They gave him a place to sleep at the edge of the camp, in a wickiup that had
belonged to a hunter away on the winter hunt — close enough to the fires
that he was not a prisoner, and far enough that he was not yet anything else.
Ash was hobbled with the band's horses and grazed with perfect indifference
to the company, which he chose to take as instruction.
The work began the next morning, because Tolin was a man who believed
that a thing agreed at night should be begun before the sun was high, while
the agreement was still warm. Sekan came on his crutch, Kiona behind him
carrying a strip of tanned hide as wide as a man's two hands and a lump of
charcoal wrapped in cloth, and they sat in the cold bright morning while
Sekan, and then the two hunters who had run the Cedar Creek ridges since
boyhood, gave Elias the line.
It was a strange thing, and Elias did not pretend to himself that it was not. He
had made maps all his life — in his head, mostly, and twice on paper for
money, and the second of those paper maps had killed more than forty people
— and now he set about the trade again, kneeling in an Apache camp with a
hide across his knees, drawing Cedar Creek from other men's memories. The
traps sat where the game trails came down to water, chained to root and rock.
The poachers' cache stood in the second draw, under the leaning cedar. Their
main camp, five men, lay a mile below, where the creek widened and a
wagon could be brought in when the ground froze hard enough to bear it.
Sekan marked the place of his own trapping with a charcoal X and did not
linger on it, and Elias marked the place two bends above, where the ice went
rotten early over the spring seep — where a boy could go through in
February, if the ice had been sawn in the dark, as the band believed, and left
to skin over thin as paper.
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He drew carefully, the distances true, and felt the old competence come back
into his hands like warmth into cold fingers, and with it the old sickness,
close behind — the two so near kin in him that he could not have said where
the skill ended and the shame began. That was to be the texture of the debt:
his own trade, done in the open, for the people it had once been done against.
Kiona watched his hands for a long time without speaking. At last she said,
in her own tongue, "You draw our country as if you had dreamed it."
"I have walked it," Elias said.
"Many men have walked it," she said. "They come back with hides. You
come back with the shape of it." She said it without praise, as a fact she was
filing in its place, and then she reached out and turned the hide a quarter-turn
on his knees, so that the creek ran the way it ran and not the way a white
man's map would have it, north pinned to the top of the world like a
butterfly. "If you are drawing it for us," she said, "draw it in our direction."
And Elias, who had drawn every map of his life with north at the top without
once thinking about it, felt something small and fundamental rearrange itself,
and redrew the whole of Cedar Creek running from his right hand to his left,
the way the water went — upstream and downstream being directions that
mattered, and north only a word. It was the first thing he had been taught in
the camp, and no one had raised a voice to teach it.
She came again the next day, and the day after. Her respect, when it began to
come, did not announce itself; it was simply present in practical things. She
brought him food without being asked to, which no one had done the first
day. She corrected his Apache at the fire once, in front of others — the word
for the ice that forms at a creek's edge — and the correction, delivered flatly,
told him more about his standing than any kindness could have, because you
do not correct the pronunciation of a man you are waiting to see gone. On the
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third day she asked him how a man learned to read ground the way he read it,
and he told her about learning to track by being hungry, and she listened the
way she did everything, entirely, and then said, "Sekan reads it that way too.
It is why he is alive."
"Sekan says a great deal," Elias said.
"He is deciding what you are," Kiona said. "He does it out loud. Do not
mistake it for the camp deciding. The camp will take longer."
The children took no time at all. By the second day there was a small, solemn
delegation at the edge of his fire's light in the mornings — three boys and a
girl with her hair in two braids, watching him work a trap chain or sew a torn
seam in his coat with the grave attention of a council — and by the fourth
day the girl had appointed herself his instructor in the words he got wrong,
and corrected him more freely than Kiona did, and with less mercy, and the
boys had discovered that the white man could set a snare their own uncle