He walked back in, carrying a heavy armful of firewood, and stopped in surprise.
Goyah had dragged himself over to Caleb's leather saddlebags. He was holding a small, faded photograph framed in a simple brass oval—an item Caleb kept wrapped in oilcloth deep inside his pack.
The photograph showed a young woman in a high-collared cotton dress, sitting on a wooden bench, smiling faintly at the camera.
Caleb set the firewood down with a heavy thud, his body instantly tensing. "Put that back."
Goyah did not flinch. He looked at the photograph, then looked up at Caleb's guarded, defensive face.
"Wife?" Goyah asked quietly.
"She was," Caleb said, his voice clipped. "Sarah. She died of the typhus seven years ago in Missouri. Before I came west."
Goyah looked back down at the brass frame. He touched the glass gently with the tip of his calloused index finger.
"I have wife," Goyah said softly, his English slow and deliberate. "In the southern mountains. Two summers ago... white horse-soldiers came to the camp near the creek. Burned the lodges."
Caleb felt his stomach drop like a lead weight into a deep well.
"She ran into the trees with my son," Goyah continued, his voice devoid of anger—holding only a vast, hollow sadness that was far more devastating than rage. "The soldiers fired rifles into the willow bushes. She did not come out."
Caleb could not breathe.
The air in the cave suddenly felt thin, suffocating, and heavy with the terrible, inescapable dark history of the territory. He looked at Goyah’s pale, scarred face, realizing with a horrifying certainty that even if Goyah had not been at Tonto Basin, he had suffered under the exact same cruel, violent machine that Caleb had served.
Caleb turned his face away, looking out at the white, falling snow outside the cave entrance.
"I’m sorry," Caleb whispered, his voice barely audible above the crackle of the hearth. "God help us... I am so sorry."
Goyah looked at the white man’s trembling hands, seeing the profound, genuine agony written across Caleb's weathered face.
Goyah carefully wrapped the brass photograph back into its piece of oilcloth, placing it gently back into the leather saddlebag. He did not say another word. He simply sat back against the rock wall and watched the white man grieve for a world that neither of them could ever fix.
On the fourth morning, the sky finally cleared.
A bright, brilliant winter sun rose into a crystal-blue sky, turning the snow-covered peaks into blinding sheets of white light. The air was still bitterly cold, but the wind had died down completely.
Goyah’s leg was improving remarkably.