The ride to the camp was not long, but Elias felt every step of it in his ribs and in his pride. Nash rode ahead, and the other riders flanked him, and Sage walked behind with a rider leading her, her ears swivelling, her head high. Tanner was not with them. When Elias looked back at the place where he had knelt by the creek, Tanner and his chestnut were gone, vanished into the trees the way a man vanishes when he has decided that thirty dollars is not worth a confrontation. Elias felt no surprise, only a cold, clear anger at himself. He had known Tanner was a talker and a seller, and he had ridden in with him anyway, because he had wanted the canyon so badly that he had let wanting do his thinking. That was a lesson the war had taught him once and he had apparently needed to learn again: wanting a thing did not make the road to it honest.
The camp lay in the canyon's upper flat, where the creek bent and the ground rose a little above the flood line. Lodges stood in a loose curve, their poles and coverings weathered and well kept, smoke rising from cook fires in thin, straight lines in the still air. Corrals of pole and brush held horses, good horses, strong and bright-coated, tended by young men and women who stopped their work to watch the patrol come in. Children paused in a game and stared. An old woman sorting herbs looked up, looked at Elias, looked at Nash, and went back to her work with a face that gave nothing away. No one shouted. No one threw anything. No one crowded him. The quiet of the camp was worse, in its way, than shouting would have been, because it meant the people here had seen men like him before and had a law for them already made.
Nash led him to a level ground near the centre of the camp, where a council fire burned low and a ring of logs and blankets marked a place for talk. Men and women gathered, not in a rush, but steadily, as if this were a thing that happened in its proper order. At the centre sat a man of sixty-one, straight-backed, grey-haired, with a face lined by sun and patience and authority that did not need to raise its voice. Elias knew him at once, though no one had named him. This was Chief Iron Elk. He wore a plain shirt and a woven blanket over his shoulders, and his hands rested quietly on his knees, and his dark eyes looked at Elias with a steadiness that made Elias stand a little straighter in spite of himself.
My son says you were measuring our water, Iron Elk said. His voice was low and plain, without anger and without hurry. "Is that true?"
Elias stood before the council, his hands empty, his revolver and knife gone, Sage held by a stranger, and he did what he had always done when the truth was against him: he told it plainly. "I took a bearing with my father's compass," he said. "I came to look at the canyon. I told myself I would not stake or survey, and then I forgot my own rule when I saw the creek and the dirt. I am sorry for it. I meant to look, and I measured instead, and I know the difference."
A murmur went around the ring, not hostile, but thoughtful, like wind through grass. Iron Elk listened, and then he spoke, and his words were careful, as if each one had been weighed before it was said. "A man who comes to our canyon with his hands open is a visitor, and visitors are fed and sent on their way in peace. A man who comes with a chain or a compass and begins to measure our water is something else. He is a man preparing to take, whether he calls it a claim or a purchase or a partnership. Our law for such a man is plain, and it has been plain for longer than I have been chief. I did not make it to punish strangers. I keep it because the water must be kept for the people who live beside it, and for their children after them."
He paused, and the fire crackled, and Elias felt the whole camp listening, not with cruelty but with attention, the way people listen when a decision is being made that will outlive the day.
The law is this, Iron Elk said. "An intruder caught measuring the land is escorted out of the territory forever, under guard, and does not return. That is the first road. The second road is this: he marries into the camp and lives under its law. He works for the water he would use. He stakes for no outsider. He keeps the camp's counsel. He becomes one of us, not by a paper, but by work and by promise, and by the judgment of the people he would live among."
Elias stared at him. He had expected anger, or a threat, or a price. He had not expected a choice that was also a sentence, or a sentence that was also a door. Marriage. To whom, he did not yet know, though he could guess, from the way one or two of the older women glanced toward a lodge at the edge of the ring, and from the way Nash's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. His dream of land rose up in him, bright and sharp, and beside it rose the knowledge of what it