asked if Elias knew the Salt Creek country. Elias told him the truth: he knew
56
it well, having trapped it two winters running.
The captain asked him to draw it.
Here Elias stopped, and looked at his own hands, and opened them, and the
firelight showed the scars across the knuckles and the trapper's ruined
fingernails, and he understood that he was looking at the instruments, and
had always been looking at them.
"I drew it," he said. "Here is the thing that must be understood, because I
have understood it alone for three years and it has not improved with
keeping. I did not draw it carelessly. I was good at my trade. I drew the
bends of the creek and the place where the water goes slow. I drew the draw
coming down from the north, and marked where a column could come down
it in the dark without being heard, because the wind takes the sound there
and the gravel is deep. I marked the lodges as the scouts had counted them. I
wrote the hour when the camp would be deepest asleep, because I knew the
hour — I had slept in camps like it, and eaten at fires like it, and been given
water in the mornings by women like —" He stopped. "I sold them
everything I knew. A poor guide might have saved them by being wrong. I
was not wrong about anything."
He said the captain paid him in coin, counted out on the office desk from a
strongbox, and that he remembered the sound of it and the captain's hand,
which was soft. He rode with the column as far as the mouth of the draw,
because that was the contract — guide them to the place and no further —
and in the last hour of the ride, in the dark, with the column halted and the
horses breathing, he had understood for the first time what the camp was.
He said he could not have told the council how he knew. It was the absence
of things. A raiding camp has a smell and a shape — horses held close and
57
nervous, a guard that moves, the quiet of men who expect to be followed.
What lay below him in the bend of the creek had the quiet of the other kind:
the deep, unguarded quiet of people who believe themselves safe, of dogs
asleep and fires let down to coals. He had sat his horse in the dark with that
understanding arriving like cold water rising, and done the arithmetic of a
coward, which is always done quickly and always balances. If he spoke, he
would be disbelieved or arrested — a hireling, against the captain's word. If
he rode away, the thing would happen without him anyway. He had told
himself that his being there changed nothing, and that this was true, and that
it was the most worthless truth he had ever owned.
"I rode away," he said. "I want that to be plain. I did not stay and I did not
warn. I pointed them down the draw with my map in the captain's coat, and I
rode away, and I heard it begin behind me when I was a mile off, and it
sounded the way the old woman said. Like rain arriving. I kept riding. A man
who had fired a rifle that morning could at least say he was in the fight and
the fight was madness. I was not in anything. I was the eyes, and the eyes
closed themselves, and rode home, and ate breakfast."
He said that he had taken his wages. It would be easy to tell the story as if the
money had been forced on him, and it had not. He had taken them and quit
the fort's service that same week and never guided again, and men had called
that conscience, and it was not conscience — it was only the discovery that
he could not do the work without seeing the bend of the creek. And the
wages — he still had them. He had never spent them. He had carried them
three years in a twist of cloth at the bottom of his pack, not as a penance and
not as a keepsake, but because he had never found the place where a man
gives such money back, or the words for giving it. That was the size of what
he had done with his remorse in three years. Carried it, unspent, like a stone
58
carries the cold.
"I did not fire," he said at last. "I say it because it is true and because the
council should have all of it in the open. But I have had three years to weigh
it, and I will tell you what it weighs. It weighs nothing. A rifle is a thing that
kills what it is pointed at. I was pointed at the camp for a week before any
rifle was — over a desk, with a pencil. The rifles only did at dawn what I had
already done in the captain's office with the door shut. If there is a man here
who lost anyone in that bend" — he looked, for the first time, directly at
Anae, and held it, and let it cost what it cost — "he should not waste his
anger on the soldiers alone. Some of it is owed to me, and I am standing in
his firelight, and I will not spend one word of his time telling him the debt is
smaller than it is."