could see them through the trees, small and orange and steady, sixty people
in the last of the day, keeping Tolin's peace on his word while he lay
bleeding in a draw a mile above them. A mile. On foot, in snow to the knee
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in the drifts, in the dark coming down like a lid, with a torn side and no
horse.
He got up. It took both hands on the juniper trunk and a count of three, and
the world swung once and settled. He set his face toward the fires and
checked the sheath one last time inside his coat, the beadwork stiff and cold
under his palm, a mother's pattern, a boy's knife, the whole case.
Then Elias Ward started down the mountain on foot, toward the lights below
him, through the falling snow.
He did not remember the last mile. He remembered the cold going quiet in
his hands, which was a bad sign and he knew it, and then the trees thinning
before the East Fork bottoms, and smoke standing up through them in the last
gray light, the smell of it reaching him like a hand laid flat against his chest.
After that there were only pieces. His boots going through the skim ice at the
creek edge into water so cold it burned. The sheath inside his coat knocking
against his ribs with every step, like something keeping count. A dog
barking. Then the ground coming up, not fast, the way a tired man lies down
rather than falls, and snow filling one side of his face.
He thought, with the last clear thought he had: I made it to their fire.
Whatever happens now is theirs to decide. It was almost a restful thought.
Hands turned him over — hands that knew the work of hauling a man the
way you haul a deer, by the coat and the belt, snow dragging at his heels.
Someone said his name the way the band said it. Someone else pried his
frozen fingers open, one at a time, off nothing: his hands had closed on the
cold itself and would not let go.
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Then a lodge's warmth, and hide under him instead of snow, and a woman's
voice, low, giving orders the way a person gives orders in a sickroom, with
no waste in it.
Kiona's hands. He knew them before he knew his own name again, later,
when the fever of cold coming back out of a body had hold of him and he
was shaking so hard his teeth sang. They were small hands and they were not
kind in the way white women were taught to be kind. They were competent.
She worked his frozen boots off without cutting them, which he would not
have thought possible. She packed snow against his feet and then took it
away and packed warm cloths, and when the feeling came back into his toes
it came back as pain, white and enormous, and he made a sound he was
ashamed of and she ignored it the way you ignore weather. She put a cup to
his mouth and made him drink in sips. Broth, salt, fat. When he tried to speak
she put two fingers against his jaw and shut his mouth, not unkindly, the way
you shut a door against wind.
"You walk into my lodge half dead twice in one winter," she said, in her
precise, spare English. "Once is a debt. Twice is a habit. Drink."
Sekan kept the fire. That was the other thing Elias carried out of those first
hours: Sekan on the far side of the flames, his bad leg straight on a folded
blanket, the cane across his knees, feeding the fire a stick at a time, watching
Elias come back into the world. The camp that might have killed him a
month ago — and had talked about it, in council, in his hearing, with reasons
— had carried him in out of the snow instead.
Sleep took him in pieces and gave him back in pieces. Once he woke certain
the bullet graze along his ribs had opened and was soaking the blanket, and
Kiona, who seemed to sleep the way a sentry sleeps, was there before he had
finished waking, pressing a clean folded cloth against the dressing and
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checking it with a touch that told her everything.
"It holds," she said. "The skin is angry. Angry is not open." She looked at his
face in the firelight. "The horse?"
"Ash is dead," Elias said, and found his voice was a stranger's voice, scraped
raw. "They shot her from the timber above the trail. It was meant for
whoever was on her, I think. It got her instead."
Something moved in Kiona's face that was not surprise. She nodded once, as
if a name had been added to a list she was already keeping, and went back to
her side of the fire. He understood he had just told her the war was not
finished, and that she had received it the way her people received everything
that winter: without theater, and without forgetting.
He slept then, truly slept, the first unguarded sleep he had had since before
Fort Apache.
The sheath came out of his coat on the second morning, when he was awake
enough to sit and too weak to stand, and Kiona had gone to fetch water and
Sekan had come in to sit where she had sat, the cane hooked over his