led her off toward the horse string as if she were his own responsibility now.
A woman he did not know put a bowl into his hands. It was stew, and it was
hot, and he stood in the middle of the camp of the people holding it like a
man holding a bird he is afraid of crushing, and ate because not eating would
have been a statement, and he was done with statements.
He was given a place at the edge of things, near the council ground — a flat
space by the creek where the stones of a great fire ring lay cold, the wood
already stacked and ready, though no one had lit it. The council would sit
tomorrow, Nitis told him, or when Tolin decided; tonight there was a
wounded man home alive, and that had its own ceremonies, which were
older than councils. Elias sat on a log at the margin of the cold fire ring with
his bowl empty in his hands and watched the camp settle into its evening,
and understood that he was being allowed to watch it, and that the allowance
was itself a kind of judgment being prepared: look, then, since you have
come. Look at what a camp is, when it is not being destroyed.
His gaze kept snagging, all the same, on the smoke. It rose from twenty fires
straight and unhurried into the dusk, blue and peaceful, the smoke of cooking
and of warmth, and his hands were not steady on the bowl. He set it down
carefully in the snow beside the log. He did not notice the old woman until
she was standing in front of him, close, the way the very old stand close
because the world has narrowed for them and they have stopped apologizing
49
for it.
She was small and folded in on herself like a letter read many times, wrapped
in a trade blanket worn thin as paper at the folds, and her face was a country
of lines, and her eyes, in the failing light, were the youngest thing about her.
Anae. He would learn her name later, though by then it would hardly matter,
because by then everyone in the camp would know what she had known first.
She was the grandmother of the camp, the one the children were sent to and
the young wives consulted and the council itself listened to with the
particular silence reserved for those who remember what everyone else only
inherits. She stood and looked at Elias for a long time. She looked at him the
way Kiona had, but deeper — not at the surface of him, not at the trapper
standing in her camp with his empty bowl, but down through the years of
him, as if his face were a creek in winter and she were listening for the water
under the ice.
"Anae," someone said, gently, behind her. "Grandmother. Come away from
the cold."
She did not come away. She raised one hand — slowly, a hand like a root,
like a claw of polished wood — and she pointed at Elias, not in anger, and
the pointing was worse than anger. Her mouth opened. The sound that came
out of her was not a word. It was the beginning of the keen, the old women's
mourning cry, low at first and rising, the sound made over the dead when the
dead are finally brought home. It rose out of her in the dusk beside the unlit
council fire, and it went through the camp the way the dogs' barking had
gone through it, only slower, and heavier, and fires were left untended and
women came out of the lodges with their hands still and children stopped in
the middle of their running and stood like posts.
She had been at Salt Creek.
50
She had been twenty, no — she had been a woman grown, visiting her
sister's family in the winter camp at Salt Creek in the January of 1868, when
the soldiers came in the dawn behind the column's guide. She had run. She
had lived — lived by the creek and the rocks and the losing of everything she
had run from — and she had carried that morning inside her for three years
the way Elias had carried it, in pieces, in silence, and now the pieces had
walked into her camp on his face. She keened for her sister. She keened for
the more than forty. She keened because the white guide who had ridden at
the column's head — young, beardless under the winter beard he wore now,
unmistakable the way a face is unmistakable to the one person on earth who
has dreamed it in fire — had come at last to sit in her people's camp, eating
their stew, beside their cold council fire, waiting to be asked about a trap.
Elias did not move. He could not have said afterward whether it was courage
or its opposite that kept him on the log with his hands open on his knees, the
way he had stood in his own doorway, empty-handed, in full view. The
keening rose and gathered, and one by one, lodge by lodge, fire by fire, the
whole camp of the people turned — men, women, the old men with the
harness, the boy holding Ash's rope, Kiona in the doorway of Sekan's lodge
with her hand flat against the frame — and looked at Elias Ward, sitting in
the dusk by the fire that had not yet been lit, while the oldest memory in the