the open, whatever it cost — then in the spring, when the cottonwoods
turned, the marriage would proceed, and he would be of the band, and his
past would be the band's past too, a thing carried by many hands and so made
bearable.
27
Then the Chief said the clause that Micah would hear again in the dark for
many nights, and said it without cruelty, as a man states the depth of a river.
If the soldiers took him, the band would not fight for him. "We will feed your
horse," Tavio said. "We will speak your name truly at the agency, and to the
soldiers, and to any who ask — that you came to us openly and lived among
us honestly. We will not spend our young men on your past. That past is
yours. Carry it into the open yourself, or do not carry it here at all."
Micah stood in the frost with the whole valley's eyes on him and gave his
acceptance in the formal way the interpreter had coached him the night
before, phrase by phrase, and if his voice was not entirely steady on the
words for I understand and I agree, it was steady by the end of them. He said
one thing more, in English, for the interpreter to carry: that the terms were
the first fair offer any body of men had ever made him, and that he would try
to be worth the winter. Seeka, wrapped to the eyes in her blanket at the fire's
edge, made a sound that might have been approval or might have been a
comment on the weather, and the council broke, and the proving season
began without ceremony, in the most ordinary way imaginable: an old
woman Micah had never spoken to thrust a water bag into his hands and
pointed at the river, and Pahket, at his shoulder like a second shadow,
announced, "That is work. I will show you where. You will be slow. I will
allow it."
The days took their shape. Work came to him the way it comes to an
unproven man in any camp on earth — the lower end of everything. Water in
the dark mornings, when the river's skin of ice had to be broken with a stone
and his hands went numb to the wrist. Wood, endless wood, split and hauled
and stacked against the lodges, the band burning in a night what his mother's
kitchen in Ohio had burned in a week. The horse herd at night, two nights in
28
seven, walking the pickets with a lance-butted staff and a blanket over his
shoulders, learning the horses by their habits in the dark — which mare
drifted, which gelding would test a rope, which old stud stood like a sentry
himself and watched the herd and needed nothing from Micah but company.
The band's food defeated him politely for a week: dried meat that had to be
learned like a skill, a stew whose name Pahket taught him to say and then
laughed at him for saying wrong, corn ground by hand that left his shoulders
burning. He ate what was set before him and said the word for thank you
until the word stopped sounding like a stone in his mouth.
The language came at the rate Pahket set, which was the rate of a boy who
has discovered that teaching is a form of power and means to enjoy it while it
lasts. Twenty words the first days, drilled without mercy at the wood pile, at
the river, at the herd. Lodge. Fire. Water. Horse. Woman — at which
Pahket's face arranged itself into a gravity so extreme that Micah understood
the word had been chosen deliberately and that his pronunciation of it would
be reported at the family fire that night, and was. He learned the word for
winter, which sounded like a held breath. He learned the word for debt,
which Pahket taught him while pointing, with enormous innocence, at Micah
himself. He learned that the language had more tenses of intention than
English bothered with, and that there was a way of saying I will do it that
meant I swear it before witnesses, and Pahket made him learn that one twice.
The herd nights taught him the valley's true census, which was not people but
horses, and with it a lesson he had not expected to need: how to be watched
without resenting the watching. The old herd-keeper, a man so wrinkled and
sparing of speech that Pahket called him Grandfather Stone when out of
earshot and something more respectful within it, walked the first night at
Micah's shoulder in total silence and the second night ten paces off, and on
29
the third night he was nowhere to be seen, which Micah understood to be a
report filed in his favor — the old man had moved from auditing him to
merely knowing where he was. The band's children tested him differently,
with the scientific cruelty of the young: a file of them trailed him to the river
one morning at a distance of six feet, scattering when he turned, until the
smallest, a girl of five with her mother's beads in her braids, detached herself
from the expedition, walked up, and held out a strip of dried meat with the
gravity of a treaty envoy. Micah ate it with ceremony and thanked her in his
new words, and she corrected his pronunciation twice, without mercy,
exactly as her uncle Pahket would have done, and ran back to her colleagues
shouting the verdict, whatever it was. After that the children used him freely
— for reaching things, for carrying, for settling the question of whether a
white man's hair was the same all through or only on the surface, a question
he answered by letting them pull it, once, which Pahket witnessed and
pronounced the bravest thing Micah had done in the valley, counting the
confession. He mended harness with the herd boys. He learned to set a cold
shoe well enough to hold a band pony to the agency and back, though the
shoes the valley used were few and precious and mostly his hands were