he was not interested in guilt's housekeeping either. If the winter after this
one found him needing the line again, the line would be there, and the need
would be an honest one and he would judge it then. For this winter the
lean-to could hold them, and the country along his old route could go
unharvested, and the martens and the fishers could run their dark roads under
the snow without his handwriting at the end of them. He came home from the
last trip out with two traps on the frame and his hands numb through the
gloves, and he hung the pair beside the others and stood looking at the row of
them in the lean-to's gloom, eleven traps, oiled and still, and felt nothing that
required a name, which was itself a kind of finding. The quiet in the cabin
that night was the same quiet as the night before. It had simply acquired one
more room.
Sekan came to the cabin in the last week of February, on a day when the
thaw had begun its first false start and the trail was mud over ice, the worst
traveling of the year. He came on foot, leading his horse up the last steep
pitch rather than riding it, his cane working in his free hand, and Elias
watched him from the doorway and did not go down to meet him, because
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going down to meet him would have been a comment on the leg, and the leg
was not a thing either of them commented on anymore.
Sekan tied off at the rail and came up onto the porch and stamped the mud
from his good foot and most of it from the other. His leg had healed the way
the agency doctor had said it would, which was to say it had healed into
something permanent. The cane was ash wood, cut and smoothed by Sekan's
own hand, and he used it the way a man uses a tool he respects, without
apology and without decoration. He had walked into Elias's life out of a steel
trap with his leg in ruins, refusing help at knifepoint. He walked now with
the ruin folded into him, a fact of his gait, the way the scar on a tree is a fact
of the tree.
They ate. Elias had become, in the winter's quiet, a tolerable cook of plain
things, and he set out stew and coffee and the last of the store bread, and they
ate it the way they had learned to eat together, with the talking saved for
after, as if talk were a course that came later and should not be rushed.
"My father sent me," Sekan said, when the bowls were empty. "He could
have sent Nitis. He sent me because the words are about you, and he said the
words about a man should be carried by the man who knows him, not the
man who is quickest on a horse." He turned his cup in his hands. "The
agency is going to pay for a man to stand between the band and the fort.
Whitfield asked my father's leave to name you, before he named you
anywhere else. That is why I am here and not a clerk with a paper."
Elias waited.
"The work is this," Sekan said. "When paper comes from the agency, you
read it to the council, all of it, including the parts that are bad. When the
council sends words to the fort, you carry them and say them as they were
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given to you, not softened. When the fort's people come to the camp, you
stand there, so that nothing is said in one language that cannot survive being
said in the other. Whitfield will pay you from the agency, wages like a
scout's wages, every month, on the book. My father says a man who is paid
in the open can be trusted in the open. A man who does favors can be
suspected of them."
It was work for a map-maker's skills turned to a different use. Elias had spent
his knowledge of this country, for years, in the service of men who wanted to
move through it quickly and leave nothing behind but their own version of
events. He had read trails for a column riding to a sleeping camp. He had
read paper for no one. To read the country now for the people the country
belonged to, and to read the fort's paper for them word by word, neither
adding nor taking away, was the same set of skills with the direction of them
reversed, and he felt the rightness of it in the place where he had once felt
only the shape of his own guilt, which was not the same place at all, though
they were neighbors.
"There are terms," Elias said. "Mine. You can carry them back with my
answer, and if your father doesn't like them, the answer changes."
Sekan nodded, unsurprised. "Say them."
"I'll read paper exactly as it's written. Even when I think the paper is wrong,
even when I think the council would be better off not hearing a sentence of it.
The day I start choosing which parts of the truth to carry, I'm no use to
anyone, and I've had my fill of that trade. If Whitfield, or any officer after
Marsh, asks me to carry words to this camp that I know are not the words