want found, and Elias caught himself, more than once, in the old
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maintenance, listening past the ordinary sounds of the cabin for the sound of
being found out. Then the listening would finish, and there would only be the
stove ticking as it cooled, and the wind in the chimney, and a quiet that asked
nothing of him. Only a quiet. He let it be one.
The coins were in a tobacco tin under the loose stone at the left of the hearth,
where the tin had sat, in this cabin and in camps before it, for four years,
wrapped in a square of oilcloth inside the tin, as if they were something that
might spoil. The last of his Salt Creek wages. The army had paid him in coin
for the guiding of Doren's column, and he had spent most of it in the ordinary
way in the months after, on meal and powder and the mending of gear,
before he understood that a remainder of it was still in his possession and
what the remainder was. After that he had not been able to spend it, and had
not been able to throw it away, and so it had ridden with him through four
years of camps and cabins like a stone a man carries in his pocket to remind
his hand of something.
He took the tin down on a morning in late January when the cold had locked
the creek solid enough to walk and the sky had the flat white look of more
snow coming. He unwrapped the oilcloth on the table. The coins were dull
with their years in the dark. He counted them out of old habit and then
stopped counting, because counting them was one of the ceremonies, and he
was done with ceremonies that had no one in them but himself and the dead.
He rode down to the agency store that afternoon with the coins loose in his
coat pocket, mixed in with two cartridges and a Barlow knife, which was
where money belonged. The storekeeper, a man named Hulse who weighed
everything twice and said little, set the scales going. Elias bought flour. He
bought salt, and coffee, and dried apples, and a side of bacon, and a length of
new rope, and a blanket of good weight, the kind with the stripe at the end,
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and a sack of the striped rock candy that Hulse kept in a jar by the scales for
the children of the agency employees. He paid for all of it out of the pocket,
coin by coin, until the pocket had nothing in it but the cartridges and the
knife. Hulse counted the coins the way he counted all coins, without interest,
and made his marks in the book, and that was the whole of it. No one in the
store knew anything had happened. On the ride home the pocket knocked
light against his leg at every step of the horse, and the sound of it, the
absence of the other sound, was so ordinary that he laughed once, out loud,
alone on the trail, at how ordinary it was.
The blanket and half the flour and the sack of candy went to the East Fork
camp two days later, left with Kiona at her fire without explanation, because
there was none that would have survived being spoken. The candy she
distributed with the gravity of a woman dividing something scarce and
important, one piece at a time, to a line of children who received it the same
way. Elias did not stay to watch. Some of the bacon he kept. The rope went
to work before the week was out, splicing a broken trace. The money was
gone into flour and rope and children's mouths, and into nothing else, and it
did not follow him afterward. He had carried it four years. Setting it down
turned out to be a smaller thing than carrying it had been. Most true things,
he was learning, were smaller than the lies a man built to hold them off.
He pulled his own line in the first week of February, going out in the hard
cold with the pack frame and bringing the traps home two and three at a time
across four days, hanging them in the lean-to in their old order. It was not a
decision he made sitting down. His hands made it, the way his hands had
made other decisions before his mind had finished arguing. The fur would be
prime for another month yet, and the money, such as it was, had kept him in
flour and powder through winters when nothing else would have. But
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walking the line had begun to feel like walking a sentence he had already
read, and every set he came to, sprung or holding, he saw now with the
map-maker's eye turned inward, saw the whole geometry of it from above,
the lure and the approach and the place where a living thing's attention would
be gathered to the one point where the iron waited. He had understood traps
all his life as tools. That winter he understood them also as arguments, and he
was no longer willing to make that particular argument to the country.
He did not make a ceremony of it, and he did not make a speech of it to the
empty cabin. He cleaned the traps and oiled them and hung them in a row,
because tools kept in order are not the same as tools abandoned in guilt, and