down this mountain. There rarely was. That was why men drank, and why
they rode away, and why he had done both for three years.
"The sheath's the whole case," he said aloud, to Ash, to the creek, to the boy
under the ground at the East Fork. "That's the pity of it. You're the whole
case, Kes. They'll handle your mother's work with their gloves on and write it
down wrong, and it's still the only thing they can't talk past."
Ash blew out and shifted, ready to be done with standing in a creek in a
snowstorm while a man conducted his conscience at her. Elias gathered the
reins. The light was going the color of wet slate. An hour, perhaps a little
more, to the East Fork camp, where the fires would be lit by now and Sekan
would be waiting in a doorway with his stick, watching the trail the way men
wait for weather.
He thought, as he turned Ash up the far bank, that he would tell Sekan first
and alone, before the council, before the news of the patrol and the bargain
could spread through the camp — that the order of the telling was the last
courtesy in his power. First the knife. Then the three days. He composed the
first sentence of it in Apache, carefully, and then in English, and neither
language had a clean way into it, and he was still composing it when the shot
came.
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It came out of the timber on his left, up the slope — a flat, slapping crack
that the snow should have muffled and didn't, and Ash screamed.
Elias had heard horses scream before and it had never been a sound the world
should contain. The mare went sideways and down in the same motion, her
hindquarters collapsing under her, and the snow went up around them in a
white explosion and Elias was out of the saddle by instinct and by the mare's
falling, thrown clear into deep snow on the downhill side with his right side
gone numb from shoulder to hip where the ball had grazed him — not deep,
not through, a furrow torn along his ribs, and he knew it for a graze by the
burn of it. The sheath stayed inside his coat. His hand found it there,
checking, the way a man checks a child in a fall, before he checked himself.
Ash was thrashing between him and the timber. She had come down on her
side in the drift at the trail's edge and she was trying to rise and could not, her
forelegs digging and her hind legs useless, her head up and her eyes white all
around, screaming in that rhythmic way that was worse than any single cry
because it kept time. In the gray last light he saw the second shot come —
and strike the snow and the thrashing mare together, spattering red across the
white where her neck met her shoulder — and he understood with the cold
clarity of the old trade that she was cover now, God forgive them both, that
the man in the timber was shooting at movement behind a dying horse and
the horse was taking it.
He went the only way there was to go: downhill, away from the timber, low
and rolling and crawling through the drift, his rifle gone — it was in the
scabbard on Ash's far side, and he would not reach it and would not try —
his revolver still on his hip, useless at that range against a rifle in trees. This
was not close work. This was murder at a hundred yards by a man who knew
the trail and the hour and had waited in the cold for both. A third shot
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cracked and threw snow over his head as he went over the bench's lip into the
draw, and then there was no fourth, and the screaming followed him down a
long way before the ground took it away.
He did not stop until the draw's bottom, where a stand of juniper gave him
dark shapes to be among. He got his back against a trunk and made himself
be still and listen, and heard nothing but his own breathing going ragged in
the cold. His side was wet under the coat. Not deep, he told himself, working
his fingers along the furrow with a butcher's honesty — torn open along the
ribs, bleeding the way torn skin bleeds, too much and not fatally, and the
cold was his friend in it, slowing everything down. He bound it with his
scarf, one-handed, biting the knot tight, and the pain cleared his head the way
pain does when it finally arrives, and he made his inventory in the dark the
way he had made it in the cache, because inventory was what he had instead
of panic.
Rifle: gone. Horse: gone, and he would hear that screaming in whatever
years he had left. Revolver: six loads, and his hand steady enough. Sheath:
inside his coat, against his heart, unharmed. Statement: signed, locked in a
dispatch box at Fort Apache, and suddenly the wisest thing he had ever done,
because whatever happened in this draw, the paper was already out of any
man's reach on this mountain — the account stood, even if its signer was
found in the spring melt. That thought came and went without self-pity. It
was bookkeeping. It balanced.
Above him the light was nearly gone from the sky. Below, down the long
slope through the timber, the East Fork camp was lighting its fires — he