his people decided.
The council talked long after that, in low voices, with Elder Hakan speaking of old wrongs and how they had been answered before, and Iron Elk listening to each man in turn. In the end, Iron Elk gave judgment in the same plain voice he had used to ask his question. Red Hawk would not be killed, and he would not be cast out to starve. He would be set apart from the hunt for a full season, and he would work for the families he had endangered — mending fences, hauling water, tending horses