whole world, arranged along a river, with winter coming on.
Micah stood in the juniper shadow with his torn sleeve stirring in the evening
wind and considered his situation the way he had been trained to consider all
4
situations: as a question of how to leave it.
The gelding was down there. That much the sign had already told him, and
his eyes, traveling as they did out of old habit across the herd in the river
bend, found in short order a familiar roan shape with a familiar brand of
idleness about it, grazing hock-deep in grass a mile from any fence that had
ever been dreamed of. Worse than that — or better; it depended on the
reckoning — there was something on the roan's back that caught the light:
his saddle, still cinched, three days ridden by nobody. The herd boys had
gathered the horse in, of course. Of course they had. A saddled horse
wandering into a valley of horsemen was not a mystery to be pondered but a
fact to be used, and they had used it the sensible way, and put it with the
herd, where it would be fed and kept from lions and appreciated.
He could not simply walk down and take it. A white man on foot, alone,
armed, walking into a treaty valley at dusk to lay hands on a horse in the
band's herd — there were ways that could be read, and most of them were
the wrong ways, and Micah had spent his soldiering years learning exactly
how the wrong reading of exactly such a moment could run downhill into
history. He would have to go down openly, in the last of the light,
empty-handed in the visible sense, and ask. Ask, and be sized up, and answer
for himself, and wait upon other men's leisure for the return of his own
property. It went against every joint of his doctrine. But the horse was the
ride, and the ride was the road, and the road was the whole of the
arrangement.
He worked his way down the bench in the juniper shadow, slow, keeping his
hands where the light could find them when he chose to show them, and he
had come perhaps halfway, within the smell of woodsmoke and roasting
meat and horse, when he heard the singing.
5
It was not war singing. He knew the difference in his bones before he knew it
in his mind, the way a man knows thunder from artillery after one education
in each. It was a full camp's singing, a gathering kind of music, many voices
rolling up out of the bottomland with the smoke, and under it the drum,
steady as a walking horse. He came around the shoulder of the bench at a
cautious crouch — and stopped, and stayed stopped, because the bottomland
below him was not the evening camp he had expected.
It was a council. Or a fair. Or a wedding market, come to that, though he did
not know the word for what he was looking at until he had looked a while.
A great fire burned in the open ground between the lodges and the river, in a
ring of stones wide as a wagon's turning, and around it the people sat in their
hundreds, in circles within circles, the old men nearest the heat in their
blankets, the families behind, the children everywhere and silent in the way
of children at the edge of great doings. Three small camps' worth of guests
were marked by their banners and their separate horse lines — allied camps,
come in for the occasion, dressed in their best: quillwork and trade cloth and
silver, eagle feathers, painted shields hung where the firelight could approve
them. And in the cleared ground before the fire, in the place of honor, sat the
chief in his blanket and his bonnet of feathers laid by for the moment, and
beside him — upright, still, dressed like a sunrise that had decided to be
patient — his daughter.
Micah understood, with the particular sinking that belongs to men who have
survived by leaving rooms before they fill, that he had walked three days out
of the empty country directly into the middle of the most important evening
of these people's year. And that his horse was in their herd, and the sun was
going, and the singing was building toward something, and there was no road
out of this valley that did not pass through the firelight.
6
He settled into the cottonwood shadow at the valley's edge to wait for a gap
in the proceedings — a lull, a dispersal, a moment when a stranger might
approach an outlying lodge and conduct a small shameful negotiation about a
horse. It depended entirely on the proceedings providing a gap.
The proceedings, as it turned out, had other intentions.
What it was, the fire told him, in the way that fires eventually tell everything
to a man patient enough to watch. It was a choosing.
One at a time — with a spacing between them like the spacing between
verses of a song — a young man rose from the guest circles and crossed the
open ground to stand before the chief, and with him came his people, and his
people's wealth walked on four legs behind him. Horses were led in and lined
out in the firelight, good ones, chosen ones, their coats curried to a shine that
caught the light in waves as they shifted. Blankets were laid down in stacks
that a clerk would have called inventory and these people plainly called
honor. A silver-mounted bridle passed from hand to hand like a treaty. A
rifle in a beaded case. A shield painted with a sun that had witnessed things.
And the young man stood in the middle of his family's generosity and his
uncle or his father or his eldest brother spoke for him — for who could boast
of himself, before a chief, with a straight face — and recited him: the raids
he had ridden and come home from, the horses he had taken from the enemy
and given away again, the winter counts of his short life told at their fullest