forearm, moving better than Elias had dared hope and worse than Sekan
would ever admit.
"My coat," Elias said. "Inside pocket. Left side. It's wrapped in oilcloth. It
isn't mine to keep and it isn't the Army's either, whatever Marsh's clerk wrote
down. It was in Vail's cache, Sekan. In the bottom of the hide box, under the
winter beaver. I took it out before the patrol could log it wrong." His breath
was still a shallow thing that had to be budgeted. "It should have come home
before any paper did."
Sekan unwrapped the oilcloth with both hands, slowly, the way a man opens
something he has already recognized and is postponing. The sheath was
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beaded along its length in white and dark blue, a boy's work and a mother's
work together in it, the knife inside with a haft worn smooth where a hand
had carried it daily. Sekan drew the blade a finger's width and put it back. He
held the whole thing across both palms like an offering he was not sure
which direction to make.
"Kes made the beads crooked on purpose," he said at last. "At the second
turn. He said a straight line was a white man's road and he would not put one
on anything of his." His voice did not break. It did something worse — it
went very careful, the way a man walks on new ice. "Kiona's mother
threaded the first row for him and he unpicked it twice before he let it stay.
He was fourteen. He carried it three winters." His hands closed on the sheath,
gently. "February. They said the ice. Bad luck, a boy hunting alone — all the
words people use when the true words would cost them something. I buried
my brother with an empty place at his belt and told myself the creek had
taken his knife too. Creeks take things. It was a story I could carry."
"Vail had it in his box," Sekan said. "Under his winter skins. A trophy box."
Now the rage came up in him, and Elias watched it come the way you watch
weather cross a ridge — the hands tightening until the beading creaked, the
whole big frame of him drawing together like a fist. "I could ride tonight. I
could ride tied on. He is three hours from here and asleep in a warm camp
with a full belly while my brother's knife — " He stopped, and the stopping
was a visible labor, a hauling back, breath by breath. "And if I kill him
tonight, then his men's story becomes the true story. The clerk writes Sekan
the murderer. The boy in the ground stays a story about ice. And the line
stays where it is, with new men on it by spring." He set the sheath down
between them with terrible gentleness. "You stood in a fort, white man, and
signed your name to your shame where your own people keep their paper.
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You did not ride on Doren in the night, though God knows you owed him a
night ride more than I owe Vail one. So. I will not let the rage pick the road.
It can walk behind. It has had practice." He looked up, eyes wet and furious
and absolutely steady. "But when the paper is finished — when your Marsh
has seen the line and the box and the creek — I want that man to know
whose knife he kept. From my mouth. With soldiers standing there. That is
not rage. That is an accounting."
"It will be," Elias said. "I give you my word on the shape of it. Marsh agreed
to witnesses from the band. You and Nitis. Protected, on the record, your
words in the clerk's book. Whatever happens out there happens in front of
paper that cannot be unwritten."
Sekan nodded, once, and picked up his brother's knife again, and held it like
a coal he had decided to carry a long way.
Kiona came back with the water skin, saw the sheath lying open on the
blanket, and understood everything at a glance. She knelt and took it from
Sekan's hands — he gave it up without a word — and held it against her own
chest a moment, her lips moving on words Elias was not meant to hear. Then
she hung it from the lodge pole above the place where Sekan slept, high, in
the smoke and the honor of the lodge.
"It stays in the lodge until the boy is answered," she said. "It does not go
back into a white man's box." She turned back to Elias and resumed being a
nurse. "Now you will eat. All of it. A man who faints on a borrowed horse in
front of soldiers shames his nurse."
The patrol came on the third day, as agreed, in the thin bright cold of late
morning, and Elias heard it before he saw it — the particular music of an
Army column in winter country, bridle chains and saddle leather, carrying far
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in the still air. He had been out of the lodge since dawn, sitting wrapped in a
blanket on a stump, because he had bullied Kiona into it with the only
argument that worked on her: that the soldiers must see him alive and upright
with their own eyes, or they would write whatever suited them.
"He rides today," she had said to Sekan, "because the paper needs his mouth.
Tomorrow he does not ride. If he argues, I will put him in the blankets
myself and sit on the blankets."