His voice had held. It gave out only at the very end, not into weeping — he
would not have permitted himself that; weeping would have been another
kind of asking — but into roughness, like a rope fraying.
"I ask for nothing," he said. "Not to be believed. A man can tell the truth so
that he will be believed, and that is a kind of trade, and I am finished trading
in it. I have told it because the old woman was owed the telling in front of
witnesses. What the council does with it is the council's. I will stand where I
am told to stand."
He stopped. The fire had burned down during the telling without anyone
tending it, which Elias understood later had never happened at that fire in
living memory. Sekan was watching him with an expression he could not
read. Anae sat with her hands folded, looking at him fully now, her eyes wet
in the firelight and entirely unsparing, and she did not nod, and he had not
asked her to.
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Tolin rose.
He was not a tall man, but he rose the way water rises, without hurry and
without any question of being stopped, and the camp's attention went to him
so completely that Elias felt it leave his own skin like a warmth going out of
a room. He spoke to the council first, and to the ring of the band after, and
only at the end to Elias — the people first, then the fire, then the man.
Tolin said that he had heard the demand for the old law and that it was a true
law and he would not shame any man for speaking it. But if the council gave
the white man to the law, the law would be satisfied by morning, and nothing
else would be ended, and nothing else begun. In the spring the traps would
still be on Cedar Creek, and the men who set them still alive and rich in
hides, and in some winter to come another boy would go through the ice with
no mark on him to show it was murder, and the band would carry the blame
of this white man's death into every dealing with the fort forever, because the
white men would write it down, and the things they write down outlive the
men who write them. A death was a small, quick thing, he said, and they
were not a small people, and they had a larger use for this man than his
death.
He turned then to Elias.
He said: "You did for the soldiers, once, the work of the eyes. You will do it
for us, once, and this time you will do it standing in the light where all men
can see your face, in the place where the white men write things down. You
will go before the agent Whitfield, and before the soldiers at the fort, and you
will speak the truth there on the record they keep. You will speak of the trap
line on Cedar Creek, which is on our land by their own treaty and their own
law, and which has taken, now, a man's leg nearly and a boy's life altogether.
You will speak of Kes, who went under the ice in February, and you will say
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what his people believe and why they believe it, and you will make them
write it. And you will speak of Salt Creek. You will tell them what you told
this fire — the map, the wages, the dawn, all of it — in their own room, with
their own pens moving, so that if the thing we set in motion goes wrong, the
blame of it will not fall on this band. The truth will already be standing
where it cannot be unwritten. That is the debt."
Elias would also help to prove the poachers' guilt, not with words only but
with the work of his hands — the line mapped, the traps found and marked,
the evidence carried in, the way a case is built out of paper and iron until
even a captain with pins in a map cannot look away from it. The terms were
these and not others: no blood price, no adoption, no absolution, and no
forgiveness spoken or implied by any word of his, now or when the work
was done. The debt was the work. When the work was done, the council
would say whether the debt was paid, and not before.
He said: "Sekan is witness to the terms. You stood in his trap's iron and he
stands in this. Speak your answer to him, so that it is witnessed twice — once
by the blood you kept in him and once by the blood you owe."
Elias turned to Sekan, who had got himself upright against Kiona's shoulder,
his face gray with the effort of the evening, and said, in Apache, clearly
enough for the ring to hear: "I accept the terms. All of them. I will speak at
the fort, and I will do the work, and I will not ask the council to call it
enough until the council calls it enough."
Sekan said, "Witnessed," and the word went around the ring like a coal
passed hand to hand.
And Tolin, at the last, fed the fire himself, one stick and then another, with
his own hands; and the flames rose, and the council fire burned up bright in
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the cold dark of the East Fork, and the matter, for that night, was finished.