"They will think you did it. The trap. The leg. A white man's cabin, a white
man's iron." Sekan's gaze drifted and came back, and the hand that had held
the knife all day came out from under the blanket and found Elias's wrist
where it rested on the bunk's edge, and closed on it, hot as a coal, strong as
the trap had been strong. "You should not have stopped."
The fever was on him and the words could have been fever talking, but they
weren't. For one moment Sekan was entirely lucid — Elias watched it
happen, the focus coming into the eyes like a man surfacing — and the grip
on his wrist was deliberate, a man leaving a message in the only hand
available. You should not have stopped. It was not ingratitude. It was
accounting. It said: you have bought something today whose price you do not
know, and I am sorry for you, and I am warning you, and I cannot stop it and
neither can you.
Elias looked down at the hand on his wrist. He thought of the tin under the
hearthstone eleven dollars and forty cents deep, and of a pencil moving over
foolscap in a lamplit tent, and of all the years since, arranged stone upon
stone so that no one could ask him anything. He thought of the drag marks
behind them in the falling snow, already filling, already pointing at his door
like a finger.
"I know," he said.
The storm came down the canyon an hour after Elias got the door barred, and
it did not knock. It leaned.
17
He heard it first as a change in the fire — the draw of the chimney going
strange, gusts shoving smoke back into the room in flat, choking breaths —
and then as a sound against the walls like something large and patient feeling
its way around the cabin, looking for the seam. Snow came through the
chinking in two places he had meant to mend in October. It sifted down in
fine white threads and melted on the floorboards and made dark coins of the
wood. He stuffed the cracks with rags and a strip of canvas off his pack and
did not think about October. October was a country he had lived in once. It
had nothing to do with now.
Sekan lay on the bunk with the leg up on a folded blanket, and by midnight
the fever had him.
Elias had seen fever in camps and in one bad winter in a line shack outside
Prescott, and he knew its arithmetic. It added itself up in the body hour by
hour. It took the strength a man had saved and spent it on heat. He kept the
room warm but not hot. He kept water by the bunk in a tin cup and lifted
Sekan's head when the shaking started and got small mouthfuls into him
between the clenched teeth, and most of it went down, and some of it went
on the blanket, and that was all right. There was no one to be clean for. There
was only the work.
The work was this: wood, water, and the wound. He said it to himself the
way he said the stations of any hard job, in order, because order was a rope a
man could hold. Wood — the pile by the door going down faster than he
liked, the lean-to stack buried to its middle in drift. Water — snow melted on
the stove in the black pot, strained through cloth, because the creek was a
rumor under ice and the axe work to reach it cost more than the melt did.
And the wound, twice a day, morning and dark, the splints loosened strap by
strap and the bandages peeled back slow where they had dried to the skin,
18
and the leg looked at hard in the lamplight, and smelled, because the nose
knew before the eye did.
The leg was bad. It had been bad since the trap. The teeth had gone in above
the ankle and the bone — Elias had set it by feel in the snow with Sekan's
knife at his throat, in the part of that day he already could not quite remember
in sequence — the bone had held, he believed, cracked maybe, not broke
through. But the flesh around the punctures was the color of a plum going
soft, and on the second day a red thread began to climb from the worst of the
holes, up the inside of the calf, patient as ivy.
He knew what the thread meant. He had seen it mean it twice. Once the man
had kept the leg and once he had not, and the difference had not seemed to
live in anything the nurses did. It lived in the man, or in God, or in the luck
of what had been on the iron. Elias washed the holes out with boiled water
cooled to bearable and a little of the whiskey he kept for medicine and did
not drink, and Sekan, deep in the fever, made a sound through his teeth that
was not quite a word, and Elias said, "I know it. I know. It's a clean hurt.
Better than a dirty one," and went on, because talking was a thing a hand
could do while the other hands worked.
He re-splinted with fresh willow wands because the first set had warped with
the wet, padded with strips of his spare shirt — the good shirt, the one