She did not speak to Elias. She did not need to. Her judgment of him had the
finished quality of a made thing, and he found, to his discomfort, that he
would rather have had her hatred, which is a hot and temporary weather, than
this cold exactitude, which was climate.
They passed the place where the creeks joined, and Nitis pointed once,
without stopping, at a stand of cottonwoods up a side draw, and said,
"There," and Elias knew without asking that it was the poachers' line, or near
it — Vail's country, Cedar Creek, the chained steel, the place where a
seventeen-year-old boy named Kes had gone under the ice in February and
been found in the spring, and been called an accident by men who had not
46
been there. He looked at the cottonwoods a long time as they went by. The
draw was quiet and white and showed nothing. Country keeps its counsel
better than any council, he thought. Country had kept his for three years.
The camp announced itself the way camps do, by smell before sight —
woodsmoke and roasting meat and horse dung and the green smell of hides
being worked — and then the sound of it, dogs raising their professional
clamor at the strangers on the trail, and then the East Fork bottom opened
below them in the late light and Elias stopped walking without knowing he
had stopped, so that Ash came up against the end of the lead rope and blew at
the back of his neck, patient, waiting for him to remember his feet.
Below him, in the shelter of the cottonwoods along the creek, the band of
Tolin was camped for the winter, some twenty lodges and brush shelters
arranged with the loose order of people who have done this in this place for
longer than the word Arizona had existed. Fires burned in front of half of
them, small and well-kept. Women moved between the lodges with pots and
bundles and children, in the economy of motion of people finishing a day. A
string of horses stood hipshot in the lee of the bluff. Two old men sat in the
last of the sun mending a harness between them, passing the leather back and
forth without talking. Children — a dozen at least, more pouring out as the
dogs' news spread — came running up the trail toward the litter, and stopped
at a distance to stare, not at Sekan, whom they knew, but at Elias, whom they
did not, with the frank, unblinking, entirely unhostile stare of children
examining a new kind of animal. A girl of perhaps six, with her hair in two
braids and a man's coat cut down for her reaching nearly to her ankles,
pointed at him and announced something to her companions in a voice of
pure reportage, and they all nodded as if a fact had been added to the world.
It was ordinary. That was the thing he had not armed himself against. Three
47
years of memory had kept the idea of an Apache camp in a single shape for
him: a shape of smoke going up wrong, of figures running, of a sound like
the tearing of the world's cloth. He had braced himself, all the way down the
trail, for a place that would accuse him — and the camp did accuse him, but
not with anything it did. It accused him with dinner. With dogs underfoot and
a baby crying itself out on somebody's shoulder and an old man laughing at
something across a fire and a woman calling a boy in from the horses in the
tone of women calling boys in from horses since before there were horses.
He had told himself for three winters that the people at Salt Creek had been
the enemy, because the believing of it had been issued to him like a coat and
he had worn it because the alternative was to stand in that January dawn
knowing what he was knowing now: that they had been this. Just this. People
finishing a day, in a camp that smelled of supper.
"Steady, trapper." Nitis had come back down the trail and sat his horse
beside him, and his voice was not unkind. "You look like a man who has
seen a camp before."
"I have," Elias said.
"Like this one?"
"No," Elias said. "Not like this one. That one I only saw the once. And
mostly—" He stopped. The truth was climbing in him like water in a well,
and he was not going to spill it here, on a trail, to a man who had ridden out
under a headman's orders. "Mostly I saw the smoke," he said. "I never saw
the rest of it. That's the fact. I never saw the rest of it until today."
Nitis looked at him a moment longer than the words required, and then he
nodded once, slowly, as if a guess of his had been confirmed in a direction he
had not expected, and he turned his horse and led them down into the camp.
48
They took Sekan to his own lodge, and there was a sound when the litter
came into the firelight — mothers and sisters and old men crowding, hands
reaching to the poles to take the weight from the horses, a noise like a held
breath let go all at once — and Elias found himself, without anyone unkindly
arranging it, standing outside the circle of it with the lead rope still in his
hand and no function left. Ash was taken from him gently by the boy, who