a man signs a document he has actually read, and they walked back down to
the river together, and she showed him where the trout held in the cold water,
in the shadow under the far bank, invisible unless you knew the shape of the
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shadow was wrong.
The raid came on the ninth night, in the deepest part of it, when the fires
were down to their bones.
Micah woke to the sound before he understood it — a drumming under the
ground more than in the air, hooves in numbers, and then the herder boys'
shouting from the far meadow and a horse screaming once in pain or terror.
He was out of the lodge with his rifle in his hand and his two cartridges in
their loops and his bare feet finding every stone the frost had sharpened, and
the whole village was awake around him in the dark, men running for the
herd with lances and bows and one old muzzle-loader, women pulling
children back from the lanes. The herd was already going — a river of horses
pouring north through the meadow gap, dust and breath-smoke in the
starlight, the raiders' whoops coming from inside the noise like a voice inside
a river. It was done the way such things are done when they are done by
professionals: fast, loud, and finished before the village could become an
army. By the time Micah reached the meadow's edge with Kweo and six
others, the gap was empty and the sound was going away over the ridge, and
what was left behind was the true bill for the night's work, laid out in the
trampled grass.
Twelve head run off. And the younger of the herder boys, found by his
brother in the dark where a horse had gone over him in the first rush — alive,
which was the good news, and carrying his left arm against his chest in the
particular way that told anyone who had ever set a bone what the morning's
work would be. They carried him to Waneka's lodge on a robe, the boy biting
his own sleeve to keep from disgracing himself with noise, and Micah held
the lantern while she worked — her hands reading the shoulder the way she
read gravel bars, in sequence, finding the collarbone broken clean across and
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nothing worse underneath it, which in her grammar was a mercy. She set it
with a gentleness that had splinters of impatience in it, bound it tight against
his ribs, and dosed him with willow and something else from a pouch she did
not name, and the boy slept before the dose was finished, his face still wet.
"He will mend crooked if he is careless and straight if he is not," she said,
wiping her hands. "He is fifteen. He will be careless. It will mend crooked
and he will carry it all his life and it will ache before rain. That is what your
twelve horses cost, whoever took them."
Micah went out at first light with her to read the meadow, the two of them
walking the trampled ground in widening turns while the mist was still on the
river. He read it the way he had been taught in two schools now, and the
schools agreed, which was what frightened him.
"Unshod," Waneka said, at the herd's center, where the horses had milled
before they ran. "Ours." She moved outward, to where the pressure changed.
"Here. And here." Shod horses — iron on the hoof, the print clean-edged and
deep — among the raiders' mounts, at least three, ridden by men who knew
how to cut a herd in the dark. White men's horses. Or horses a white man had
paid to have shod, and in the valley in late autumn, with the agency smith
forty miles off and the snow coming, the distinction was one for lawyers and
not for tracks. The raiders had come down the north ridge on the old game
trail, and they had left the way thieves in stories always leave, in a body, fast
— but the trail did the thing Micah had been trained, in his other life, to
watch for. It split. It split exactly the way a staged trail splits: one branch too
loud, a broad highway of sign running north and getting broader, broken
brush and kicked gravel laid on like paint; and one branch too careful,
threading the rock and the creek edge southeast, where a man on a shod
horse had taken the stolen twelve at a walk, in the water where he could, out
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of the water only on stone. The loud trail was the story. The careful trail was
the fact. The loud trail led to the agency road. The careful trail led, when
Micah walked it out a mile and came back with his mouth dry, toward the old
prospectors' camp on the valley's eastern edge — the camp the syndicate kept
supplied through the autumn for men who were, officially, not there.
"They want the loud trail followed," he said. "They want riders from this
valley on the agency road by tomorrow, angry, armed, chasing horses. In
front of witnesses."
"In front of the commission's witnesses," Waneka said. "A war party is a
better argument than a petition." She stood looking at the two trails a while,
the loud one and the true one, and her face was the face she wore over a
sickbed when the sickness had begun to tell her its real name. "Horses can be
replaced, Micah. A story cannot be unrun. They did not come for the horses."
The worse news came at midday, brought in by two of Kweo's riders at a
gallop the valley heard before it saw, and it was the other half of the design,
fitted to the first half the way a lid fits a box. A white prospector — a man
known slightly at the agency, a loner with a burro and a hammer and a tent
he moved around the valley's skirts like a chess piece — had been found
dead that morning on the edge trail, face down in the frost with a Ute arrow
in his back. The agency runner was already on the road to Fort Lewis with