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weight and temperature, and if the words were hard, then the commission
would hear hard words, and if there was grief in them, the grief would not be
ironed flat by his mouth into the agency dialect of complaint.
Chief Tavio testified to the line. He was not a man for long speeches, but the
treaty boundary he carried the way other men carry a psalm — the river's
bend, the ridge of red stone, the marked trees, the place where the
commissioners of 1868 had set their stone and his father's mark had gone
onto the paper that now slept in Washington. He told how the line had been
walked and agreed and sworn to, and how in the years since, the line in the
earth had stayed where the walking had put it while the line in the territory's
talk had crept, season by season, toward the valley's heart, the way water
creeps uphill in a liar's story. When he said, through Micah, that the
government spoke to his people with two tongues — one in the treaty tent
and one afterward — Micah said it exactly so, and felt the clerks' pens stop,
and saw Commissioner Grey take the sentence without flinching and nod
once, slowly, as a man nods who is keeping accounts and finds this entry, at
least, accurate.
The herder boy's mother testified to the horses. She was a small woman with
her dead husband's blanket over her shoulders, and she spoke standing,
because she said a person asking for stolen things should not sit like a guest.
Twelve head, she said, gone out of the band's herd in one night from the
meadow below the winter camp, and her boy — who was fourteen and slept
with the horses in the summer — had followed the sign two days before his
courage and the sign both gave out, and what he had found was this: the
tracks of the band's unshod ponies walking in a body, and among them and
behind them the tracks of shod horses, iron-shod, ridden by the thieves,
pressing the herd from behind like dogs. She asked the commission one
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question, and Micah put it across the table as nakedly as she had laid it in her
own tongue. If my son had stolen twelve of your horses, Captain — she
addressed herself to Doyle, having decided he was the honestest face at the
table — how many days would you need to find the road they took, and how
many men would you send down it? Doyle answered her himself, before
Grey could, and he answered her in the open: "One day, mother. And every
man I have." It did not bring the horses back. But Micah saw the woman
mark it down in whatever ledger she kept behind her eyes, among the very
few entries the white world had ever made in her favor.
Seeka spoke last among the band's witnesses, and shortest, and it was the
testimony Micah carried out of the tent each night afterward like a coal in his
pocket. The old woman rose with Tavio's hand under her elbow and her own
bundle long since surrendered to the record, and she did not speak of corners
or horses or the dead man or the line. She told the commission what the
valley was for. It was where the people were buried, she said, going back
beyond counting. It was where the children learned the names of the waters
and the grasses and the winds in their proper order, so that the world would
be known to them and they would be known to it. It was not a thing that had
been bought, and therefore it was not a thing that could be sold; a man cannot
sell the ground his mother is buried in to the man who wants to dig in it, and
call the digging an agreement. She said the valley was where the people had
been put to be the people, and that was what it was for, and then she sat
down, having used fewer words than the clerk needed for the date. Micah
interpreted her, and his voice behaved, barely. No one at the table wrote it
down — he watched the clerks' pens rest, watched Grey himself sit with his
pen down and his eyes on the old woman — and no one in that tent, he was
certain, forgot a syllable of it for the rest of their lives.
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Against all this, Ames's case came in on paper, the way weather comes in off
a front range: massively, and by accumulation. The Denver lawyer spread
claims and filings and affidavits across the table like a man dealing faro —
mineral entries, discovery notices, the prospector's death laid at the valley's
door by the simple geometry of his having died in it, and under everything,
like a drum under a song, the argument that the cession was inevitable and
the commission merely the courtesy extended to a fact. Capital was coming
to this territory, the lawyer said, as surely as the snow came to the high
country, and the only question before the commission was whether the band
would be compensated for stepping out of its path or crushed standing in it.
He described money so often as weather that Micah, translating the day's
residue for Tavio in the evening, found the old chief listening with his head
cocked like a man hearing a distant river, and Tavio said at last: "Tell me
again which of their words means rain." It was the closest thing to humor the
hearing produced, and Micah treasured it the way soldiers treasure dry socks.
It was in the middle of the third day, with the lawyer reading a schedule of
mineral claims into the record in a voice designed to make theft sound like
bookkeeping, that the riders came in from the valley.
They were two of Tavio's young men, dust to the knees, and they did not
wait for the session's courtesies. The news they carried went across the tent
in the people's tongue first and arrived at the table a half-breath later through
Micah, and it rearranged the room the way a hand rearranges pieces on a