and he raised his voice to the pitch of a man addressing not a room but a
people.
"Hear me, because I will say it once and then I am tired. The trap that took
me was not this man's trap. It was a steel trap, a poacher's trap, chained, set
hidden in our hunting ground where no honest trap is set hidden. This white
man found me because he heard me. He opened the steel with his own hands
and his own back, and the iron cut him too — look at his hands if you want
the signature of it. He put me on his horse. He fed me from his own stores.
41
He sat up with my fever two nights running and put his own blanket under
my leg and slept on the floor of his own house like a dog by the fire. I am
alive because this man, who owed me nothing, decided I was not a thing to
leave in the snow. Whatever else is said about him, let it be said after that,
and let it be said by men who were there. I was there."
He lay back. The silence that came after it had weight. The boy in the yard
shifted the rifle on his shoulder, and looked at the ground, and looked at the
mountains, anywhere but at the cabin. Nitis stood in the doorway a long time
with his scarred mouth working at nothing, and then he grounded his rifle
against the door frame, butt down, barrel to the sky, and the gesture moved
through the yard like a change of wind.
"He speaks for you, trapper," Nitis said quietly. "That is not a small thing.
Sekan does not spend words. He is famous for it." He came into the cabin
then, the first of them to cross the threshold since Kiona, and he crouched by
the fire and held his hands to it, and the crouch and the cold hands were
worth more than a speech: it said the standoff was over, and ordinary life,
with its cold hands and its need of fires, was permitted to resume. "Now I
will tell you why we are not simply taking him home."
He told it plainly, the way a man delivers a message he did not write and is
not permitted to soften. Tolin had sent them. Tolin had sent them before the
smoke even — the smoke had only been the band's own signal answering
itself ridge to ridge, the search already two days out when the storm locked
every trail. The headman's word had three parts, and Nitis gave them in their
order, and Elias understood that the order was the message. First: the thanks
of the band to the stranger who had kept its son alive. The thanks was real,
and Nitis did not hurry past it. Second: Sekan was to be brought home, when
his wife said he could be moved, and not one hour before. Third — and here
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Nitis looked up from the fire, and his face settled into the expression a man
wears when he becomes a doorway for another man's authority — Elias
Ward was required at the camp on the East Fork. He was to come and stand
before the council and answer for himself in the matter of the steel traps, and
in the matter of Sekan's leg, and in the matter of what a white man was doing
alone in the high country where the traps were thick as teeth.
"It is a summons," Elias said.
"It is a summons," Nitis agreed. "My uncle does not waste the shape of a
thing. But hear the rest of it before you decide what shape you are standing
in. There are men in the camp — more than a few — who say the trap was
yours. The creek where he was taken is white men's country, they say. The
cabin is your cabin. Who else walks that ground? Who else profits? A man
hunting alone all winter, and then a hunter of the people is found in steel a
mile from his door — they say it is a short story, and it ends with you." He
turned his hands over at the fire, warming the backs of them. "Sekan's word
will travel to the camp ahead of you, and it is strong. But a word carried is
not a man standing. Tolin says: let the stranger come and be looked at. Let
the council ask, and let his answers be heard by everyone, so that no man can
later say the thing was settled in a corner."
"And if I don't come?"
"Then you don't come." Nitis shrugged, but it was a careful shrug, an honest
one. "No one will drag you. You are not a prisoner, and this is not the
agency, and we are not soldiers. But a man who will not stand and be looked
at has answered the question, trapper. You understand me. The question
answers itself. And after that — the creek, your trapline, your winters up
here. It would not be safe for you. Not because Tolin would order it. Because
he would no longer be able to prevent it, and everyone would know why."
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Elias said nothing for a while. The fire settled. In the corner, Kiona was
coaxing broth into Sekan a spoonful at a time, ignoring the men with the
whole of her attention, and her ignoring had a quality of deliberateness in it,
as if she were keeping her hands visibly off a scale. He thought of Salt