camp rose around him like smoke.
The keening did not stop when the fire was built up. It went on under
everything, and Elias stood where they had left him, at the edge of the
firelight, with his hands empty and visible and the whole of the band turned
toward him like a field turning toward weather.
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Anae sat across the fire from him. She was old in the way that mountains are
old, not worn down but worn true, and her face in the firelight had the
stillness of a thing that has finished deciding. Her daughter's daughter knelt
beside her with a hand on her arm, and it was the girl's hand, Elias thought,
that finally gentled the sound out of her, by patience and by not letting go.
Tolin sat at the head of the fire with his council around him, seven men, and
Sekan sat among the hunters on the far side, his healing leg stretched out
before him into the warmth. Kiona sat behind him with her arms around her
knees. Beyond the fire stood the rest of the band, sixty souls, in a ring that
did not break, children held up on shoulders to see the white man brought in
to answer.
No one offered him a seat. He had not expected one.
Tolin spoke first, and his voice was not loud, and did not need to be. He said
that the old woman had a thing to say that had waited three winters to be said
in the right place, and that the council would hear it in the right order, all of
it, before any man spoke of what was to be done. He said that a fire where
men shout is only a fire. Then he nodded to Anae, and the camp went quiet
enough that Elias could hear the creek below the bluff, running cold under its
skin of ice.
Anae did not look at him while she spoke. She looked into the fire, and she
spoke the way a person reads a thing written somewhere she can see and the
rest of them cannot.
She said that in the winter of the deep snow, her sister's lodge stood at Salt
Creek in the second bend, where the water went slow and the willows kept
the wind off. She said her sister's name, and her sister's husband's name, and
the names of the children, four of them, spoken into the fire one by one like
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stones set down in a row. She herself had not been in the lodge that morning.
She had gone up the creek before first light, because her sister's youngest had
a cough and there was a root she wanted, and she had thought the child
would not even wake to know she had gone.
She said the soldiers came down the draw in the hour before dawn, when the
camp was at its deepest sleep. She heard it from the ridge where she had
stopped with the root in her hand — first the horses, too many horses, and
then a voice, and then the shooting began, and it did not begin the way
shooting begins in a fight, scattered and answering, but all at once, like rain
arriving.
She did not describe what she found when she came down. She said only that
she had stayed in the camp until the second day, doing what had to be done,
and that she would not speak of those two days now, because they were not
the part that belonged to the council. The part that belonged to the council,
she said, was the man.
She raised her hand then, and pointed at Elias without looking at him, her
finger steady as a sight post.
On the morning after, she had gone to the soldiers' camp at the mouth of the
draw — and at this several of the older men shifted, because going there had
been a madness and everyone knew it — wrapped in a blanket with her head
down, an old woman, invisible the way the old are invisible to soldiers, to
beg that the bodies not be left for the crows. The captain would not see her.
But she had seen the guide standing by the horses with his hands in his coat,
a young man then, thirty-five, and she had known him for what he was,
because a camp does not hide itself, and men who were not born to that
country do not find a sleeping camp in a crooked canyon in the dark of the
moon without being shown.
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"You showed them the way," she said, in Apache, and then, turning her face
to him at last, she said it again in the other tongue, slowly, so that there
would be no place in either language for him to hide. "You were the eyes.
The rifles were only rifles. You were the eyes."
Elias did not move. He had imagined this moment perhaps five hundred
times in three years, alone in a hundred camps, and in every imagining he
had been somewhere else in his mind by the time the words were spoken, out
the back of himself like a man leaving a burning house. He had not
understood until now that the imagining had been the leaving. There was
nowhere to go. The silence that followed her words was not an empty
silence. It was a silence with sixty people in it.
Then the voices came, as Tolin had known they would, and he let them come