Under the canvas shelter, on the ground that had been soaked in blood and fire, life had begun again.
The winter of 1873 fell upon the high Arizona desert with an iron fist.
The balmy, golden afternoons of autumn gave way to piercing northern blizzards that swept down from the Colorado Plateau, burying the San Pedro valley in three feet of dry, powdery snow. The chaparral bushes were transformed into grotesque white statues; the creeks froze solid beneath four inches of milky ice; and the mountain winds shrieked through the chimney stones at night like the lamentations of abandoned spirits.
In Silver Creek, two miles to the south, three miners froze to death in their canvas shanties, their bodies discovered only when the morning saloons failed to open. The freight wagons from Tucson ceased to run, trapped at the base of the pass by impassable drifts, and the price of flour in Henderson’s store soared to thirty dollars a hundredweight.
Yet on the Mitchell claim, the chimney never ceased to smoke.
Sarah lived by a rhythm older and simpler than the laws of the territory. Every morning at first light, she wrapped her feet in the fur-lined moccasins Tazhi had made for her, strapped the baby in his cradleboard across her back, and stepped out into the biting cold with Thomas’s double-bitted felling axe.
She felled the dead, fire-blackened cottonwoods along the dry wash, splitting the seasoned heartwood into clean stove-lengths with swings that had grown powerful, balanced, and tireless. Her hands were hardened to leather; her shoulders were thick with lean, corded muscle; and her skin, though whipped by winter frost, bloomed with a fierce, radiant vigor that no pampered town woman possessed.
Inside the canvas-roofed dwelling, the little iron stove glowed cherry-red around its lower dampers. Thomas—Bih-chin-te—thrived in the dry, cedar-scented warmth. By January, he was rolling across the fleece rugs, his laughter ringing out like bright silver coins as he batted at the dangling turquoise hawk on his frame. He was strong-limbed, broad-shouldered, and had teeth breaking through his gums without fever or weeping.
Yet Sarah was not as alone as the citizens of Silver Creek believed.
The first sign appeared in late December, after a three-day blizzard that had obliterated every wagon rut between the homestead and the town.
Sarah woke to find three dressed haunches of bighorn sheep hanging from the high crossbeam of the collapsed well shed. The meat was fresh, cleanly butchered with an iron blade, and wrapped in clean spruce boughs to keep away the ravens. Beside the meat, pressed into the virgin crust of the snow, was a single mark: the print of a high, round-toed moccasin with a raised heel seam—the signature cut of a Chiricahua hunter.
There were no tracks leading to or from the well shed; the hunter had walked along the tops of the fence rails and the snow-crusted rocks, leaving no trail for cavalry scouts to follow.
Sarah did not tell anyone in Silver Creek about the meat. She salted what she could in an earthenware jar, boiled the bones with wild onions and dried corn into rich, steaming broths that nourished her milk, and left two small cakes of tallow and a pouch of dried salt upon the well beam in return.
The next morning, the salt and tallow were gone. In their place lay a small cake of dried mescal paste, sweet and rich as molasses, and a bundle of dried osha roots for warding off winter fevers.
A silent, invisible bridge of honor had been stretched across the frozen miles. Goyahkla’s band had not fled south to the Sierra Madre as Major Howard had assumed; they had moved their winter lodges into the high, inaccessible limestone caverns of the northern canyons, watching the valley with patient, unblinking eyes. And as long as Chato drew breath, the widow and the son of Thomas Mitchell would never starve in the cold.
In early February, the isolation was broken by an unwelcome visitor.
The snow had begun to crust over with midday thawing and night-freezing, creating a noisy, glass-like sheet across the valley floor. Sarah was outside, splitting kindling beside the woodpile, when she heard the heavy, labored crunch of an animal moving up the wash.
She dropped the axe, reached into the folds of her deerskin coat, and cocked the hammer of the double-barreled shotgun O’Dowd had left behind from the garrison surplus. She stepped into the clearing, leveling the weapon from the hip.
Through the scrubby mesquite came a lone horseman.
It was not a soldier. It was Henderson, the storekeeper.
He was bundled in a greasy buffalo-robe coat with a beaver-fur cap pulled down to his red ears. His horse was a gaunt, shivering sorrel that breathed clouds of white vapor into the freezing air. Henderson looked around the clean, organized homestead—at the neatly stacked cords of firewood, the skin bags of salt meat hanging from the rafters, and the clear path shoveled from the doorway to the spring—with an expression of bewildered disbelief.