corrals himself — curried to a shine, her mane combed out, her feet trimmed,
a horse presented the way a man presents the best thing he owns — and the
herder boy waited at the fence with his father beside him and his bad arm
still bound in its sling against his ribs. The boy was fourteen and trying very
hard to look like a person to whom remarkable things happened every day,
and failing at it in a way that made the whole yard gentle.
Kweo put the lead rope into the boy's good hand and closed the boy's fingers
over it himself, one by one, the way you teach a thing that must not be
dropped.
"She answers to a whistle, two notes, falling," he said. "She will test you
once, the first cold morning, to learn whether you are worth obeying. Let her
test. Win it quiet. Her name in our tongue means the wind when it runs red at
evening — the clerks write her Red Wind." He looked at the mare and then,
with an effort Micah could see from ten paces, away from her. "She is yours
in front of these witnesses. A horse given is not taken back. That is the whole
of the law about her now."
The boy said something in a voice too small to carry, and his father put a
hand on his good shoulder, and Kweo nodded once as if the small voice had
been a speech. Then he shouldered the bedroll and the rifle that were waiting
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for him at the fence rail — all that a herd guard winters with — and walked
out through the agency gate toward the herd ground, alone, in the first snow
of the year, to begin his service on the morning it had been pronounced,
while it still cost something. He did not look back at the mare. He did not
look back at the valley. Micah watched him until the snow and the distance
took him, and understood that there are men who pay their debts in silence
and men who pay them in speeches, and that he had now been privileged to
stand witness for one of each.
The cold came down that year the way it comes down in that valley — all at
once, out of a clear sky, with the river locking at its edges and the wind
finding every seam a lodge had.
Micah's proving was completed in those months, in the valley's hardest
school, and its curriculum was not the one he would have chosen and was
exactly the one he needed. He was no longer a guest, to be fed from
politeness and excused from the heavy end of the work. He drew a working
man's portion of everything. He hunted in the snow with the valley's men,
learning the winter sign the way he had once learned a patrol's — the old
snow lying about yesterday, the new snow telling the truth about the last hour
— and he came home more than once with meat on a travois he had mended
himself, the poles re-lashed with rawhide he had cut and soaked and
stretched with his own hands, clumsy the first time and less clumsy the
fourth. He re-dressed a lodge roof against the wind, badly and then
adequately. He resoled his own boots by firelight with an awl and a strip of
rawhide, sitting cross-legged among the women with their sewing, and took
their corrections on his stitching with the same attention he had once given a
drill sergeant, and got, in return, the highest praise the lodge economy
offered: his work was used, and not remarked on.
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His tongue came the same way his stitching did — slowly, and then all at
once. By midwinter he bargained in the valley's language and joked in it and
took correction in it, and one morning at the breakfast fire he told Waneka a
dream he had had in the night and realized, halfway through the telling, that
he had dreamed it in her tongue and not his own. She laughed and corrected
his grammar in the dream, which seemed to him the most married thing that
had ever happened to anybody.
Then the sickness came through the lodges, as sickness comes where people
winter close — a fever that took hold in the deep cold and moved from fire to
fire with the visiting. Waneka went out into it the way she had been raised to
go, with her medicine bundles and her patience, lodge to lodge through the
worst weeks of the year, and Micah went with her first as her basin-holder —
the man who carries the water, holds the bowl, keeps the fire — and then, by
degrees that nobody announced and everybody understood, as her assistant in
fact. He learned which bundle. He learned which root, and how long it
steeped, and the order of her preparations, and how to read the breathing of a
sick child in the dark. He sat the night watches so she could sleep an hour
with her head against the lodge wall. In the worst week the fever took an old
man whose name Micah had only just learned to say properly, and the valley
buried him in the frozen ground with the whole winter looking on, because
winter keeps its due even in a year of mercies. And in the last week of the
sickness, in the herder family's lodge, a small girl's fever broke at dawn with
Micah holding the basin and Waneka's hand on the child's forehead, and the
sound the mother made was not a word in either language and needed no
interpreter anywhere on earth.
It was in that season, by Seeka's fire, that the last of it arrived.
The old woman spoke to Waneka in the tongue of the valley and did not
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lower her voice for the white son-in-law at the fire's edge, because by then
there was no need and had perhaps never been any. She said that the dream
she had dreamed in the autumn — the dream of the stranger standing in the
circle with his hands empty and his blood unspoken — had finished arriving.