worth more than memory. Marsh dismounted men at each set: the trap hauled
up by its chain, the jaws sprung open with a lever and a curse, the bait
identified, the apparatus laid out on a groundsheet and entered in the clerk's
book — steel jaw trap, maker's mark ground half off with a file, set in a
baited cubby on the north bank of Cedar Creek, on the wrong side of the
reservation line. The surveyor's chain came out, the stakes went in with white
tape fluttering, and the clerk wrote, and wrote. Elias had trusted paper once,
and paper had marched him to Salt Creek. But this was paper of the other
kind: not paper that sent men somewhere in the dark, but paper that said
where a thing had been found, in the light, with names under it. As the stakes
multiplied up the creek like a small white fence of testimony, Nitis said at
last, low: "A man can move a trap in the night. He cannot move where the
clerk stood when he wrote it. The paper is a trap too. It just closes slower."
Set followed set up the frozen creek — seven, eleven, sixteen — some
sprung and empty, some holding their horror under drifted snow, once a bald
eagle, which made even the troopers go quiet. Every one of them on Apache
land by the Army's own survey, every one baited and set within sight of
water, where everything in a winter country must eventually come to drink.
By the fourteenth, the only sounds on the line were the chain, the clerk's
pencil, and the creek going secretly under its ice.
The hide cache stood at the head of the line where the creek forked, in a
dugout under the bank roofed with poles and sod, and Marsh had it opened
before all of them together, lanterns lit, so no one later could say a thing
about hands in the dark. The smell came out like a held breath released: salt
and fat and green hide and the chemical sweetness of the poison Vail dusted
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into the folds against insects. Beaver by the stack, otter, fisher, fox beyond
counting, the winter take of a whole watershed laid up in the dark like
money. And at the back, on a frame to itself, a hide too large and too pale at
the edges for anything that walked Cedar Creek, and Marsh stooping with the
lantern: "That is a buffalo robe, gentlemen. There has not been a buffalo
within two hundred miles of this creek in ten years. This was taken off
someone, or off someone's lodge." Beside him Sekan made no sound at all.
The clerk wrote it down. The clerk wrote everything down.
Last on the line, where the creek bent below the place Sekan had been
caught, they found the set Elias had been dreading and needing in equal
measure: sprung, old, the jaws rusted into their half-open snarl, the chain run
out to its anchor log. The blood was still there. Not red any longer — a
darkening in the ice at the creek's edge, sealed under the season like a fly in
amber, visible when Marsh's lantern man knelt and held the light low. No
one spoke for a while. Sekan stood looking down at it with his weight on the
cane, and what crossed his face was older and quieter than rage: a man
visiting the address of his own near-death the way you visit a grave, to
confirm the ground of it, to fix it in the record of himself.
"Write that it is his blood," Sekan said to the clerk, not to Marsh, and the
clerk looked up startled, and then, to his credit, wrote. "Write that the man
who owns the blood stands here and says whose trap it was. I say it. Sekan,
son of Tolin. The trap of Cyrus Vail, on the land of my people, in the winter
when my brother went under the ice." His voice stayed level, a testimony
voice, and Elias understood he had rehearsed it in the lodge through all the
days of fever and nursing, against this exact moment. "And write that I
walked to this place on a cane, in front of soldiers, to say it. So it will be
known I was not afraid to say it."
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"It is written," the clerk said, and showed him the page. Sekan looked at the
marks that were his words in another man's keeping, inclined his head the
smallest fraction, and turned away up the bank, and did not look at the trap
again.
Vail's camp lay a half mile above the cache, where the timber closed in black
and dense: two cabins of squared logs with sod roofs, a corral, a smokehouse,
and smoke rising lazy and confident from both chimneys, the smoke of men
who believe the country belongs to them. Marsh deployed his column the
way the book said — four men wide of the corral, four at the cabins' backs,
the rest in the open with carbines at the ready but not raised — and Elias
watched Vail come out of the nearer cabin with a tin cup in his hand and take
in the whole arrangement with the stillness of a man checking reality against
a rehearsal.
Cyrus Vail at forty-five was built like a stump, broad and dense, with a beard
going the color of old iron. He did not go for a weapon. He had the poacher's
first instinct perfected: a man can talk his way out of more country than he