soft-footed mare away to her picket, and the cold war settled in for the winter
like weather.
The cold came down out of the north in the middle of the following week,
not gradual but architectural — a wind that rebuilt the valley overnight,
rattling the lodge covers, driving the river's broken ice against the banks in
rafts — and with it, riding hard ahead of their own dust of blown snow, came
the agency runners. Two agency men, white clerks in heavy coats with a
government wagon, and with them the agency's interpreter, and a letter in a
canvas dispatch case that was read aloud to the council at the fire with the
whole band gathered and the frost smoking off the logs. Pahket, pressed
against Micah's side at the edge of the light — for by now the minder had
become something more complicated than a minder, a herald, a leash, and
the closest thing Micah had to a friend — translated the parts the official
interpreter made smooth, in a whisper, before the smooth version arrived.
The substance was this. A mining syndicate out of Denver, fronted by a man
named Victor Ames, had petitioned Washington to open the valley and the
mineral country above it to prospecting, on the claim that the band's treaty
reserved the valley for hunting and not for exclusion, and that the gold the
33
territory needed was lying locked under grass that fed nobody's treasury. The
Department had not granted it. The Department had done something worse,
in its way: it had appointed a treaty commission, which would come to the
valley before first snow to hear the band on the question of a cession — hear
them, the letter said, in the full courtesy of the government, and report their
answer to Washington. The band received this in the silence of people who
have heard a river described by the men who intend to dam it. When the
letter was done, an old man of the council asked, through the interpreter,
what the word cession meant in the agent's own tongue — not the treaty
tongue, the kitchen tongue — and the clerk, to his credit, did not dress it up:
it meant the band would be asked to give the valley away and be thanked for
the gift. A murmur went through the lodges at that, not anger exactly —
something older and more tired, the sound of a people doing arithmetic they
had done before in other valleys, subtracting. Seeka asked one question, in a
voice like a file on iron: whether the commission would come with soldiers,
and the clerk said commissions traveled as they traveled, and that the
Department could not be answerable for what accompanied courtesy. Micah
stood in the smoke at the fire's edge and watched Chief Tavio's face during
all of it and saw nothing move there at all, and understood that the stillness
was itself a kind of fortification — the valley would meet the commission the
way it met winter, prepared and unhurried — and that his own small name,
appended in an agent's postscript, was about to arrive in the valley ahead of
the soldiers like the first scout of a column, which was, he thought, exactly
what a scout was for, and exactly what he had sworn, three winters ago,
never to be again for any man's arithmetic. But there was more, and it was
not in the letter's body. It was appended at the end in the agent's own hand, a
postscript of the kind agents add when a thing is official enough to warn of
and not official enough to own: word to the Chief that a cavalry column
34
under Captain Doyle was sweeping the territory on a deserter warrant, ten
days behind the runners on the same road, and would pay the agency a call
and very likely the valley. And the official interpreter, rendering the
postscript, glanced once — once only — at Micah where he stood at the fire's
edge with his empty hands at his sides, and then added, in his own voice,
what the letter did not say and what he had plainly carried down the road as a
debt of conscience: the warrant list had names on it that the agency had been
given to read, and Micah Thorne's name was on the list. The army had
known he was alive for a long while, the interpreter said. It had only now
come to the country where he lives.
No one looked at Micah then, either. The valley's courtesy again — averted
eyes, while a man received his sentence in public. The council thanked the
runners with grave politeness and fed them, and the band dispersed into the
cold, and Micah went out to the horse herd for his night of walking the
pickets because it was his night and because his hands needed the rope and
the dark more than they needed a lodge. He was halfway down the picket
line, moving among the horses by their breath and their shifting, when Chief
Tavio came out of the dark ahead of him without a lantern, the way a man
comes to a herd he has known all his life, and stood with him a while among
the horses, saying nothing, both of them listening to the herd's winter noises
and the wind working at the valley's rim. The Chief's breath smoked. His
voice, when it came, was the voice he had used at the fire — the voice of a
man stating the depth of a river.
"The question I asked you is about to be asked again," Tavio said, "by men
with ropes. Decide before they arrive what your answer is worth."
35
The winter work had a shape to it, and Micah learned the shape the way he
had once learned drill — by being corrected until the corrections were no
longer necessary, which in the valley meant until they were no longer spoken
aloud. He learned that wood was stacked bark-side up against the snow that
was coming, and that a man who stacked it wrong would hear about it once,
from Pahket, in the tone of a boy repeating what the whole village agreed he