name. And by the hole in the ice, the snow was trampled by boots — boots,
trapper, with nails in the heels, such as your people wear and mine do not —
and the marks of chain dragged, and a sled, going down toward Cedar Creek,
which was covered after with fresh snow that the wind was blamed for."
30
He fell silent. The lamp smoked a little and Elias trimmed it and said
nothing, because there were silences a man does not fill, and this was one,
and he knew the shape of it too well to make the mistake.
"The agent wrote accident," Sekan said at last. "The officer wrote accident. A
paper was signed. My father stood in the office at San Carlos with his hat in
his hands — my father, Tolin, who has never held his hat to any man — and
begged them to write what the hands said. They were sorry. They were kind.
They wrote accident." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at Elias
full. "That is why I was on the creek counting traps, trapper. Not for the
agent's desk. For the day a better desk is built. And if no better desk is ever
built—" He stopped, and what he did not say filled the cabin more
completely than the wind had. "Kes was seventeen. He could not yet grow a
beard worth the name. He laughed at my teaching too. Everyone laughs at
my teaching. It is a great sorrow of my life."
"I don't think he was laughing at the teaching," Elias said.
"No," Sekan said. "He was laughing at me. It is different. It is worse. I would
give—" He stopped again, and this time he did not go on, and after a while
his breathing changed, and he slept, with his face turned to the wall, and
Elias sat in the chair with his boots on and did not sleep at all.
Here it was, then. The whole shape of it, laid out on the bunk in the lamplight
like the pieces of a trap: a boy dead under the ice with unmarked hands, a
line of stolen steel running through another people's hunting ground, a leader
who smiled on one side of his mouth — and a wounded man in Elias's cabin
who knew where all of it was, and could not walk, and would not be able to
walk for weeks, and whose people did not know if he was alive.
And here was Elias's side of the ledger, which he added up honestly, in the
31
dark, the way he had added up the wood and the water. To help Sekan was to
be seen. It was to ride down out of three years of careful nothing and present
himself — to the agent, who would want statements; to the Army, who
would want the man who knew the creeks and spoke the tongue, and who
had once been very good at the work, and whose name was on old paper in
old files; to the poachers themselves, five men with rifles who cut chains and
left boys under ice, if that was what they had done. It was to become a name
spoken in rooms again. Elias Ward, who guided Doren's column to Salt
Creek in the January of '68, believing the lie he had been handed because
believing it was easier than asking — Elias Ward, who had taken his wages
in coin, coin that still sat in its tin under the hearthstone of his cabin, unspent,
every piece of it, because spending it would have been a kind of agreement,
and carrying it was a kind of refusal, and he had never yet decided which of
the two men he was.
Three years he had spent building a life with nobody in it, a life the size of
this cabin, where the worst thing he could be asked was whether he wanted
coffee. He had sworn himself off the world of men and reports and columns
moving through the dark toward sleeping camps. Sworn it on nothing, to no
one, which made it the easiest oath in the world to keep and the hardest to
break, because the only witness was the man who had sworn it.
He said nothing. Not that night. Not — and here is the honest part, the part
he would have cut out of the account if the account were for anyone but
himself — not because he had decided to refuse. Because the other thing had
already begun in him, quiet as the poison-thread in reverse, a thread of his
own climbing: the questions. The guide's questions. They rose in him while
he dressed the wound, while he melted snow, while he stood with the mare,
in their own order, unhurried, professional as ants.
32
Where on Cedar Creek did the camp sit — above the forks or below, and on
which bank, and where did they picket the horses. How far did the line run,
and which creeks fed it, and how often did Vail's men walk it — every day,
every second day, in pairs or alone. Did they keep a watch at night or did
they drink. Where did the wagons come in, and how often, and by which trail
did the hides go out. He did not ask them all. He did not even ask them
quickly. But by the last day of the storm he had asked enough of them,
spaced out among talk of weather and meat and the mending of harness, that