It had been here, on a peg, in the dark. Kept. Not used — the blade was clean
and the sheath's beadwork undamaged. Kept the way a man keeps a thing
taken off a body and found pretty. A trophy. A souvenir of a drowning.
Elias's first thought, and he was ashamed of its speed, was for what it would
do when it was seen in the camp. Sekan's face. Kiona's hands. He stood in
the cold dimness of that stolen room and weighed the taking of it the way he
had weighed every act of this whole winter: not for whether it was right, but
for what it would cost and who would pay. The sheath was evidence — the
only piece of all of it that could not be explained away or lost in a sutler's
arithmetic. A dead boy's knife in a poacher's cache turned a dispute about
hides into a question about a death, and questions about deaths had to be
answered by somebody, somewhere, on paper.
He took it down off the peg. The leather of the sheath was cold and stiff and
lighter than he expected, the way relics always are.
"I have it," he said.
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Nitis nodded. He did not ask what Elias meant to do with it, and Elias did not
say, because they both knew it would be done in an office. They left
everything else exactly as they had found it. Elias counted the hides once
more at the door, wrote the number, and they brushed their sign out of the
draw with a pine bough as far as the hard snow, out of a habit neither of them
remarked on.
On the ride back, with the light already leaving the high country though it
was only midafternoon, Nitis said, "My cousin's leg will mend. His brother
will not."
"No," Elias said.
"He keeps such a thing on a peg, this Vail. A man who keeps a thing like
that—" Nitis stopped, and rode a while, and finished it differently. "He is not
afraid of us. That is the whole of it. He is not afraid of anyone."
"He's afraid of paper," Elias said. "He just doesn't know it yet."
He felt the sheath inside his coat against his ribs as he rode, where he had put
it to keep the beadwork from the wet, and it rode there like a second, smaller
heart. He was carrying two things into Fort Apache he had never carried
anywhere in his life: another man's grief, and his own name, ready to be
signed.
He had not been inside an Army post in three years, and had arranged his life
around the fact. Fort Apache announced itself the way all of them did — first
the smell, woodsmoke and horse and latrine and boiled coffee, carried
downwind; then the flag over the parade ground, snapping in the December
wind; then the buildings, cottonwood logs chinked and whitewashed, set
around a square of frozen mud. He rode Ash through the gate at a walk with
his hat in his hand, and the guard looked at him the way guards look at
73
civilians of no account, and let him pass, and Elias felt the years go out of
him like heat out of an opened door.
He knew this place the way a man knows a song he has decided never to
sing. There was the adjutant's office where he had once signed for rations
and ammunition and a mule. There was the sutler's store, its windows lit
though the afternoon was young, where Cyrus Vail's hides went in salted and
came out as credit, as cartridges, as coffee, as friendship. And beyond them
the agency buildings, meaner and newer, where Mr. Whitfield kept the
government's other set of books — the ones in which sixty people on the
East Fork were a line item called rations and annuities, and in which Elias
Ward, if he appeared at all, appeared nowhere.
He tied Ash at the agency rail and stood a moment with his hand on her neck,
feeling her warmth through his glove. He had walked into this office a
hundred times in his sleep. He climbed the two steps and knocked.
Whitfield's clerk kept him waiting the length of time that waiting was for,
and then Whitfield himself came out of the inner room — a man of fifty with
a careful beard and the eyes of a schoolmaster who has been promised a
pension and intends to survive to collect it. A trapper. A civilian. A man with
snow on his coat to the knees and a notebook in his hand and something
wrapped in oilcloth under his arm, with no hides to sell and no complaint
about his rations, because he drew none.
"Mr. Ward." Whitfield had the name from the clerk. "I don't believe we've
had the pleasure. What brings you off the mountain in this weather?"
"The East Fork band," Elias said. "And a trapline that isn't theirs, and two
wickiups burned, and a dead boy's knife. I've come to lay it before you in
order, if you'll hear it in order."
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Something in Whitfield's face closed, politely, the way a door closes when a
man inside it has decided about the weather. But he was a bureaucrat before
he was anything else, and bureaucracy loves an order of business, and he
gestured Elias into the inner office — and then paused, because the outer
door had opened again, letting in a blade of cold and a young officer in an