They began the cabin on a morning so clear that the red peaks stood out against the sky like something freshly cut. Nash came down from the camp with an axe over his shoulder and a team of camp hands behind him, men who knew timber the way Elias was learning water — by touch, by weight, by long habit. They walked the shelf together first, Ayasha marking the corners with stones, Elias pacing the ground the way his father had once taught him to pace a line without ever driving a stake, and Nash nodding at the lay of it: door to the creek, back to the wind, garden to the morning sun. It was a good piece of ground. Everyone could see it, and nobody needed a survey sheet to prove it.
The work went up the way honest work goes up: slowly at first, then all at once. They cut pine from the ridge timber, choosing straight trunks and hauling them down on a drag behind two horses, and the smell of fresh-cut wood settled over the shelf like a second morning. Elias learned to notch a beam the camp way, with Nash standing over him, correcting his angle with a grunt and a tap of the axe handle rather than a lecture, and after the third beam Elias's hands began to find the rhythm on their own. His left arm, stiff in the cold since Wilson's Creek, complained at the lifting, and he worked around it the way he had learned to work around everything since the war — by letting the other arm and his legs do the heavy part, and by never stopping long enough for the stiffness to settle in. Ayasha kept a pot of water and a cloth nearby for his hands when they blistered, and she doctored them in the evening with the same matter-of-fact tenderness she gave to any working person, which was exactly the right kind.
There were frictions, small ones, the kind that belong to any two people building a life rather than dreaming one. Elias wanted the door to face the creek squarely; Ayasha wanted it angled so the wind would not drive the rain straight in, and she won the argument by standing in the doorway's place during a gust and letting the wind make her point. Ayasha wanted the garden larger than Elias thought sensible; Elias wanted the corral closer to the cabin, and she won that one too, by pointing out that a corral too close to a house was a corral you smelled all summer. They argued the way people argue when they know they will still be eating supper together at the end of it — plainly, without cruelty, and with laughter waiting just behind the disagreement. Elder Hakan came down most afternoons to watch, and his dry advice became a kind of weather for the building. "A cabin," he said once, watching Elias wrestle a beam into place, "is like a marriage. The first corner has to be true, or everything after it leans." Elias made sure the first corner was true, and then he made sure of the second one as well.
Ayasha planted the garden while the walls were still going up, because she said a garden should not wait for a roof to be worth starting. She worked the black dirt with her hands, three feet deep and rich as anything Elias had ever seen, and set in beans and squash and the herbs Grandmother Luta had taught her, marking the rows with sticks and talking to the plants the way her grandmother had talked to her patients — quietly, as if encouragement were a kind of medicine. Little Elk came down sometimes with Nash, and Ayasha set him to carrying water in a small bucket, a supervised chore he took as seriously as any grown man's work, and he asked Elias a hundred questions about the cabin, the horses, and the creek, and Elias answered every one of them, because a boy who asks questions is a boy learning to belong.
Sage and Night went into one corral together before the cabin was finished, and the sight of them there — the thick-boned buckskin mare and the black mare, grazing side by side in the evening light — became, for Elias, the truest picture of the whole bargain. Two horses, two lives, one fence, no papers between them. He stood at the corral rails more than once at dusk, just watching them, and Ayasha would come and stand beside him without needing to ask what he was thinking. She knew. She had watched him learn the canyon the same way: not by owning it, but by standing in it long enough for it to become familiar.
Between the walls and the roof there came the slow, unglamorous work that makes a cabin livable rather than merely standing: chinking the gaps with mud and grass, hanging a door that swung true on leather hinges, cutting a window on the creek side so the morning light would fall across the table. Elias did the chinking with a patience that surprised even Nash, pressing the mixture into every seam with his fingers, because a cabin that leaked wind in winter was a cabin that had been built in a hurry, and he had not come this far to build in a hurry. Ayasha fitted the window herself, setting the oiled cloth taut in its frame, and when the first light came through it the next morning it fell in a clean rectangle across the packed-earth floor, and she stood in it for a moment with her eyes closed, as if the light itself were a kind of blessing.