smooth as a stone. "Not new."
"No," Elias said. "Not new."
"On the creek, when you found me—" The dark eyes held his. "You broke
the trap that held me. You did not take it. A trap is money. Men have killed
for less money than that trap."
"I broke it because it was faster than springing it whole, and I left it because I
had a man to carry." Elias fed the stove. "And because it wasn't mine to take.
It was set on your people's land, if my map's any good. That made it stolen
twice over."
"Your map is good," Sekan said, after a moment. "That is a strange thing,
trapper. A man who knows whose land he stands on."
He let that sit. Outside, the wind worried the eaves. Then Sekan changed the
subject the way a man changes a trail — all at once, and for a reason — and
pointed with his chin at the splints on his leg.
"You called that—" he nodded at the willow wands "—by a word of my
25
language, when you were working. When you thought I slept." He said the
word as Elias had said it, and in his mouth it was unmistakably wrong, bent
like a green stick. "That word is for the wood you burn. For fire." His mouth
moved again, that almost-smile. "All morning you have been telling my leg it
is firewood."
Elias felt the heat come up in his face like a boy caught out. "And the right
word?"
Sekan said it, slow, twice — the word for a thing bound alongside to hold a
broken thing straight — and made him say it back, and corrected the back of
his tongue, and made him say it again, until Elias had it. "There. Now your
Apache is less of an insult." He lay back against the wall, tired by the lesson
as if he had walked it. "My wife says my teaching is cruel. She says a
drowning man does not need his stroke corrected."
"Your wife's a wise woman."
"She is." Something closed in his face then, gently, like a door set to against
the wind — the wife was on the other side of the storm, in a camp that did
not know where he was, and Elias watched him decide not to go through that
door yet. "She counts the days badly, on purpose. So that she is always
expecting me later than I come. She says worry is work and she will not do
the work for nothing." He was quiet a moment. "She will be doing the work
now."
The questions came back in the evening, after the wound was dressed — the
red thread, Elias noted with a care he kept off his face, had not climbed; if
anything its edge had blurred, like a line drawn in wet sand when the water is
going out instead of coming in — and this time they came closer to the bone.
"There is no woman here," Sekan said. "No children. A man's cabin tells it."
26
"It tells I'm alone. That's the whole of that page."
"Men are alone for reasons. A debt. A crime. A grief." The eyes never
hurried. "The Army pays guides well, in the winters. The post at Apache is
forty miles. A man who speaks our tongue and knows the high creeks—" he
gestured at the room, at Elias, at the whole arrangement of competence
"—such a man, the soldiers would hire every season. You trap alone in the
snow instead. In a cabin that is not even yours."
Elias was quiet long enough that the fire ticked twice in the stove.
"I guided soldiers once," he said. "I do not anymore."
He said it flat, the way a man lays a stone down. He did not dress it. He did
not explain it. And he saw — clearly, because he was watching for it the way
you watch a man's hand near a gun — he saw Sekan take the sentence and
weigh it and find it short weight, and put it away in the ledger anyway, with
the missing part marked. Not challenged. Not forgiven. Filed.
"A man who does not guide anymore," Sekan said at last, mildly, "and yet he
found a trap line in a storm, on land he knows is not his, and carried home
the man it caught." He closed his eyes. "Sleep on your one sentence, trapper.
I will sleep on mine. I have more of them than you."
It was the next day before he began to spend them.
He told it the way the fever had kept it — in pieces, out of order, the way a
man unloads a pack and sets things down as his hands find them. The line of
steel first: it had begun in the fall, traps found sprung and emptied along the
East Fork and Cedar Creek, then traps found gone — chains cut, the ground
dug — and then, worse, traps found baited and waiting in places no Apache
had set them, on Apache land, in the people's own hunting grounds, set by
men who were taking hide and meat and tallow out of the country in wagon
27
loads and leaving the gut piles for the ravens. Beaver first, then deer as the
beaver thinned. Iron worth more than a horse, some of those traps. Set in
runs the people had hunted since before there were names for the years.
"They do not hunt like men who are hungry," Sekan said. "They hunt like