was the loudest. Kweo had spoken first and longest: the dream was a
woman's weather, changeable, private, no basis for law; the stranger was a
soldier wearing a deserter's story the way a wolf wears a dog's collar to get
among the sheep; the band was being asked to harbor a man the army
wanted, in the very autumn the agency was muttering about treaties, and to
call it a marriage. His uncles had taken it up. One of them had asked what a
man is worth who has run from his own people — if he ran from the soldiers
who fed him, what would he do the first winter the valley's meat ran short?
"And the other side?" Micah asked.
"The other side is my grandmother." Pahket said it with the simple pride of a
boy naming a river. "Seeka told the council the dream again. All of it. She
says she told it first a year ago, in this same place, before any stranger, before
your horse, before anything — the river-scar, the empty hands, the
cottonwoods turning. A dream told ahead cannot be a trick arranged after.
That is her word and it is heavy. Even Kweo's uncles do not call Seeka a liar.
They say a dream can be true and still be a warning. She says a warning is
what I am for." He grinned in the dark. "She meant me. For watching you."
"And the old men?"
"The old men are the third side and they are winning." Pahket hunched
forward, delighted by the machinery of it. "They say: the spirits may have
sent you. The spirits send weather too, and a man still builds his lodge
25
strong. They say a dream is not a pardon. They say Waneka's dream has done
its work — it brought you to the fire and made us listen. Now the winter
must do its work. If the valley keeps you till spring and you are still here, and
still yourself — that is a thing no dream can do for you." He stood, gathering
the empty bowl, and paused at the flap with the thought that clearly mattered
most to him. "They are making a proving season out of you. Like a horse. I
think it is fair. I would not give my sister to a man on one evening either, and
I am only her brother." The flap fell, and lifted again almost at once —
Pahket back, with a coal for the lodge fire in a bark cup, unable to stay away
from the gravity of his errand. "Kweo led the winter hunt last year," he
offered, unasked, tipping the coal into the kindling with a boy's ceremony.
"When the snow shut the passes and the meat ran short, his party brought in
eleven deer in four days, and two old people who would have died in the
spring are alive because of it. I tell you so you know what he is. He is not a
small man my sister refused. He is the man who feeds us in the hard month,
and half the valley thinks a war leader's claim should outweigh a dream,
because you can eat a deer and you cannot eat a dream." He blew on the coal
until it caught, and his face in the new light was suddenly grave in a way that
recalled his sister's. "My grandmother says a people who eat only what they
can hold will starve in a different way. She says it to Kweo's face. He brings
her the best cut anyway, every hunt, and she cooks it for him at her own fire.
That is also what he is." He stood, brushing bark from his knees. "If they
decide against you, it will not be because this valley is foolish. Sleep now.
The deciding is not your work tonight." The flap fell. The murmur went on.
Micah lay in the dark with his empty rifle by the door and found, to his own
astonishment, that the council's invisible weight on the other side of the
lodge wall did not frighten him. It steadied him. He had been judged in the
army by men who had not listened. Whatever this was, it was listening.
26
At dawn the valley was white at the edges with the first true frost, and the
council fire had been built up again, and Micah was brought out and stood
where he had sat the night before, and Chief Tavio, who had not slept either
by the look of his eyes, announced the terms in the open, in the hearing of the
whole gathered band, with the interpreter rendering each sentence after him
like the blows of a small, careful hammer.
There would be no marriage. Not yet. The choice Waneka had made at the
ceremony stood — the council did not unmake it — but it would be kept in
trust by the winter, the way seed is kept. Micah Thorne would live in the
valley through the winter under the band's law, as a guest who is also a
question. He would learn the language. He would work at what work was
given him and hunt with the band's hunters when they judged him ready and
not before. He would answer for himself, in the open, as he had begun to do.
And before any marriage could be spoken of again, there was the matter of
the soldiers. The army would come into this country; the council did not deal
in pretending otherwise. When it came — for him, or near him, or with his
name on its paper — Micah would settle his debt with it openly. He would
not run. He had run once, and the running had been right, the Chief said, and
the council honored it; but a man may only spend that coin once, and Micah
had spent it. If he ran now — if word came that he had slipped the valley in
the night, or hidden, or let other men answer questions meant for him — the
choice was void, the dream discharged, and he was banished from the valley
and from Waneka's country forever, and no grievance would be heard from
him in any council thereafter. If he stood — if he faced the soldiers' law in