has gone slow — slower than I am proud of — because half of it is a stone in
my chest with your name on it, and a man thinking with a stone in him thinks
badly and calls it honor." He turned his head then and looked at Micah fully
for the first time, and in the starlight his face was not an enemy's face. It was
worse. It was the face of a man handing over a weapon by telling you where
it was buried. "Decide what you are, deserter. I am deciding what I am, and it
is going slower than your column."
He did not wait for an answer, and Micah had none that would not have
shamed them both. Kweo went away through the herd the way he had come,
a man parting horses with his shoulders, and before dawn — Micah knew it
from the herder boys before the village was properly awake, though no one
said where — Kweo had taken his rifle and his second-best horse and ridden
out of the valley in the dark. Where to, the part of the morning that Micah
was permitted to hear did not say. Toward the agency, perhaps, to give
Ames's man an answer. Toward the north ridge, perhaps, to count Doyle's
dust for himself. Toward some high place where a man could think with a
stone in his chest and nobody watching the thinking. Micah saddled nothing
and followed nothing. He walked the herd's edge until the sky went grey, and
50
he thought about decisions, and how the slowest ones in a man's life were
always the ones with a bugle at the end of them.
Pahket came running at first light, barefoot on the frozen lanes, with the
boy's whole body turned into the message: riders on the north ridge — no,
not riders, dust, and in the dust the guidons, and the dust standing still the
way dust stands when a column halts to dress its lines and let its scouts come
back. Doyle. Half a day out, at the pace a column makes when it is in no
hurry because it believes the country cannot run from it. The news went
through the village the way wind goes through dry grass, lodge to lodge, and
by the time Micah reached the open ground by the council lodge the whole
band was awake and watching the ridge and not one person in it was looking
at the soldiers. They were looking at him.
Waneka came through them leading his gelding.
She had saddled it herself. He knew her hand on a cinch the way he knew her
hand on a bandage, and it was her work, tight and right, the blankets squared.
His rifle was in the boot, and in the loops of his belt — which she carried
over her arm — both cartridges stood in their places, the two rounds that
were all the valley had ever allowed him and all he had ever asked to be
trusted with. A full canteen hung at the saddle horn, and a twist of journey
food was tied behind the cantle, enough for three days of hard riding if a man
rode the way a hunted man rides. The escape, complete. Prepared by her own
hands in the dark, down to the water. She held the reins out to him, and she
said nothing at all, because there was nothing to explain: she would not hold
a husband who stayed only by debt, and a debt a man cannot escape is only
another word for a cage, and she had not chosen a caged thing at the fire. If
he rode, the choosing was void and she would grieve it and bury it as the law
said. If he rode, she would still have made sure he rode watered, and fed, and
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armed with both his cartridges. That was her argument, and she made it with
a saddled horse.
Micah looked at the gelding a long time. He looked at the ridge, where the
dust had thinned and the column was a dark seam on the sky's edge, patient
as print. He thought about the road north and the thousand miles past it,
about Canada and other names and other rivers, about how a man could be
riding before the village had finished its breakfast and be a rumor by
nightfall and a stranger by spring, and how he had done it once already, in
another autumn, and how it had tasted every day since — every day, in every
camp and at every fire, in two languages. He took the reins from her hand.
Her face did not change. He led the gelding two steps, to her own lodge pole,
and there he unbuckled the cinch with the unhurried care of a man disarming
a trap, and let the saddle down into the frost at her feet, and took the rifle
from the boot and hung it on the lodge pole where all could see, high, out of
the reach of children, exactly where a man hangs a thing he is finished with
for the day. The belt with its two cartridges he laid across the saddle. The
canteen he left hanging on the horn of nothing, swaying slightly, full.
Then he walked out of the village on foot, unarmed, in the open, up the long
meadow toward the ridge road the column must descend — past the drying
racks, past the edge of the herd, past the last lodge and the first
frost-whitened field, in plain sight of the whole band and of the scouts on the
ridge, a single man walking toward an army with empty hands. Waneka had
not moved. She stood by her lodge pole with the rifle above her and the
saddle at her feet, and he knew without turning that Pahket was beside her,
and Seeka, and half the valley behind them in a silence that had nothing left
in it of doubt.
"Tell your father," he said over his shoulder, not stopping, not raising his
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voice, because a man walking to his answer does not need to shout it. "The
answer is the same as the first time. It'll keep being the same."