hive knows a liar. I have thought about that considerable, over the years. A
hive knows a liar. There's a sermon in it somewhere, only I never found the
text."
Sekan's eyes opened.
They were dark and they were focused, and they found Elias's face and
stayed there, and Elias went still the way a man goes still when a wild thing
has come close of its own accord and any movement is a kind of theft.
"How long," Sekan said. His voice was a ruin. "The storm."
"Three days, near enough. Maybe into the fourth. I lost the count at the
window." Elias poured water and held the cup where the man could reach it
or not. "Drink, if you can. Slow."
Sekan drank. Not from Elias's hand, in the end — he took the cup himself,
with both hands, spilling some, drinking all, and the taking of it was so
plainly a victory claimed that Elias had to look away at the stove to hide
22
what his face was doing.
"The leg," Sekan said.
"It hurts," Elias said. "That's the truest thing I can tell you, and it's good news
wearing a bad coat. Dead flesh doesn't hurt. Yours does. There's a thread of
blood-poison climbing it that I don't like, and I'm fighting it with hot water
and bark and stubbornness, and this morning it's no higher than it was. That's
where we stand."
Sekan considered this with the gravity of a man being read a treaty. "You
talk straight," he said. "For a—" He stopped.
"For a white man," Elias said. "You can say it. I've heard worse in this room,
and some of it from you, only you were asleep for it."
For the first time, something moved in Sekan's face that was not pain. It did
not reach a smile. But it stood in the doorway of one.
"Then I will say it," Sekan said. "You talk straight, for a white man." He
shifted, and his breath hissed. "Now help me sit. I am tired of the ceiling. The
ceiling has nothing to say."
"My knife," Sekan said, before Elias could begin the work of him. "When
you carried me. It was in my hand, on the creek. Where is it now?"
It was in Elias's pack, wrapped in oilcloth with the rest of what he had taken
off the snow that day, and they both knew why a man might keep it there,
and neither of them said it. Elias went and got it and stood a moment with it
in his hand — a good knife, heavy in the haft, horn-handled, kept sharp
enough to shave with — and then he laid it on the stool beside the bunk,
close enough that Sekan could reach it without shifting the leg, and he
stepped back and put his hands to the stove as if the stove had called him.
23
Sekan looked at the knife. He looked at Elias's back. He reached out, slow
with weakness, and drew the knife an inch closer to the bunk's edge, no
more, and let his hand fall.
"A man gives back the knife," he said, "or he keeps it. Both are answers. I
have had the keeping kind of answer from your people, in offices. I have not
had the other kind before." He was quiet a breath. "Now. Help me sit,
trapper. Before I grow roots into this bunk like a tree, and you must feed me
broth forever."
Sitting up took the rest of the morning, in stages, like a negotiation. Elias got
him propped on blankets with his back to the wall and the leg straight out on
the bunk, and brought the broth in the tin cup, and held it out — and then,
understanding something, set it down on the stool within Sekan's reach
instead, and went to mend the harness strap that did not need mending, with
his back turned, and listened to the small sounds of a proud man feeding
himself for the first time in days: the cup lifted, the pause to master the
spoon, the swallow, the breath. He did not turn around until the cup was
empty and set back down with deliberate care, the way a man sets down a
thing he has decided not to throw.
"You cook like a soldier," Sekan said.
"I've been told worse."
"The jerky. It is cut with the grain. A man who cuts with the grain is in a
hurry or does not know meat."
"I know meat," Elias said. "I'm in a hurry. There's a storm."
"The storm is three days old. You are just a man who cuts with the grain."
But he said it without malice, almost with the air of a man filing a fact in a
ledger he kept — and Elias, who was himself a keeper of ledgers of a kind,
24
recognized the habit and did not mind it. Let him file. A man filing facts
about you was a man planning to live long enough to use them.
That afternoon Sekan slept clean sleep for the first time, no fever in it, and
woke in the gray light with his mind clear and his questions ready. Elias
could see them arrive in him in order, like riders coming up a trail in single
file, each in its turn.
"You are a trapper," Sekan said. It was not quite a question.
"I trap some. I hunt meat for the post when they'll pay for it. I keep to myself
the rest."
"Your traps. I have seen your pack. Good steel. Not many." A pause worn