pronounced adequate, which in the economy of that camp was a knighthood.
He had been a ghost in his own country for three years, eating alone, spoken
to mostly by men who wanted to hire what he knew. To be watched over a
fire by a child with two braids, and found ordinary, was a thing he had not
known he was starving for.
In the evenings he worked on the evidence, because that was the other half of
the debt. The trap Sekan's leg had come out of — the poachers' own iron,
sprung and bloodied, carried into camp wrapped in hide like a killed enemy
— he cleaned and examined by lantern light, and wrote down in a copybook
Sekan lent him the maker's mark on the spring housing, the gauge of the
chain, the fresh file-marks on the teeth. He wrote down the dates and places
the hunters gave him: eleven traps known of, two sprung empty, one with a
wolf in it left to rot — a rotting wolf being worth the trouble only of men
64
who mean to be back, and the poachers meant to be back. He wrote down
what was remembered of Kes: the morning, the poles, the place on the creek,
the way the ice had looked wrong to the men who pulled him out — too
clean at the edges, like a cut thing that had healed over. He wrote it all
without adornment, and was only a little surprised to find his hand steady. It
was bookkeeping. It had always been bookkeeping. The only difference was
whose name stood at the head of the account.
And under the work, moving through his days like the creek under its ice,
was the understanding he had been given no order to have and could not have
refused: that this was the first honest work anyone had offered him in three
years. Not the first work — he had trapped, hauled, mended, survived. The
first honest work: work whose purpose he could say out loud in either
language, work that asked the best of what he knew instead of the worst. He
had imagined, in the years of the unspent coins, that amends would feel like
suffering, stones carried uphill. It did not feel like that. It felt like being tired
at night the way he had been tired as a young man on the survey crew, with a
soreness that meant something had been built. But the sleep came anyway,
night after night, deeper than any since the January of the deep snow, and he
woke each morning with the copybook under his head and the hide map
rolled beside him, and got up, and went on with the work.
Anae did not speak to him in those days. She did not avoid him, exactly; she
passed through the camp as she had always passed, and once he saw her stop
and look at the boys clustered around his snare-lesson, and her face did
something he could not read and would not have presumed to. Her silence
was not a door left open. It was simply silence. The confession had been hers
to receive, not to answer — and for the first time in his life, Elias found he
could let a thing rest entirely in another person's hands without it gnawing
65
him.
The rider came in at dusk on the sixth day, hard, in the last of the light, on a
horse blown white with its own frozen sweat, and the camp was on its feet
before he had the words out, because a man does not ride a horse like that
into a winter camp to bring small news.
Vail's men had found their sprung trap, the rider said, and the blood beside it,
and the marks where a man had been carried out on a litter. They had read
the ground the way Elias had read it — it was the same country speaking to
anyone who listened — and they had known what it meant: that their iron
had taken an Apache and the Apache had not died in it, and that somewhere
there were men who could say whose iron it was. And they had answered as
they chose.
In the night — last night, while the council's fires burned on the East Fork —
riders had gone down to the band's lower camp, where the old ones and the
late-returning hunters wintered closest to Cedar Creek, and put fire to two
empty wickiups, standing apart from the others, a demonstration and not a
mistake. And they had fired the meat caches, the raised stores where the
band's winter hung in strips — elk and deer, weeks of hunting, the margin
between this camp and hunger when the deep snows came — and burned
them in the pits, and ridden off before the lower camp could gather itself,
firing twice into the dark as they went, at no one they hit.
No one was killed, the rider said. This time. He said it in Tolin's own
cadence, and Elias understood he was hearing the words as they had been
given down the line of camps, already weighed, already carrying the second
half of their meaning underneath them like the other blade of a knife.
The voices rose for war the way they had risen for the old law six nights
before, only faster now, and hotter, and with better reason wearing worse
66
patience. Dasan was on his feet before the rider had finished. It was not only
talk of retaliation — it was the arithmetic of survival spoken in anger's