for a while.
A hunter named Dasan, broad and scarred at the jaw, stood and said that
there was an old law and it was not complicated. A life for the lives. Not one
life — one life was a poor count against forty — but the law did not ask for
the count to be fair. It asked for the blood to know it had been seen. The
white man had come into their country of his own will, and the soldiers
would not ride three days to ask after one trapper who had no kin, and
everyone in the firelight knew this was true, and it was the truest thing said
yet and the most dangerous for being true.
Two others spoke after him in the same direction, shorter, hotter. A younger
man said he had grown up in a lodge with a place in it that no one sat in, for
the uncle who died in that camp; he wanted to hear the trap story too, but
hearing was not the same as owing.
And then Sekan stood up.
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It took him a moment. He got his good leg under him and used the crutch
Kiona had cut for him, and the wound pulled — Elias could see it pull, the
whole line of his body tightening — and he stood anyway, and waited until
the fire quieted.
Sekan said that he would tell what the white man did at the creek, since it
had been done to him and he was the one who knew it. He had lain in the
trap from the middle of the morning with the cold coming up out of the
ground into him, and two of his own people had passed on the far ridge and
not seen him, and he did not blame them, because the trap was in the shadow
of the cedar and a man in a trap learns how small he can make his voice
when the voice is all he has left and it is not enough. By the time the white
man found him, he had already said his goodbyes in the proper way — to his
father, to Kiona, to his brother under the ice — and made his peace with
being found in the spring.
He said the white man had not taken the leg and had not taken the chance to
finish it cleanly, either of which would have been easier. He had put his
hands into another man's trap with the man's knife free against his ribs —
and here Sekan looked at Elias directly for the first time that night — and
opened the iron the slow way, and packed the wound with his own shirt torn
for the purpose, and built the fire first and the shelter second and the splint
third, in the right order, like a man who understood that a life is kept in the
details or not at all. He had stayed four nights in the cold and fed him from
his own stores and not once said the thing that would have made it a bargain.
He had not asked for anything. He had not even asked his name until the
second day.
"I do not speak for his past," Sekan said. "His past is standing right there, and
it can speak for itself, and I think it will. I speak for the creek. The council
55
should hear what he did at the creek before it decides what he is, because a
man is not only the worst morning of his life — or every one of us is
finished, and some of us know it."
He sat down, hard, the way a man sits when standing has cost him the last of
something, and Kiona's hand went to his shoulder without her looking.
Tolin let the quiet stand. Then he turned his head, not his body, toward Elias,
and said: "The council will hear you now. Stand where the fire can see you.
Speak of the morning first. Speak of the rest after, if there is rest to speak of."
Elias stepped forward two paces, into the full of the light, the way a man
steps into cold water he knows he cannot step back out of.
He spoke in Apache. His Apache was workable, as it had always been — a
trade tongue, learned on trails and in camps over fifteen years, good enough
for weather and water and the price of things — and it failed him now the
way he had known it would, not in the words but in the weight of them,
because a confession is not weather, and there is no trade word for what he
had come to say. Where he had to use his own language he used it, and then
he found the Apache for it anyway, and said it twice, and the saying twice
cost him more than the saying once. This was the toll. He had been paying
with silence for three years because silence was the cheapest currency he
had. Now the price had gone up.
He said that in the January of the deep snow he had been wintering at the fort
when Captain Doren sent for him. The captain was a careful man with clean
boots who kept a map of the territory on his office wall with pins in it, and he
told Elias there was a hostile camp on Salt Creek — raiders, he said, who had
taken stock from the settlements and killed a herder on the Verde road. He