without patches, and he did not hesitate, which surprised him, and then did
not surprise him, because a shirt was a shirt and a leg was a leg — and bound
it all firm and straight and put the blanket roll under the heel so the foot hung
free.
"There," he said. "Rest now."
Sekan's eyes were open but they were not seeing the room. They were seeing
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the place the fever had taken him, and his mouth moved, and the words that
came were Apache and too fast and too low for Elias's workable knowledge
to hold more than a piece of. A name, twice. Not Kiona — Elias would learn
that name later, and learn to be careful with it. The name in the fever was
shorter. One syllable, called the way you call across water.
Kes.
He did not know it yet for what it was. He wrote it down nowhere. He only
heard it, and sponged the man's forehead, and heard it again an hour later,
weaker, and understood that wherever Sekan had gone in the heat of his
blood, there was a boy there, and the boy was not answering.
On the second night the wind found the roof.
It came off the Mogollons in a long pour, as if the whole winter had been
gathered up there in the high country and tipped, and the cabin — a line
cabin, built by other men's hands forty winters gone for a cattle outfit that no
longer ran stock this high — groaned in its corners and shed its snow load in
sliding rushes that made Sekan start up out of the fever, fighting, once, so
hard that Elias had to put his weight across the man's shoulders and hold him
to the bunk while the bad leg kicked at the splints and the fresh bandages
spotted through.
"Easy. Easy now. It's the roof. It's only the roof letting go its snow. You're
inside. You're in a house. Hear me? A house."
Whether Sekan heard the words or only the tone, the fight went out of him
the way it goes out of a hooked fish — all at once, and into a stillness worse
than the fight. His hand found Elias's sleeve and held it. The grip was strong.
That was the thing Elias kept hold of, through that whole long night of wind:
the grip was strong. A dying man's grip is a child's grip, it wanders and
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forgets. Sekan's hand remembered what it was holding.
He sat with him until the breathing evened. Then he got up and fed the stove
and went out the door he had to dig free of drift — out into the black and the
horizontal snow — to the lean-to, where Ash stood hipshot and patient with
her rump to the weather, and he forked her hay and broke the ice on her
bucket and stood a moment with his hand on her warm neck, saying nothing,
being for a moment only a man with a horse in a storm, which was a bearable
thing to be.
Inside again, he made broth. Jerky cut fine and boiled down with the last of
an onion, salt, a spoon of fat. He ate standing at the stove. He spooned what
he could into Sekan between the bouts of shaking — three spoonfuls, four —
and what the man could not take, Elias drank himself, because waste was
waste and the storm was measuring them both now in wood and water and
food, and the accounts had to balance.
He slept in the chair with his boots on, in pieces, the way he had slept on the
trail in the old guiding years, one ear up. Every time the fire sank he was
awake before the cold could tell him. Every time Sekan's breathing changed
its rhythm he was awake before that too. The lamp burned low and he
trimmed it. Outside, the world had stopped being a place and become a noise.
On the third morning — if it was morning; the light at the one window was
the same gray at every hour, and time in the cabin was not kept by the sun
but by the stove's appetite and the wound's demands — the red thread had
climbed another inch.
Elias looked at it a long while. Then he got the whetstone and set about
putting an edge on his skinning knife, slow and thorough, not because he had
decided anything but because he understood that a man who might have to
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do a terrible thing should not have to do it with a dull blade, and that
preparing the knife was not the same as choosing. He put the knife away in
its sheath, clean and oiled, in the bottom of his pack, and he did not look at it
again, and he set himself to prove it unnecessary.
He poulticed the leg with a mash of boiled bark and clean cloth kept hot. He
got a full cup of water into Sekan, and then another. He talked — to the man,
to the room, to the mare through the wall, it hardly mattered — because he
had come to believe, without deciding to believe it, that the voice was a kind
of tether, and that men in fever followed voices back the way they followed a
rope hand over hand in the dark.
"My grandfather kept bees," he said, at some hour that might have been
noon. "In Ohio. Meanest man in the county and the bees loved him. He said a