a man listening — a man lying still with nothing to do but listen, a hunter, a
counter of other men's traps — could have lined them up in a row and seen
the shape they made.
Sekan answered them all. Plainly, fully, with distances in the Apache way —
by the sun's travel and the look of the land — and never once remarked on
what the questions were. Until the final evening, when the wind had dropped
to a mutter and the re-splinted leg lay easy and the wound, dressed at dusk,
showed clean flesh at the edges of the punctures and the red thread gone thin
as a hair and fading. Then Sekan said, in the tone of a man remarking on a
change in the weather:
"You ask the questions of a man reading a trail ahead of his feet."
"I ask questions," Elias said.
"Yes," Sekan said. "That is what I said." And he closed his eyes, and smiled
— the whole way, this time, both sides of his mouth at once — and slept.
The storm broke in the night without ceremony, the way a fever does. Elias
woke in the chair to a silence so complete it had a sound of its own, a ringing
emptiness where the wind had been for four days, and the light at the
window was no longer gray. It was blue, the deep blue of a winter morning
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before the sun clears the ridge, and through the glass he could see the pines
standing still and burdened and beautiful, each one holding its white load like
an offering.
He got up stiff as an old hinge. He checked the fire, checked the man —
asleep, breathing easy, color in his face that wasn't fever's — and pulled on
his coat and took the axe and went out to bring in wood before anything else,
because wood was first on the list and the list had kept them alive.
The cold hit him clean and honest. The snow squeaked under his boots.
Smoke from his own chimney went up in a straight gray ribbon into a sky
washed empty, and the whole high country lay around him renewed and
indifferent and glittering, and he stood a moment in the yard with the axe on
his shoulder, breathing, feeling the sun not yet up but promised, feeling the
storm's four days on him like a weight set down.
Then he saw the smoke.
On the ridge above the cabin, to the east, where the timber broke against the
sky — a place of bare rock and wind, a place no fire should be, no camp, no
traveler, nothing — a thin column of smoke rose, too straight and too
deliberate for any accident of nature, and as he watched, it thickened, and
thinned, and thickened again, in a rhythm no hearth-fire ever kept.
He knew that rhythm. He had known it all his life on the frontier and had
prayed, once or twice in the old years, never to see it meant for him. It was a
signal. Apache-made, Apache-timed, patient as a pulse.
The search party had found something on the ridge — his tracks, the trap
site, the trail of dragged blood in snow now four days old — or they had
found nothing and were telling the country they were coming. Either way
they were coming: Tolin's people, riding out of the East Fork with a missing
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hunter to account for and a white man's cabin at the end of the only story the
snow had left them.
Elias stood in the yard with the axe on his shoulder and watched the smoke
rise, and thin, and rise again.
They came an hour after the smoke thinned, four riders picking their way
down the north slope through the pines, and Elias saw them first from the
woodpile, where he had gone out with the axe because his hands needed
work that his mind did not. He stood with the axe lowered and watched them
come. They rode the way men ride who are not sure what they will find at
the end of the trail, spread a little, rifles across their saddles, and the woman
rode in the middle of them like something being guarded, or like something
doing the guarding. He could not have said which. He set the axe against the
stump, head down, where it could be seen to be set down, and he went into
the cabin and told Sekan.
"Four," he said. "One is a woman."
Sekan's face changed the way a man's face changes when a debt is called in.
He pushed himself up on his elbows against the wall, and the blanket slid
from his leg, and he looked at the door as if he could already see through it.
"Kiona," he said. "She would not stay behind. Nitis will be with her." He
caught Elias's wrist with a grip that had more strength in it than it had had
two days before. "When they come in, trapper, they will come in hard. Do
not reach for anything. Do not even reach slow. Let me speak first, if they
give me the breath to speak."
"They'll give it," Elias said. "You're the one they rode out for."
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"They rode out for a body, maybe. Men who ride out for a body have their
minds made up in a shape that does not fit good news." Sekan let go of his
wrist. "Stand in the door so they see your hands. That is all. Whatever they