Caleb did not sleep.
He stayed by the warrior’s side throughout the long, dark hours, keeping the fire roaring with fresh logs of dry oak and pine. He melted clean snow in his iron tin, soaking rags in the icy water and applying them continuously to the warrior's forehead, neck, and chest to keep the fever from cooking his brain.
"Easy," Caleb kept repeating, his voice a steady, rhythmic anchor in the dark cave. "Easy, hold on. Lie still."
Whenever the warrior thrashed too violently, threatening to reopen the bleeding wound on his right leg, Caleb held the man down by his broad shoulders, using his weight to keep him motionless until the spasm passed.
At two in the morning, the warrior suddenly sat straight up in the blankets, his dark eyes wide and glassy with fever, staring into the dark corner of the cave as if seeing terrible ghosts emerging from the shadows. He let out a strange, heartbreaking cry—a sound of pure, unadulterated grief that echoed off the cold stone walls.
Caleb felt a cold shiver run down his spine. He recognized that sound. It was the same sound he had heard three years ago in the smoking ruins of Tonto Basin—the sound of a man watching everything he loved being torn away from him.
Caleb reached out, placing his hands firmly on the warrior’s trembling arms. "I know," Caleb whispered, his voice thick with an emotion he hadn't allowed himself to feel in three years. "I know, brother. I see them too."
The warrior looked at Caleb, his fevered, unseeing eyes locking onto the white man’s face.
Slowly, the tension drained from the warrior’s muscular frame. He let out a long, shuddering sigh and collapsed back onto the pine boughs, his breathing slowing into a deep, exhausted rhythm.
Caleb sat beside him in the dim red firelight, holding the wet rag against the man's burning forehead, keeping watch while the blizzard screamed outside.
Dawn arrived not with sunlight, but with a pale, gray illumination that seeped through the thick curtain of falling snow.
The wind had died down to a low, distant whistle, leaving the mountain world buried beneath another six inches of fresh powder.
Caleb sat near the mouth of the cave, his eyes red-rimmed and burning from lack of sleep. He was chewing on a piece of hard salt pork, watching the mist rise from the valley floor below.
Behind him, a quiet sound signaled that the warrior was awake.
Caleb turned his head.
The fever had broken. The warrior’s face was pale and drawn, his eyes hollowed by exhaustion, but his gaze was clear, sharp, and entirely coherent. He was sitting up against the rock wall, inspecting the heavy bandages on his leg with quiet, methodical hand movements.
He looked up at Caleb.
For the first time, there was no immediate hostility in his eyes—no drawn knife, no raised arm. There was only a profound, complex curiosity.
"Water," the warrior said. The word was English, though thick and clumsily pronounced, as if he had pulled it from a distant memory of trading posts.
Caleb picked up his iron cup, filled it with hot water brewed with a pinch of crushed pine needles for strength, and walked across the cave. He handed the cup to the warrior.