whole account — more than the riding in, more than the silence. A man can
be forgiven for not knowing. Burning what he knows is a choice, and it was
his, and he had made it, and the desertion a month later was not a redemption
of it, only a refusal to add to it.
The column got a commendation. Hasek got his money, by the head, on the
captain's count, which was a generous count. And Micah got, the following
month, orders to ride point again — to scout ahead of a second column being
fitted out at the fort, to find them another camp, the phrase the lieutenant had
used, another one like the Puerco. He told the fire that he had sat with the
orders one night in the barracks with his kit already packed, and that there
was no vision and no voice and no great turning of his soul to account for
what he did, and he would not insult the council by inventing one. "I was
ordered to find them another camp like that one," he said. "I went the other
way. I left my carbine on my bunk with the bolt out of it and a note that said
where it was, because a stolen carbine makes a thief of a man and I was
trying to be only the other thing. That's the whole of my honor, Chief. It's not
22
much. But it's mine."
The fire settled. Somewhere beyond the circle a horse stamped and blew.
Micah became aware that his hands, open on his knees in the posture that had
been remarked on since he walked into the valley — empty hands, the dream
had called them, and he had not known until this autumn how accurate a
description that was of everything he had left — had begun to ache from
being held so still, and he let them close slowly, and open again. Waneka sat
where her father had placed her, on the far side of the flame, and she did not
look at him. She looked into the fire the entire telling, her face composed, her
hands folded, and in the long silences of the council that followed Micah
understood that her not looking was not coldness. It was courtesy. A whole
people was extending him the privacy of their averted eyes while he stood, in
every way that mattered, naked before them, and she — whose choice had
put him there — was holding the courtesy hardest of all, because it cost her
the most to hold it.
Seeka spoke once, and briefly, in the old tongue, and the interpreter at the
council's edge rendered it for him with an odd gentleness: The old woman
says you have carried this a long way to lay it down in the right place. Then
the council rose, and the night of decision began, and Micah's part in it was
to wait.
They gave him the guest lodge, which stood a little apart, near the horse
herd's night ground — close enough to be watched without insult, far enough
to be a guest and not a prisoner. The lodge was clean. There was a fire laid
and not lit, a robe folded on the sleeping place, a gourd of water, a bowl of
food covered with a cloth, still warm. His rifle was returned to him before
dark by two young men who handled it with the grave care of people
returning a borrowed tool, and he took it and worked the lever out of habit,
23
and the magazine was empty and the chamber was empty, and the two
cartridges he had carried in his belt for eleven days were not in the lodge and
were not offered. He stood a moment with the unloaded rifle in his hands,
understanding precisely what had been handed back to him: the shape of
freedom, weighed and considered, without its substance. A man could not be
insulted by it. It was too exact for insult. It told him the band had discussed
him down to the level of his cartridges, and had decided he was worth
trusting with a weapon's outline and not yet with a weapon. He leaned the
rifle by the door where it could be seen from outside, so that whoever
watched the lodge would know he understood, and he ate the food, and he
lay down on the robe with his coat for a pillow, and through the lodge wall,
faint as weather, he heard the council fire's long murmur rise and fall in a
language he did not have.
He did not sleep much. He told himself it was the strangeness of a roof; it
was the murmur. Whole arguments lived in it — he could hear the shapes of
them, the long patient statements, the silences that in his experience of
councils and courts-martial meant a point had landed, the single voice that
rose twice in the night to something near heat and was twice answered by an
older, slower voice until it came down again. Near the middle of the night the
lodge flap lifted and Pahket came in with a bowl of broth and the air of a boy
who has been given a post of enormous consequence and intends to die at it.
Pahket was fifteen, all elbows and certainty, Waneka's younger brother, and
he had been appointed Micah's minder that afternoon with a formality that
suggested the council understood exactly what it was doing: a minder who
could not be suspected of intrigue, who would report everything, and who
would report it, as it turned out, in both directions.
"They are still talking," Pahket announced, in the careful English of a boy
24
who has been to the agency school for two winters and is proud of it. "My
grandfather says it will be dawn. He says white men's councils are quick
because white men only listen to themselves." He set the broth down and
then, because he was fifteen and the night was long and his charge was
awake and famously infamous throughout the valley by now, he stayed by
the door and delivered the factions as a scout delivers terrain. Kweo's party