head bowed like a man hearing the names of his dead read in church.
Victor Ames sat at the side table with his lawyer from Denver, a sleek young
man whose boots had never known a stirrup's honest wear, and Ames
conducted himself through the opening hours with the smoothness of a man
who believes the room is already his and is merely waiting for the furniture
to be arranged. He regretted the death of the prospector. He deplored the
restlessness of certain young men of the valley. He spoke of the band as one
speaks of a younger brother's unfortunate habits — indulgently, and in the
hearing of the neighbors. It was when the commission turned to the
prospector's death that Micah felt Waneka rise beside her father, and the
whole delegation's attention go to her like grass bending to a wind, and he
understood that the bundles in the women's laps had reached their hour.
She did not speak first to the commission. She spoke to her father, briefly, in
the people's tongue, and Tavio nodded once, and then she came forward to
the clerks' table carrying the long bundle, and laid it down, and untied the
sinew with her own hands, and folded back the cloth.
The arrow lay on the white trade cloth like something in a museum of the
wrong country. Micah interpreted, because that was his office now, but first
he let the room look. He had seen it by firelight in the valley; he saw it now
by the flat daylight through canvas, and it was as damning in the one light as
the other.
"Tell them what it is," Waneka said to him, in her own tongue. "Tell them
exactly. Do not make it smaller in their language, the way the agency
interpreter makes everything smaller."
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So he told them exactly. The shaft was milled — turned on a lathe, smooth as
a billiard cue, of a straightness no hand with a drawknife and a grooved stone
had ever made or needed to make. The fletching was goose feather, cut to a
factory sameness, three vanes alike as print. The head was of a pattern sold
by the gross in Eastern catalogues for the sporting trade. And then he said the
rest, and heard his own voice go flat and careful the way it had on the ridge
road. The people of this valley fletched with the wing feathers of wild turkey,
cut by hand, each shaft of dogwood or reed smoothed against a grooved
stone and known to its maker. No man in the valley owned a goose-feather
arrow. No man in the valley had ever owned one. The arrow that had been
taken out of the dead prospector's body had been put there — placed there —
by a hand that had bought it out of a store, and the killing it was meant to
testify to was a story written afterward, in English, for English readers.
The Denver lawyer was on his feet with the unhurried objection of a man
being paid by the hour to be unhurried. A drawing, he understood, was next
to be offered. A drawing was not a shoe, nor a horse, nor a man. He trusted
the commission would weigh a dead prospector above a pencil.
"Let us see the pencil, then," Grey said mildly, "and weigh them together."
Micah laid his drawing on the table beside the arrow: the print he had
measured in the mud of the prospector's camp before the rain took it, drawn
to scale on a sheet of the commission's own paper — a left fore print, a
half-round shoe, and across the heel plate the flaw he had stared at until it
was printed on the inside of his own eyelids: a crack, running the width of
the plate, with a notch where the metal had begun to part. And beside the
drawing, at Grey's direction, the clerk set down the agency smithy ledger,
fetched at Doyle's order that morning, and opened it to the page the smith
himself had marked with a strip of leather, and read the entry aloud in the
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clerk's flat voice. Three weeks before the prospector was found dead, the
agency smith had shod a bay gelding for Petr Hasek — half-round shoes all
around, the entry said, and on the left fore a heel plate cracked across, which
the smith had noted he would mend at the next shoeing, the owner having
said it would hold.
The tent was very quiet. Outside, beyond the canvas, a teamster shouted at a
mule, and the sound seemed to come from another and a lesser world. Micah
did not look at Hasek. He made himself look at Ames, because he had
decided in the night that this was the moment to watch, and he was rewarded:
Victor Ames, for the first time since the commission had sat, was not looking
at the commission, nor at his lawyer, nor at the arrow on the cloth. He was
looking at Petr Hasek, seated behind him with the other agency hangers-on,
and his face wore the expression of a man re-pricing an employee.
"The arrow, the drawing, and the ledger page will be copied into the record,"
Grey said, "and the originals held by this commission. Mr. Ames, your man
Hasek will make himself available to this commission's questions tomorrow,
and will not leave the agency ground tonight. Captain Doyle, you will see to
the second of those. — We will adjourn until morning."
The hearing days settled into a rhythm that Micah came to know the way he
had once known the rhythm of a march: the forming up in the morning cool,
the long middle hours of testimony, the breaking apart at dusk with
everyone's account of the day slightly different from everyone else's. His
place in it was fixed and strange. He stood between the band and the table
with the testimony passing through him twice — once in the people's tongue,
once in English — and he had made a private law of the work on the first
morning and kept it through all the days that followed: he would not soften.
Whatever the band said in its own language went across the table at its full