men who are emptying a house. Everything that walks, they take. Everything
that swims. A house they mean never to live in."
The agent at San Carlos had been told. The agent had written it down —
Elias could picture the writing of it down, the pen, the blotter, the drawer —
and the agent had said the thing agents say: that without proof of the men
themselves, and the number of the traps, and where the line ran exactly, his
hands were tied, he could do nothing, the Army could do nothing. Words like
a fence with no wire in it. So the council of the band had done what the band
had always done. They had sent eyes.
"My father Tolin's eyes," Sekan said. "Mine. I was to walk their line from the
top and count it. Every trap. Every camp. Where they water, where they
cache the hides. And come back, and make the number so plain that even a
man behind a desk must see it." A muscle moved in his jaw. "Three days I
watched them, before the iron caught me. I know their camp on Cedar Creek.
I know their faces. There is a big man who leads them—" he used a word
that meant something like boss — "Vail. I heard the name at their fire. Cyrus
Vail. He has a scar that pulls his mouth, so that he smiles on one side only.
His men laugh when he talks, even when nothing is funny. I have counted
that too."
"How many?" Elias asked, and heard his own voice change as he asked it,
and could not call it back.
"Five at the camp. One is a boy — not much older than—" He stopped.
28
Started again, flatter. "One is a boy of about nineteen years. He carries water.
The others do not let him set the big traps. I saw him cry once, at the gut pile,
when he thought the trees hid him. Then he wiped his face and went on
carrying. I counted him with the men, but—" Sekan's gaze went to the
window, to the flat white light. "I do not know what I counted."
Elias said nothing. He was thinking of the order of the questions that were
rising in him now, unbidden, the way they had risen on a hundred trails in
another life — how far the camp, up the creek or down, on which bank,
where they keep the horses, whether they post a watch at night, how often
they run the line — and he was ashamed of the readiness of them, and he
asked none of them aloud. Not yet. He got up and went out to the lean-to and
stood with Ash in the cold and the drift and let the wind scour his face, and
he said to the mare, very quietly, "Don't," and the mare blew out her breath
and did not comment, and he went back in and checked the wound, and the
thread of poison was receding, and that was the day's whole news, and he
wrote it in no book anywhere.
He told about Kes the last night of the storm, when the wind had begun to
spend itself and the cabin had gone quiet enough that a man could hear his
own fire again.
"My brother," Sekan said, into the lamplight, without preamble, the way a
man steps into cold water all at once. "Kes. He was seventeen in the
February that is gone. You heard me call him. In the fever."
"I heard a name," Elias said. "I didn't know whose."
"Now you know." Sekan's hands lay still on the blanket, palms down, a man
holding something flat so it would not spill. "He was the best of us with
horses. Better than me. Better than our cousin Nitis, who will tell you
29
otherwise because Kes is dead and cannot argue, and Nitis argues with the
dead the most, because he wins." A breath that was almost a laugh and was
not. "In February he went out two days, alone, to look at our own traps on the
East Fork — the ice traps, for muskrat, that our people set lawful. He did not
come back. On the third day they found him."
"Found him where," Elias said, gently.
"Under the ice. In the creek, near the place where the white men's line
crossed ours." Sekan's voice did not rise. It went lower, and slower, as if the
words were stones and the creek was deep. "The soldiers from the post came,
and the agent's man, because my father made a noise that even a desk could
hear. They looked at the hole in the ice and they looked at Kes, and they
wrote: accident. A boy who went through the ice and could not get out. It is a
thing that happens. It has happened. The word fit him like a coat that is
almost his size."
"Almost."
"His hands," Sekan said. "I held them at the last, when they laid him out. A
boy who goes through ice fights the edge of it. He claws. The ice cuts his
fingers to ribbons and breaks his nails off in his hands' last work — everyone
knows this, who has seen it. Kes's hands were smooth as a girl's. His nails
were whole. There was a mark here—" he touched the back of his own head,
low, where the skull meets the neck "—under the hair, that the cold had kept.
And his knife was gone. His knife, that he would no more leave than his