gnawed through, the worst sight the country offered and one it offered
oftener every season. There was a crew working Cedar Creek, five men
under a hard case named Cyrus Vail, who set such iron on Apache ground as
if the treaty line were a rumor and sold their hides through the post with the
sutler asking nothing. Everyone at the post knew it. The agent, Mr.
Whitfield, knew it the way a man knows weather he has decided not to dress
for. In the spring, the clerk had told him, while weighing his pelts, that a
White Mountain boy had been found under the creek ice in February,
drowned or frozen, an accident, a pity, and Elias had said, "Well," and picked
up his sack, and had thought about it on the ride home and most nights since:
a boy, and ice, and a trap line that did not belong to the boy's people, all in
one creek. He had put the thought where he put the others. The place where
he kept them was getting crowded, but it had no door he was willing to open.
At the post, twice a season, he sold his hides to the sutler and bought flour,
4
coffee, salt, ammunition, lamp oil, and nothing else. The sutler's clerk was a
talkative boy who had learned, over three years, that Mr. Ward answered
questions about the weather and no others. Men at the post sometimes tried
anyway. A new teamster, a soldier on leave, a prospector full of his own
voice. Elias would listen with the courtesy of a man listening to rain on a
roof, and then he would say, "Well," and pick up his sack, and that was the
end of it. He had a reputation in the country, though he did not know all of it:
Ward, the trapper up in the high valley, keeps to himself, speaks the Apache
tongue better than a white man ought, pays his debts, and was something in
the Army once, nobody remembers what. Nobody remembered because he
had taken care that there was nothing to remember with.
But the country remembered, or he did, which came to the same thing. Salt
Creek came to him in pieces, the way it always came, never whole, never in
order, and never when he called for it. It came in the smell of woodsmoke on
a still morning, smoke lying low over his own valley the way it had lain over
the camp that January dawn in 1868. It came in the voice of Captain Doren,
which he could still hear with the clarity of a bell: You know this country,
Ward. You drew the map. It came in the shape of his own hand, three years
younger, holding a pencil over a sheet of foolscap in a lamplit tent, drawing
the creek's bend, the ford, the shelf of rock above the winter camp where the
families slept. He had drawn it carefully. He had always been careful with
maps. The scouts had said a hostile camp, a raiding camp, men who had
taken cattle and killed a herder over by the Verde. What slept at Salt Creek
were grandmothers and children and old men, forty and more of them, and
the column went in at first light the way columns do, and by the time the sun
was up the thing was finished and could not be unfinished.
He had not fired a shot. He told himself that for a while, in the first year, the
5
way a man tells himself a wound is not deep. Then he stopped telling himself
anything, because a guide does not need a rifle. A guide is the rifle. He had
taken the wages for the work — a guide's wages were good wages,
government wages — and he had ridden out with the column and then kept
riding, and he had never drawn another map for another man, and he never
would. The wages he had spent, most of them, the way a man spends money
in a year of drifting: food, gear, a horse that died, a winter in a room in
Prescott listening to the roof leak. But the last of it he had never spent, and he
did not know why, or told himself he did not. Eleven dollars and forty cents,
in coin, wrapped in a square of oilcloth inside a tobacco tin that sat under a
loose stone at the left of the hearth. Once or twice a winter he took it out and
counted it, not because he doubted the sum but because counting it was a
kind of appointment he kept. Eleven dollars and forty cents. The exact
weight of the remainder. Some men carried a scar where a thing had
happened to them. Elias carried the price of the thing he had done, and kept it
accurate.
The Army had offered to buy him again, once. In the spring of 1869 a letter
had come up from Fort Apache with a teamster, written in a clerk's fair hand
over a major's signature: the department had need of guides who knew the
White Mountain country, the pay was raised, his previous service was
spoken of warmly in the report — the Salt Creek action, the letter called it,
as if it had been a battle and not a butchery of sleeping people — and would
Mr. Ward present himself at the post at his convenience. He had read it
twice, by the lamp, with Ash shifting in the lean-to and the spring rain on the