language: the meat was gone, the winter was coming down, and a band that
let its stores be burned in the night would be carrying its children out of these
mountains by spring, to the agency, to the ration lines, to the slow death that
did not require any shooting at all. To strike now — five men, one camp, a
known place — was, the way some of them framed it, merely the same
sentence Vail had written, answered in kind. Elias stood at the edge of the
firelight where he had stood at the beginning, heard his own captain's voice
in the framing of it, and his blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do
with the December air.
Because he knew where that sentence ended. He had drawn the map for
where that sentence ended.
Sekan had got himself up on the crutch and was shouting — whether for the
war party or against it Elias could not tell over the noise — and Kiona had
both hands in his blanket, holding him upright or holding him back, and
Anae sat perfectly still in the middle of the rising storm with her hands
folded, watching her son.
Tolin did not rise. He did not raise his voice. He sat looking into the fire
while the camp's anger built around him like weather around a mountain, and
let it spend its first strength against his silence, and then, when the shouting
had begun to hear itself and falter, he turned his head — not his body — and
looked across the fire and the noise straight at Elias, and held the look until
the camp, following it, had gone quiet.
"The debt," Tolin said, "has come due faster than anyone planned."
He said it to Elias, and in front of everyone, which Elias understood was also
part of the terms, and perhaps the largest part: that the work be done in the
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open, all of it. The band now had days, perhaps hours, before some young
man with a dead brother decided the matter for all of them — and a white
man's promise to speak at a fort would have to be kept now, or be revealed as
what such promises usually were.
Elias stepped into the light. The copybook was in his wickiup, and the hide
map, and the coins he had never spent at the bottom of his pack, and he
understood that by morning he would be riding for Fort Apache with nothing
in his hands but the truth, told in the order Tolin had set it — the line, the
boy, the camp, himself last and unhidden — and that the time for carrying it
alone and unspent was over.
"Tolin," he said, in Apache, in front of them all, "I will ride at first light. And
I will not ride alone in the doing of it. The witness stands with me." He
looked at Sekan, gray-faced and upright in Kiona's grip, who nodded once,
hard, like a man driving a nail. "The poachers have made their answer. Now
they will hear ours — in the room where it is written down, where it cannot
be burned in the night, and cannot be unwritten by spring."
They went out in the blue hour before the sun cleared the rimrock, when the
cold was at its deepest and the snow gave back what little light there was.
Elias rode Ash at a walk and let Nitis choose the ground, because Nitis knew
where the line ran the way a man knows his own house in the dark, and
Elias's business that morning was not to lead but to count.
Sekan had wanted to come. He had stood in the doorway of the wickiup with
his weight on the carved stick Kiona had cut for him, his bad leg stiff under
its wrappings, and had argued in the flat, reasonable tone of a man who
knows he will lose and intends to lose slowly. Tolin settled it without raising
his voice: a hunter who cannot run does not walk a poacher's line in
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December. Sekan had looked at Elias then, and Elias had understood that he
was being handed something — not the task, exactly, but the place beside
Nitis where Sekan himself should have been.
"You will see it all," Sekan had said, in Apache, and then in English, as if to
fix it in both languages. "Then you will tell me true."
"I'll tell you true," Elias said.
Now the two of them rode the high benches above Cedar Creek where the
timber thinned into parks of snow-covered grass, and the line announced
itself the way such things always did: not all at once, but in a grammar Elias
had learned before he was twenty and had spent three years trying to forget.
A drag mark where a set had been chained to a log and the log hauled six feet
through the snow by something dying. A scatter of raven sign in a pine's
lower branches. The faint, sweet, rotten smell of bait gone old under the cold.
He read it without deciding to read it. His eyes went to the ground and the
ground spoke, and he hated the fluency of it, the way a man might hate
finding his hand still knew a song on an instrument he had sworn off.
Nitis rode a little ahead and a little to the side, saying nothing, pointing with
his chin. Here. And here. And here.
The first set was a number four Newhouse with its jaws frozen open and a