see out of. Silas got a fire going small and hot, boiled water in his canteen
cup, and laid out what he had: a needle, gut thread, a bottle of whiskey he
kept for medicinal purposes and had never once drunk, clean rags torn from a
7
spare shirt. He had stitched calves and colts. He had set a mule's broken
foreleg once with splints and swearing. He had never worked on a person,
and his hands shook for the first minute until the work itself steadied them.
He cleaned the wound as best he could, picked out the worst of the grit,
stitched the deepest tear with six uneven stitches, and wrapped it tight in
clean cloth. She slept through it all, which worried him more than if she'd
screamed.
The stitching was the worst of it. The gut thread was meant for calves,
thicker than he'd have liked, and his needle was a darning needle, and twice
he had to stop and breathe through his nose and start again because his hands
wanted to shake and he wouldn't let them. He talked while he worked — not
to her, she couldn't hear him, but to himself, the way he'd talked himself
through a breech birth once, years ago, in a snowstorm, with a lantern going
out: "Steady. There. Again. Good."
When it was done he sat back and looked at his work and thought it was the
ugliest honest thing he'd ever made. Then he built the fire up a little higher
against the coming night, picketed Slate where the grass was best, and
inventoried what he had: jerky, hardtack, coffee, the whiskey, his spare shirt
now in rags around a stranger's leg. It would do. It had to do.
He'd doctored stock for twenty years. He knew the signs to watch for — the
heat, the red streaks climbing, the smell. He knew them the way he knew his
own name, and he hoped, to no one and to the canyon and to whatever
listened, that he wouldn't need them. When he was done he sat back on his
heels, wiped his hands on his thighs, and realized the sun had moved two
hours and his coffee had gone cold in the pot back at the cabin and none of it
mattered.
8
He was banking the fire for the night when he heard the hoofbeats.
Three horses. Maybe four. Coming up the canyon at an easy trot, unhurried,
the way men ride when they're looking for something and in no particular
hurry to find it — because they believe it can't get far.
Silas killed the fire with sand in one smooth motion and was behind the rocks
at the overhang's mouth with his revolver in his hand before the second
handful of sand had settled. Slate stood quiet in the shadows, trained to
stillness. Saya didn't stir.
The riders passed below on the canyon floor, not a hundred yards off. Silas
could see them through the juniper: three men, hats low, rifles across their
saddles. They weren't talking. One of them pointed up the side draw —
toward the trail where the trap had been — and they turned that way, and
after a while the sound of them faded into the rocks.
Silas waited a full half hour before he breathed easy. When he went to check
the trail at dusk, the trap was gone. Chain, drag iron, all of it. In the dust
where it had been, he found a cigarette stub, pressed flat, the tobacco in it
dark and sweet-smelling and expensive. Not the harsh shag the local hands
smoked. The kind of tobacco a man buys when money has stopped being a
consideration.
He stood there a long time with the stub in his palm. Then he pocketed it,
walked back to the overhang, and rebuilt the fire small.
Back at the overhang he sat with his back to the rock and thought.
A number-four trap on a foot trail. Chained, not staked — a drag iron, meant
to let the catch move a little and tire itself. That was a cruelty with a purpose:
whoever set it wanted the victim alive, or at least findable. And they'd set it
where no honest trapper would ever set steel, because there was nothing out
9
here with fur worth the trouble. Which meant it wasn't set for fur at all.
He'd seen traps set for men before. Down in the mining camps, during the
claim wars, when he'd been young and hauling freight through country where
the law was whatever the man with the most rifles said it was. Toe-poppers
on trails. Snares at water holes. It had been ugly then and it was ugly now,
and the ugliness had a particular smell he recognized: money, somewhere
behind it. Men didn't do this kind of work for sport. They did it because
someone was paying.
The question was what Saya had that was worth this kind of trouble. A
young Native woman, alone, a healer by her own account. Nothing about her
suggested money. But the riders had come looking, unhurried and confident,
and they'd taken the trap away with them when they found it empty — which
meant they didn't want questions asked about it, which meant they knew
exactly what it was for.
He checked his revolver by feel, the way his father had taught him —
cylinder, cartridges, the action smooth — and set it back in the holster. Then
he took the rifle and leaned it where he could reach it without sitting up, and
told himself he was being foolish, and didn't move it.
Saya slept on, her breathing shallow but even. In the firelight her face had
lost the gray cast of shock. He found himself watching the rise and fall of the
blanket and thinking, with a kind of distant surprise, that he was afraid — not