the word of it. The commission that was to sit in the spring and hear the
syndicate's petition and the band's answer would now hear a third voice first,
ahead of both of them: savages, silver, murder, in that order and no other.
The council sat that afternoon in Tavio's lodge, and Micah sat where he had
been put, at the edge, with his mouth shut and his ears open, while the old
men and Seeka worked the problem the way they worked everything, from
the outside in. He understood perhaps half the words and all of the shape.
44
The fear in the lodge was not the fear of soldiers — the band had buried
soldiers' grandfathers and expected to bury soldiers. It was the fear of the
story: of paper that traveled faster than any horse, arriving at rooms in
Denver and Washington already believed, so that whatever the band said
afterward would be heard as the noise a drowning thing makes. A lie, Seeka
said, in the tone of a woman stating the weather, was a horse with no rider —
it ran where it liked and everyone fed it. The truth, to catch it, would need a
rider and a road and a reason for tired men to let it pass. Nobody in the lodge
said the dead man's name, because nobody knew it. He was not a man yet.
He was an arrow and a headline, and that, Micah understood sitting in the
smoke with his half-language, was precisely what he had been manufactured
to be.
They went to the dead man in the late afternoon, with Tavio's permission
spoken in front of witnesses and two of Kweo's men detailed to watch —
watch the ground, watch the white deserter, the order did not specify and did
not need to. Kweo himself refused at the lodge door, flatly, in English, for
Micah's benefit: "I will not kneel in the dirt to save a white man's lie." Then,
as they were mounting, he appeared at the corral with his own horse and his
jaw set like a man reporting for a punishment, and rode with them the whole
way without explaining himself to anyone, least of all to Micah.
The site was a teaching text. Micah had seen battlefields read worse.
The man lay where he had fallen on the edge trail, at the place where the path
came down off the shoulder of the valley and turned toward the agency, and
the first thing Micah read was the boots. The toes pointed down the trail,
away from the valley, toward his own camp and his burro and his breakfast.
He had been walking out. Whatever story the agency runner was carrying to
Fort Lewis — a prospector murdered by valley Utes as he went about his
45
lawful business near their borders — required a man walking in, toward the
forbidden ground, surprised from ambush. The boots said otherwise. The
boots said a man leaving, unhurried, his back to an empty valley, who had
been ridden up behind by someone he did not fear enough to turn for.
The arrow lay beside him where Waneka's careful hands had drawn it, and
she held it across her palms the way she held instruments, and read it aloud
like a letter from an enemy who could not spell.
"Goose feather," she said. "Dyed." She turned the shaft so the light went
down it. "Our fletching is turkey, or hawk when a man can get it, and it is cut
so — " her thumb described the cut, low and swept — "not so. This is cut by
a man who saw ours once, from across a trading counter, and remembered
the shape and not the making." She rolled the shaft. "And this is not cane.
Our arrows are river cane, grown and straightened and light. This is bought
wood. Milled. Heavy as a fence picket. No man of this band would carry it to
war or to meat. It would fly like a thrown stick." She laid it down with a
precision that was its own verdict. "This arrow was made by a man who
needed an arrow that would be believed, not an arrow that would fly. It was
made to be found."
The ground around the man completed the sentence. There were the dead
man's own tracks, coming down the trail at a walk, and over them and
through them the tracks of horses that had come up behind him and milled —
three horses, four — at the moment of the shot, if shot was even the word for
a thing done at arm's length from a saddle. And there, pressed into the soft
edge of the trail where a horse had swung wide around the body, Micah
found the print he would have traded a month of his life to unfind: a hind
shoe, half-round, the print's inner edge broken by a crack in the heel plate
that printed as a clean white notch in the mud.
46
He knew that shoe. He had stood in Ames's agency corrals in the early
autumn, before the trader's news and the counting of days, on a legitimate
errand with a mule to sell, and he had watched a smith's boy lead out a leggy
bay gelding — a good horse gone sour-tempered — and he had noticed the
shoe because noticing was his trade and his curse: half-round, cracked at the
heel plate, the crack gone unrepaired because the horse was a string horse
and string horses get what the string can spare. The bay belonged to Petr
Hasek's string. Hasek — the guide who had lied in '71, whose lying had
written Micah's own confession for him in advance, who now drew a
syndicate wage to know every trail into this valley.
"One shoe," Kweo said, behind him. Micah had not heard him come up;
Kweo read the ground over his shoulder with his arms folded, and his voice
was not the voice of a man scoffing. It was worse than scoffing. "One shoe is
a story, deserter. Stories are what they are killing us with. You cannot carry
one shoe into a room of paper men."