say to you, stand in the door and let them see your hands."
Elias helped him sit straighter, packed the spare blanket behind his back, and
set the water gourd where he could reach it, and then he went out onto the
little porch and stood in the doorway of his own cabin with his hands empty
at his sides, and waited. Ash, in the lean-to, put her head over the rail and
watched the slope with her ears up. The riders came down out of the timber
and crossed the clearing without hurrying, and Elias counted the rifles again
because counting was a habit that did not ask his permission. Four rifles. The
woman had none that he could see. She did not need one. The men were
arranged around her like the points of a compass.
At forty paces the riders stopped. The man in front was broad through the
shoulders, older than Sekan by a few years, with a scar that pulled at the
corner of his mouth and made his face look as if it were always halfway to an
expression it had not chosen. Nitis. He had to be Nitis, the cousin, the one
Sekan had named when fever made him generous with names. Nitis sat his
horse and looked at Elias, and looked at the cabin, and looked at the
woodpile and the stump and the axe set down head-first in the dirt, and his
eyes came back to Elias the way a scale comes back to level.
"Where is Sekan?" he called, in English, loud enough for the cabin to hear.
The English was good. It was the English of a man who had traded and
talked and been lied to in it for years.
"Inside," Elias said. "Alive."
It was the wrong word and the right word at once. Something moved through
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the four of them, a loosening and a tightening together. Nitis's rifle came up
off the saddle by the width of a hand, not aimed, not yet, a question being
asked in the only grammar that never lies about itself. Elias felt his own body
want to answer it — the old guide's body, which had spent years knowing
where the weapons were in every room and clearing — and he made himself
be still. He lifted his hands a little from his sides, empty, open, and he spoke
in Apache, carefully, the words placed like stones in a creek crossing, each
one tested before his weight went on it.
"I am Elias Ward. The man inside is Sekan, son of Tolin. He lives. His leg is
hurt bad. He is waiting for his wife."
His Apache was workable the way a mended bucket is workable. It held
water if you did not ask too much of it at once. He saw the woman's head
come up at the sound of it, and he saw Nitis glance sideways at her, and in
that glance Elias understood the arrangement among them better than any
words could have told it to him: whatever she decided here would be done.
Then Sekan's voice came from inside the cabin, hoarse and not loud, and it
did what no rifle could have done.
"Kiona. I am here. Put the guns down, Nitis. The white man is unarmed and I
am the one who is angry about it, not you."
For a moment nothing moved except the horses' breath smoking in the cold.
Then Kiona slid down from her horse before any of the men had decided to
let her, and she walked past Elias in the doorway without looking at him,
close enough that her blanket brushed his arm, and she went to her husband.
Elias heard her say his name once, in a voice that was not soft, exactly, but
stripped of everything that was not necessary — and then Sekan answered
her, low, and Elias stepped down off the porch and away from the door,
37
because there are things a man does not need to stand witness to, and a wife's
first sight of a wound is one of them.
He stood by the woodpile with his hands still where they could be seen and
let the men look at him. The other two riders were younger, one barely more
than a boy with a man's rifle carried like a man's burden, and they watched
him the way you watch weather on a ridge you have to cross. Nitis
dismounted last, and slowly, and he did not ground his rifle. He walked a
half-circle around Elias, not close, taking in the cabin, the lean-to, Ash
watching them all with her gray head high, the trapline tools hung by the
door, the snow trampled and bloodless where Elias had kept it clean. He
stopped where he could see both Elias and the doorway.
"You keep a clean camp, trapper," he said.
"I try to."
"You have traps on this creek."
"I have traps," Elias said. "Deadfalls and snares, up the south fork, marked. I
own no steel. I have never owned steel. Steel is a rich man's tool and a lazy
man's, and I am neither." He said it in English because the words mattered
and he wanted them exact. "What took Sekan's leg was a poacher's bear trap
on a chained stake, set in a game trail on your side of the ridge. I cut the
chain. I carried him here on my own back when the litter wouldn't hold on
the slope. He can tell you."