meant to be kept, or to soften what the council said so the fort hears
something easier, I'll refuse, and I'll say in both languages why I'm refusing.
And I don't speak for the band. I'll carry what the council gives me to carry. I
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won't stand in the fort and decide what the band would accept. A man who
starts deciding for other people what they'll accept ends up guiding
columns." He stopped. "Those are the terms."
Sekan was quiet a moment, and then something moved in his face that was
not quite a smile, the way a crack in creek ice is not quite the thaw. "My
father said to tell you his terms, and to tell you them after yours, so that you
would hear that he thought of his first." He shifted the cane against his knee.
"His terms are these. You will eat in our camp as a man eats who works for
us, not as a guest who is being thanked. You will not be thanked. Thanks is
for a finished thing, and this is not a finished thing, it is a life. When you are
wrong you will be told so in council and you will answer there, like Nitis
answers, like I answer. And when the agency pays you, you will take the
pay." He looked up. "He said you would try to refuse the pay, map-maker.
He said the refusing of pay is a white man's ceremony for keeping a debt
alive, and he is finished with your ceremonies."
Elias laughed, a real laugh this time, the second one of the winter, and
noticed that both of them had come easier than any had in four years. "Tell
your father his terms are harder than mine and I'll meet them anyway. Tell
him yes."
"I will tell him the terms were agreed." Sekan rose, and got the cane under
him, and at the door he stopped, in the way of a man whose errand has a tail
to it. "He also said to say that the position has a name in the agency book.
Interpreter. It is a poor word. In our language I told him you would be called
the man who reads the paper aloud. He said that was a better word, and to
use it." He went out into the mud and the false thaw, and led his horse down
the pitch at a walk, the cane finding its places, unhurried, a man crossing his
own country at the speed his life now went.
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March came in with wind and went about its business of loosening the world.
The ice on the East Fork went rotten at the edges and then broke in the night
with a sound like distant musketry, and Elias, asleep in the small room
Whitfield had assigned the interpreter at the agency, woke knowing what the
sound was before he was fully awake, and lay listening to the water take the
creek back. He had kept the line cabin. A man should keep a door of his own,
Tolin had said, when the matter of his lodging came up in council, and then
had added, with the straight face that in the old headman passed for humor,
that a man with no door of his own would be underfoot in other men's.
The work settled into his days the way a trail settles into a hillside, by being
walked. Paper came down from the fort and up from the settlements,
requisitions and ration counts and a long letter from a territorial delegate that
took Elias the better part of an afternoon to render honestly, because the
letter had been written to sound like a promise while committing its writer to
nothing, and rendering it honestly meant letting the council hear the hollow
place in the middle of it. He read it all, twice, and then a third time when
Tolin asked, and the old man nodded at the third reading as a man nods at a
stream he has decided not to cross. "That is not a bridge," Tolin said. "That is
a painting of a bridge." It went into the agency book that the council had
received the letter and would answer it in its own time, which was the truth,
and Elias wrote it in his fair round hand and felt the strange plain satisfaction
of a page with nothing hiding under it.
In the yard behind the agency schoolroom, on the afternoons when the sun
had any strength, he taught the camp's boys their letters. It had begun as
Whitfield's idea and become, within a week, Elias's own appointment with
himself. The agency book lay open on a bench between them, the great ruled
ledger where the band's names were written in clerks' hands, half of them
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spelled as they had sounded to a clerk who was not listening. The boys
leaned over their own names as over something that belonged to them and
had been kept in a strange house. Yano, who was nine and missing a front
tooth, traced his name with one finger and sounded it out and then, with the
fierce concentration of a boy signing a treaty, wrote it himself in the margin
in letters that leaned like saplings in a wind. Tse, older, skeptical of the
whole project, demanded to know what use the letters were, and Elias told
him the truth, that a man's name written wrong in the fort's book could cost
his family its rations and written right could not be argued with, and that