bed of pine needles laid over the pan, bedded in a deer trail where the trail
squeezed between two boulders. Elias swung down and stood over it a long
time. He did not touch it. He took the little stub of pencil and the oilcloth
notebook from his coat and wrote it down, because Tolin had asked for a
counting that could be carried into a white man's office and laid on a desk,
and paper was the only language that office believed.
"One," he said.
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Nitis watched him write. "They do not write theirs down," he said.
"No," Elias said. "They don't have to. Nobody makes them prove anything."
They found the second set before the sun was up, and the third as the light
came gray and flat over the rim. By midmorning the notebook held eleven.
Eleven sets on the benches and along the creek bottom, and every one of
them on the band's side of any line any surveyor had ever run — not near the
boundary, not arguably near it, but deep, miles deep, in country the White
Mountain people had hunted since before there was a United States to argue
with them about it. Elias had known it would be so. Knowing it and counting
it were different things. The counting made a weight. He felt it accumulate in
him like snow loading a roof.
At the seventh set there was a fox in the trap, three days dead at the least,
frozen into the shape of its last effort, and Nitis stood looking down at it with
an expression Elias could not read and did not try to. At the ninth, the bait
was a haunch of deer meat gone green-black, and Elias thought of the winter
caches ashes-cold at the lower camp, and of sixty people doing arithmetic
with hunger, and he wrote the number down with more force than the pencil
wanted and snapped the point. He sharpened it with his knife, kneeling, his
hands steady, aware of being angry in a way that had nowhere to go until it
had somewhere official to go.
Anger carried into the hills was just weather. Anger carried into an office,
written down, signed — that was a thing with edges. He had spent three
years refusing edges. He put the notebook away and rode on.
Toward noon the sign changed. The sets grew farther apart and better hidden,
and then, in a side draw where a spring kept a fringe of ground bare around
its seep, Nitis reined in and sat still, listening, before he lifted his chin toward
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a wall of deadfall piled against the draw's head.
"There," he said. "That is not wood the creek put there."
It was a cache built the way Elias would have built it himself, which was
another small grief: logs stacked and chinked with brush to break its outline,
a hide roof weighted with stone, the whole drifted over with snow that had
been helped along by a shovel. They picketed the horses fifty yards down the
draw and went in on foot, rifles low, and Elias felt the old professional calm
come over him like a coat he had never actually taken off, only hung up —
and under the calm, disgust at how easily it still fit.
Inside, in the dim green light under the hide roof, the poachers had stacked
their winter's theft in order. Hides rolled and tied, more than forty of them —
deer mostly, some elk, two bear, the hair side in, salted and stiff as boards. A
keg of salt. A coil of new chain. Three spare traps bright with factory grease,
and two older ones with the rust ground off their jaws and their springs oiled.
The leavings of a going concern, a business conducted in other men's country
with other men's game, and Elias stood among it taking his inventory for the
notebook, and the numbers steadied him, because numbers were evidence
and evidence did not require him to feel anything at all.
It was Nitis who found the knife.
It hung on a peg driven into the cache's back wall, among the small clutter
men keep where they work — a whetstone, a tin cup, a pair of gloves with
the fingers worn through. Nitis did not touch it. He went very still, and then
he said Sekan's brother's name, once, in a voice with nothing in it, the way a
man reads a word off a stone.
Elias came and stood beside him and looked.
The knife was a good one, a working blade with a stag handle, nothing
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remarkable in itself. The sheath was what a man's eyes went to: rawhide
sewn with sinew and worked all over with beadwork in white and blue and a
deep red, a pattern of stepped diamonds and a running line like water, and no
two of that pattern in the world, because a woman had made it for her son
with her own hands only. Kes had carried it every day of the last year of his
life. In February, when they brought him up from under the creek ice and his
death was ruled an accident by men who had not looked at anything, the
knife had not been on him. It had not been in the wickiup either. Kiona had
asked after it once, in the spring, in Elias's hearing — a small thing, she said,
but their mother was dead and the sheath was her work, and she would have
liked it back.