should say. He learned which lodges took meat without being asked and
which took it only after a refusal had been made and properly overruled. He
learned that you did not walk between a fire and the person tending it, that
you did not reach across the dream-keeper's mat, that a guest ate what was
put in front of him and commented on it exactly once, in praise, and then
shut his mouth and ate.
The language came slower and then all at once, the way river ice goes out.
For weeks it was a wall of separate stones — word for horse, word for cold,
word for the particular kind of foolishness a man displays when he will not
admit he is lost — and then one morning in the wood lot he understood an
entire sentence of Pahket's, a joke at his expense involving the axe and his
own feet, whole and entire and in order, and he laughed a breath too late and
the boy looked at him the way a teacher looks at a slow student who has
finally carried the tune. That night he dreamed in it. He dreamed he was
standing in a creek he did not know, calling to someone on the far bank in
words that were not English, and he woke in the dark of the lodge with the
wrongness of it sitting on his chest — not fear, exactly. The sense of a door
in his own house standing open that he did not remember building. He lay
awake a long time, listening to the river, and thought about what it meant that
his sleep had gone over to the other side before the rest of him had decided
anything.
36
The hunting was where the valley weighed him most honestly. He was a
good shot — the army had seen to that before he saw to the army — and he
could still walk a ridge line the way he had been taught, glassing with his
eyes instead of his head, but the valley did not hunt the way the army
scouted, and the difference was a curriculum. Kweo's party took him because
Tavio had said to take him, and they hunted the high meadows where the
deer came down ahead of the snow, and Micah learned to leave the fat buck
for the one behind it because the fat buck was next year's herd standing in
this year's body, and he learned to read the aspen groves for the rubs that told
where a deer had been thinking, and he learned — hardest of all, and he
knew it was the actual lesson — to hand over the meat he had killed to men
who received it without thanks and to walk back to the village with empty
hands and an unchanged face. The first time, it cost him something he could
feel, like a coin pried off a roll. By the fourth hunt he understood that the
absence of thanks was itself the measurement: thanks would have made it a
gift, and a gift would have made it a debt, and the valley was not interested in
his debts. The meat was the village's. He was only the instrument that had
been sent out to fetch it, and an instrument that does its work well is not
praised. It is used again.
He was used again. That was the whole of his report, most days, and he made
himself be satisfied with it, and some days he almost was.
What he counted, in private, was different. The word that had come down
from the agency with the last trader — nine days old when it reached him
and stale when it was spoken — put Captain Doyle's column ten days out,
riding the north road with a warrant and a list of deserters and orders to look
into reports the agency found convenient. Ten days. He did the arithmetic in
the wood lot, on the hunt, in the dark before sleep. Every man in the valley
37
was doing the same sum with a different answer in mind. Tavio had set the
term in front of the council and the term had not been softened by repetition:
when the soldiers came, Micah Thorne would face them openly, on his feet,
in the open, like a man and not like a rumor. If he ran — if his feet chose the
trees or the river or the white anonymity of the high country — then the
choosing was void and Waneka's dream was a thing the band would grieve
and bury and not speak of again, and whatever Doyle did to him afterward
would be the army's business and not the valley's. He had agreed to it
standing up, in a language he then barely had, and Pahket had translated his
agreement with the solemnity of a boy carrying water in both hands.
He did not intend to run. He turned the intention over every night the way a
man turns a stone in his pocket, checking it for cracks, and found it whole,
and was not comforted, because he had been a soldier long enough to know
that a man's intentions at a warm fire and a man's behavior at the sound of a
bugle were cousins and not brothers. The column was coming out of the
north with his name spelled right on a piece of paper, and everything he had
built in the valley — the unthanked meat, the stacked wood, the jokes
understood a breath too late — was scaffolding around a single moment that
had not happened yet.
The snow came to the high peaks first and stayed, white down to the tree
line, a promise written where everyone could read it. The valley worked at
the pace of people who have read that promise before. Meat went up on the
drying racks. Hides came off the frames. The river ran lower and clearer and
colder, and it was at the river, on a morning when the frost had made the
grass along the bank stand up in white crystals, that Waneka took him to read
sign.
She had chosen the place the way she chose everything, without announcing
38