"He will tell us," Nitis said. "That is what we came for. Among other things."
Kiona came to the doorway then. She stood where Elias had stood, and he
saw her properly for the first time: twenty-four, maybe, with a face that
would have been called handsome except that it had no interest in being
called anything, her hair bound back, her eyes red-rimmed from wind and
38
riding and not from weeping — or if from weeping, then weeping that had
been finished with and put away like a tool. She looked at Elias the way she
had looked, ten minutes before, at her husband's leg. It was the same look. It
was an assessment. He had the strange feeling of being unwrapped and
examined and found, provisionally, not gangrenous.
"You splinted it," she said.
"Yes."
"You gave him willow bark. And yarrow on the wound, the first day, before
the fever."
"Yes."
"You did not move him after the second day, even when the snow came."
"No," Elias said. "Moving him seemed worse."
"It would have been worse." She said it without warmth, as a correction to a
sum that happened to come out right. "You set the bone straight before you
splinted. That was luck, or you have done it before."
"I have done it before. On a horse, once. On a man, once, a long time ago."
"Then the man before had luck too." She looked past him at Nitis, and
something passed between them that Elias could not read, and then her eyes
came back to Elias and stayed there, exact as a plumb line. "My husband
says I am to thank you. I will thank you when I have seen the leg in daylight
and counted what is left of it. A wife does not pay a debt before she knows
its size. Go inside now. I want the light, and I want you where I can see you
while I work."
Inside, she worked the way Elias worked his trapline, without waste and
without hurry, and he understood within minutes that whatever she had been
39
doing while her husband lay missing in the snow, it had not been wringing
her hands. She had brought her own roll of remedies tied in a cloth —
pouches of dried leaf and root, a small pot of rendered fat darkened with
something resinous, strips of hide softer than any cloth Elias owned — and
she laid them out on his table in an order that was clearly an old order, a
geography she could have found blind. First she looked. She unwrapped his
bandaging with her fingers reading ahead of her eyes, and she made no sound
at what she found, and Elias, who had changed those bandages twice a day
for four days and had never once been able to look at the leg without his
stomach turning over, watched her not flinch and revised several opinions he
had not known he held.
"The teeth went deep," she said. "Here, and here. The muscle is torn, not cut.
That is better. A cut closes. A tear must be persuaded." She pressed, gently
and then less gently, along the shin, and Sekan's breath went through his
teeth but he did not cry out, because his cousins were in the room and in the
doorway and outside it, and there are things a man owes his pain in company.
"The bone?"
"Cracked, I think," Elias said. "Not through. When I set it, it ground, but it
held its line."
"You think." She bent close and smelled the wound, unembarrassed, the way
Elias had seen surgeons do it in the war years and the way his mother had
smelled milk. "No rot. You kept it clean. A white man's cabin, and you kept
it clean." She said it as if the fact mildly offended her arithmetic. "The splint
is good work. The bindings were too tight on the third day — here, the skin
remembers it — but you loosened them. Why did you loosen them?"
"His toes went cold."
40
"His toes went cold, so you thought, and you loosened. Good. Many men
loosen nothing. They tie a thing and admire the knot." She began to work
then in earnest, her own medicine going onto the leg alongside the evidence
of his — a poultice of chewed and pounded root that she prepared in her own
palm, the dark salve warmed between her hands, fresh dressings of hide and
cloth laid with a neatness that made his bandaging look like the work of a
child. She did not discard what he had done. She built on it, the way you
build on a foundation you did not pour but have decided to trust. "It will
mend," she said at last, and she said it to Sekan, not to Elias, a wife's bulletin.
"Slowly. The muscle will be short where it knits. You may limp. You will
hunt again, but the mountains will charge you more for it than they did. That
is the truth of it. I am not going to wrap it in better words."
"I have heard worse news in this room," Sekan said, "this week," and he
looked at Elias, and something that was almost humor moved in his face, and
died there, because what he had to do next was not humorous and they both
knew it.
He raised himself on his elbows again, and this time nobody tried to stop
him, and he turned his head toward the doorway where Nitis stood and
toward the yard beyond, where the two young men waited with the horses,