Creek. He thought of it the way he had taught himself to think of it over three
winters, which was from a distance and in pieces, never whole — a column
of dust, a captain's voice, the particular quality of his own silence in the
saddle — and he felt the pieces begin, treacherously, to assemble themselves
into the whole thing at the mere prospect of the East Fork. Sixty people. The
band of Tolin was sixty people. He had guided soldiers to a camp of sixty
people once before, on a January morning, in the year he did not name aloud
even to himself.
"You are quiet," Nitis said.
"I am deciding."
"Decide slow, then. We leave when Kiona says. That may be tomorrow. That
may be the day after." Nitis rose, and at the door he paused. "I will tell you
one thing that is mine to tell and not my uncle's. I did not believe the trap
was yours. A man who sets steel in secret does not cut a stranger out of it and
fatten him in his own bed. But I believed it enough to ride here with my rifle
across my saddle, because a cousin is a cousin, and belief is a thing that has
to survive the road home. In the camp there are men whose belief has a
shorter road to travel. Come and shorten it for them, trapper. That is all my
uncle is asking, under the asking."
When he had gone out, Elias stood a long time looking at the fire he had built
in his own hearth, in the cabin he had raised with his own hands, board by
board, in the year after he swore he was done with people's business forever.
The cabin was the shape his life had taken when he had finished apologizing
44
to everyone except the dead: one room, one man, one horse, one creek,
winters that asked nothing of him but endurance. He had believed, in the way
a man believes in a wall, that if he kept to it, the past would eventually lose
his trail. He looked at Sekan sleeping at last under his wife's hands, and at
Kiona folding her cloths away with the air of a woman who has decided a
thing and is now simply waiting for the world to arrange itself around her
decision, and he knew that the past had not lost his trail at all. It had only
been waiting for him to stop moving.
"I'll come," he said, to no one in particular, and Kiona did not look up, but
her hands slowed for the space of one breath, and then went on with their
work. "When she says he's fit to move. I'll come."
Kiona said he could be moved on the second morning, and by then Elias had
built the litter. He built it the way he built everything, as if it would have to
answer for him: two straight pine poles, green enough to flex and not snap,
the cross-slats lashed with rawhide from his stores, the bed made of his own
canvas and both his blankets and the good bearskin off his floor, because a
man being carried six miles over frozen ground on a ruined leg would feel
every knot and every stinginess through the meat of it. The litter rode
between Ash and the steady bay gelding Nitis had brought riderless for the
purpose, slung at the poles' ends, and Elias walked at Ash's head with the
lead rope in his hand and his rifle — after a moment's consideration, in the
sight of all of them — left behind in the cabin, slung over the peg by the
door. He took the rifle down once, looked at it, and hung it up again. A man
did not ride into a council as an argument.
He locked nothing. There was nothing in the cabin he could not lose except
the habit of it, and he was losing that anyway. He pulled the door to against
the weather and followed the litter down his own trail, walking away from
45
three years of solitude at the pace of a wounded man's comfort, and it struck
him somewhere in the first mile that he had not expected it to feel like this —
not like exile, and not like danger, but like being read aloud. Every man in
the little procession knew something about him that he had not chosen to tell,
and the camp at the end of the trail knew more, and less, and wronger. He
walked at his mare's head and watched her ears work the wind and tried to
keep his mind on Sekan's breathing behind him, which was the only fact he
was sure of.
The trail dropped off the ridge and followed the East Fork down through
country that improved as it descended — the snow thinner, the grass showing
in the bottoms where the sun reached, the creek running black and loud under
its lids of ice. Nitis rode ahead and ranged wide without seeming to. The boy
rode behind the litter with his rifle across his back now, unslung and
ordinary, and once, when the poles shifted on a grade and Sekan grunted
through his teeth, the boy was off his horse and at the litter's side steadying it
before Elias had finished turning around. Kiona rode beside her husband the
whole way, one hand sometimes resting on the litter's frame, not for balance.