The cabin when they reached it was cold as a cave, the light nearly gone,
snow beginning to sift down out of a windless sky in the straight lines that
mean a long storm. Elias got the fire going first and the man inside second, in
that order, because fire was the tool and the man was the work. He laid him
on the bunk built into the wall — his own bunk; he would take the floor and
think nothing of it — and cut away the rest of the legging and looked at the
leg in the lamplight with the fire roaring up behind him, and what he saw
made him quiet for a moment with his hands resting on his knees.
The bleeding had slowed but the wounds were deep and dirty with rust and
willow bark and creek grit, and the foot below them was the color that feet
turn when the blood has forgotten the road down. He washed the leg properly
this time, with warm water and lye soap, a slow and deliberate cruelty, and
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packed the tears with yarrow and clean linen from the shelf, and bound the
splint again over all of it, and then manipulated the ankle with great care to
see whether the bone had gone. It had not, or not wholly. The leg might live.
The man might live. Both decisions belonged to the fever that was already
coming up in Sekan like a tide — Elias could see it in the shine of his eyes
and feel it in the dry heat coming off him as he worked — and fever in a
closed cabin in a snowstorm, two days from any help that would help an
Apache, was a coin tossed in the dark.
He understood his choices with the clarity of a man reading his own ledger.
He could ride for the post surgeon, two days each way in this weather, and
come back to a cold cabin and whatever the fever had decided. He could ride
to the East Fork and carry word to Tolin's camp and let the man's own people
take him — down off the mountain on a travois in a snowstorm, with that
leg, which was a death sentence written in a fair hand. Or he could do what
he had already begun doing, which was keep the man here and tend him
himself, hour by hour, with his own hands in the wound. There was a time
when he would have weighed those choices like a guide weighing routes, by
distance and risk and the orders of the day. He did not weigh them now. At
Salt Creek he had kept his hands clean and his horse moving and had told
himself the work was not his, and he had lived inside that telling for three
years the way a man lives in a house with no windows, and he found,
kneeling by the bunk with the lamp lit and the storm coming down, that he
could not do it again. Not because the man was innocent, though he was. Not
because the trap was a crime, though it was. Because the country had put a
dying stranger across his path in the one place where riding on would make
him the thing he had decided, in a lamplit tent in 1868, never to be again —
and a man does not get an unlimited number of such decisions. This one he
would make with his hands in the work. If it killed them both, it would at
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least kill an honest man and a tended one.
Before he settled to the vigil he did one more thing. Sekan's knife lay where
it had fallen on the floorboards when he lifted the man onto the bunk. Elias
picked it up, wiped the blade clean of snow-melt and grit, and laid it on the
blanket within easy reach of Sekan's right hand. It was a courtesy, and it was
also a confession: I am not afraid of you, and I have no plan for you that a
knife would spoil. Sekan's eyes, half open, watched him do it. Neither of
them said anything about it, then or ever.
He made broth from the marten he'd skinned that morning, rich and salt, and
got a cup of it into Sekan a spoonful at a time, and then another, and whiskey
after — his own medicinal bottle, kept two years against snakebite and
company — watered half, which Sekan drank without complaint and then
regarded him over the cup with eyes that were too bright.
"You keep a good cabin," Sekan said. "For a man alone."
"I keep it for my own use."
"No one comes here?"
"No one comes here," Elias said. "That is the first rule of the place. You're
breaking it merely by bleeding."
A ghost of something moved in Sekan's face that in a healthier man might
have been humor. "Then I owe you for two things. The leg and the rule." He
drank again. "Tolin's camp is on the East Fork, two days in good weather.
When I do not come back they will follow my sign. They will find the blood
at the creek. They will find your drag marks in the snow." His voice was
thickening as the fever took the edges off the words, but the thought beneath
them stayed hard and clear. "My people will come looking, white man. You
should understand this. It is not a threat. It is weather. It is only weather that
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is coming."
"I'll keep an eye on the sky," Elias said.