paper was a country too, and the band would need men who could walk in it.
Tse considered this and then wrote his name four times, each time straighter.
Sekan crossed the yard during these lessons more often than his errands
required, the cane ticking on the hard ground, going from the corrals to the
storehouse or from nowhere in particular to somewhere else he had just
remembered, and Elias understood that he was being inspected, the way a
man inspects a fence he helped build, not doubting it, just wanting to see it
standing. Once, pausing, Sekan looked over Yano's shoulder at the leaning
letters and said, "When I was his age I was learning to read sign in mud. My
son will learn mud and this." He said it without sorrow, as a statement of
addition, and went on across the yard, and the limp went with him, neither
hidden nor displayed, simply the way he crossed a yard now.
Kiona made her judgment known in her own time and her own manner. She
had watched Elias come and go in the camp for a full moon of his
employment without granting him any particular notice, which Elias had
learned, in that camp, was itself a form of notice. Then, one evening when he
had stayed late over a ration count and been fed at her fire because leaving a
man unfed at dusk was not done, she set a bowl in front of him and said, to
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Sekan, in her own language, in Elias's hearing, with her eyes on her work,
that the white man had been in her camp so long now that the dogs no longer
announced him, and when the dogs stop announcing a man, a wife begins to
count him among the furniture.
Sekan translated it with a straight face and added nothing, and Elias, who had
been announced by dogs in that camp for two winters, understood that he had
been given something and received it accordingly, gravely, as furniture
receives a place by the fire. "Tell her furniture that eats this well will try to
be worth its place," he said, and Sekan translated, and Kiona made the sound
that in her was a laugh let out through the nose, and refilled his bowl, which
was the whole ceremony.
The horse he chose in the second week of March, out of a string of agency
remounts that Whitfield, with a clerk's flourish, authorized him to buy at the
government's price because an interpreter afoot was an interpreter always
arriving late to his own work. He walked the string twice. He passed over a
handsome black that threw its head and a leggy sorrel that wanted to be
somewhere else, and he stopped at a bay mare standing at the end of the
corral with her hip cocked and one ear turned toward him, five years old by
her teeth, unremarkable in every way except that when he ran his hand down
her legs she stood for it like a table stands, and when a crate fell off the
loading platform with a crack like a shot she moved exactly one step, the
sensible step, and then blew out her breath and looked for what had made the
noise. A horse that takes the one sensible step, Elias thought, and no more
than one. He had ridden a gray mare over half this territory whose courage he
had never once had to doubt, and Ash was dead in a box canyon with the
ambush's bullets in her, and no horse was going to be asked to be Ash. This
one would be asked to be herself, and she had just shown him, in one step
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and one breath, a fair part of who that was.
He named her Juniper, for the trees that held the hillsides all winter and
asked nothing of the weather. She learned his weight in a day and his habits
in three, and by the end of the week she was picking her way down the East
Fork trail with the care of a horse who understood that the man on her back
read ground for a living and would notice if she didn't.
In Tolin's lodge, on an evening when the council had finished its business
and the talk had gone down to the low fire of old accounts, Elias saw the
sheath. He had last seen it in other circumstances, in the autumn, when it had
come back to the family across a distance of grief that no one had measured.
It lay now on a folded blanket among the lodge's kept things, with Tolin's
pipe and a medal from some forgotten treaty year and a pair of spectacles the
old man used for looking at paper he pretended not to read. It was not
displayed. It was not hidden. It was at rest, in the place where a family keeps
the things that are finished being carried and are not finished being kept, and
Kes, who had died at seventeen in a winter creek with his death hidden under
ice by men who feared what the telling would cost them, had his small
beaded sheath lying in his father's house in the firelight, and Elias looked at it
a moment and then looked at the fire, and Tolin saw him look, and neither of
them said anything at all, and the not saying was complete.
The month turned. The thaw took hold in earnest, the creeks running brown