Now the column came around the bend of the East Fork: Lieutenant Owen
Marsh at the front on a leggy bay, eleven troopers behind in two files, a clerk
from the agency riding mid-column with his document case strapped behind
his saddle, and two pack mules at the rear, one loaded with survey and record
gear — chains, stakes, a theodolite in its box. Paper, and the instruments of
paper. Whitfield had not come himself. Whitfield, Elias thought, was a man
who liked records the way other men liked alibis: best prepared by somebody
else.
Marsh reined up at the edge of the camp and dismounted and came forward
on foot, which was correct of him, and Elias saw the young officer take in
the camp in one professional glance — sixty souls, lodges in good order,
children being drawn back out of the way of the horses — and then take in
Elias, and stop.
"Mr. Ward." Marsh's voice was carefully neutral and not entirely successful.
"You were to meet us at the trail junction. You appear to have been — " He
looked at the blanket, the gray face, the bandage showing at the collar.
"Shot."
"Grazed," Elias said. "My mare wasn't. She's on the trail above Cedar Creek
where they left her, Lieutenant, if your men want to look at the hole in her.
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Rifle shot, from above, on a trail your patrol was announced to use. Vail
knew my statement existed before the ink on it was a day old. I'd like the
clerk to write that down too, while his pencil's fresh."
The clerk, a thin young man with ink already on his cuff, wrote it down.
Marsh's face settled into the expression of an officer who has decided to do a
thing properly or not at all. "It will all be written down, Mr. Ward. That is
what we are here for." He turned as Tolin came out of his lodge with Sekan
and Nitis at his back, Sekan on the cane, upright as a fence post. The sheath
hung in the lodge; Sekan wore his own knife, and carried himself like a man
who had left the most important thing he owned behind on purpose, as a
promise to come back for it. The agreement was restated in front of
everyone, so no one could later misremember it: Elias would guide; Sekan
and Nitis would ride as the band's witnesses under the patrol's protection,
their testimony recorded in the clerk's book in their own words; the line
would be walked, marked, and recorded from its first set to its last.
The horse they gave Elias was a troop horse, a broad sorrel gelding with a
mouth like iron and no opinions, and getting onto him was a piece of public
humiliation he performed with as little drama as he could manage, which was
not little. He used the stump. Kiona held the reins and did not assist him in
any way that showed, except that the horse stood like a statue, which horses
do not do for strangers, and he understood she had arranged even that. Sekan
mounted one-handed off his good leg with the cane slung across his back on
a thong, and Nitis held his horse's head for him without being asked, the way
kin do things.
"You know what you look like," Nitis said to Elias, as the column formed up,
"riding at the front of soldiers again, map-maker?"
"I expect I do," Elias said.
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"Good," Nitis said. "Then it costs you the right amount." He grinned, sudden
and brief, and took his place.
It cost. He had ridden at the front of a column once before, four winters past,
in the dark before a January dawn, his knowledge in his mouth like a stone
he had agreed to carry for Captain Doren. Now he rode in full daylight, and
every sound the column made was the innocent music of men going to look
at something. The difference was everything, and it did not make the riding
one degree easier. His body remembered the old posture before his mind
could stop it — the forward hunch of the guide, eyes quartering the ground
for sign — and each time he caught himself at it something in him flinched.
To guide soldiers was his trade and his ruin in a single motion of the hands
on the reins. He kept them still, and spoke only when there was something
true to point at.
"You're white as the snow, Mr. Ward," Marsh said quietly, riding up beside
him where the trail widened. "If you fall off that horse I shall have a devil of
a report to write."
"If I fall off this horse, Lieutenant," Elias said, "pick me up and tie me on. I
owe too many people the end of this ride."
Something in the young officer's regard changed: not warmth, exactly, but a
revised estimate. "Then we ride it to the end," Marsh said, and fell back to
his place.
The line began where Elias had known it would begin, at the old cottonwood
above the second crossing, and it began with the smell before the sight: the
rank, iron-and-musk stink of a baited set, carried down the frozen creek. He
reined the sorrel in and pointed with his chin. "There. Under the bank, where
the ice shelves. That's set number one, Lieutenant — you'll find the season
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on this line runs whenever Vail says it runs."
They worked it the slow way, the thorough way, the way that makes paper