One afternoon a wind came up the canyon hard enough to rattle the unfinished frame, and for an hour it looked as if the weather might beat them to the roof. Elias and Nash lashed the loose beams down, Ayasha and Red Hawk weighted the shingle stacks with stones, and the camp hands worked with their heads down against the gusts until the wind spent itself and moved on down the valley. Afterwards they sat on the half-built floor and ate cold food from Grandmother Luta's basket, tired and dusted with pine, and Elder Hakan, who had watched the whole struggle without lifting a hand, said that a cabin that had already stood up to one good wind would stand up to a winter of them. Elias believed him. He had learned, in the canyon, to trust the judgment of men who had watched weather for seventy years.
There was also the matter of the hearth, and Elias gave it more thought than any other part of the cabin, because a hearth was where a marriage did its daily living. He built it of creek stone, fitted tight, with a chimney that drew clean, and Ayasha laid the first fire in it herself, with dry pine and a handful of herbs that made the smoke smell sweet. They cooked their first supper in the cabin that night, though the roof was not yet on and the stars showed through the rafters, and the food tasted better for being eaten under an open sky in a house that was almost a house. Ayasha laughed at Elias for burning the beans, and Elias laughed at himself, and the sound went up through the rafters and out into the canyon night, where the creek answered it in its own bright language.
The roof went on in the last week before the autumn rain, and it went on with a hurry that was almost festive. Everyone who could lift a hand came down to the shelf: Nash and his riders, Elder Hakan with his advice, Grandmother Luta with a basket of food, Red Hawk — still working his restitution, still early to every task — carrying shingles up the ladder without being asked. The last beam was set at sunset, and the first drops of rain came in the night, pattering on the new roof while Elias and Ayasha sat inside by a small fire, listening to it the way people listen to a promise being kept. The cabin smelled of pine and fresh earth and smoke. Outside, the creek ran high and cold in the dark, and the rain drummed steady and kind above their heads. Ayasha leaned her shoulder against Elias's for a moment, and neither of them said anything, because there are moments when talking would only make a good thing smaller.
Winter came to the canyon the way it comes to high country everywhere: not all at once, but in a series of cold mornings that grew longer and quieter until one morning the creek's edges were rimed with ice and the red peaks wore white on their shoulders. Inside the cabin, Elias and Ayasha settled into the first winter of their married life with the practical contentment of people who had built their own shelter and knew every beam in it by name. The fire burned in the stone hearth, the garden lay under its blanket of straw, Sage and Night stood close together in the corral with their coats thickening, and the world narrowed, in the good way, to the warm circle of the cabin and the cold, bright country beyond the door.
Elias's left arm was at its worst in the deep cold, stiff from the old wound at Wilson's Creek, and he learned the winter rhythm of it: slow mornings, careful lifting, work broken into short spells with rest between. Ayasha's healing hands became part of that rhythm. In the evenings she would warm her hands by the fire and then work the stiffness out of his shoulder and arm with a patience that never made him feel like a patient. She did it the way Grandmother Luta had taught her — not as a fuss, but as a task, like mending a harness — and she talked while she worked, about the camp, about the horses, about the spring thaw that would come when it came, and Elias found that the talking eased him as much as the hands did. He told her, in those evenings, things he had never told anyone: the hollow spring of 1865, the silence after the discharge tent, the way the war had made the world feel emptied out. She listened without trying to fix any of it, and that was the fixing.
The watch found its place that winter. Elias had carried his father's gold pocket watch for twenty years, its crystal cracked like lightning, its hands stopped at twenty minutes past four, and he had carried it because it was the only thing his father had left him. In the cabin, he set it into a beam above the door, where it could be seen every time they went in and out, and he did not wind it, and he did not wish it to tick. It was kept as memory, not as a clock.