of the riders, though he had sense enough for that, but of the weight settling
onto his shoulders, familiar as a pack saddle. Responsibility. He'd carried it
once before, all the way to the bottom of a flooded valley, and it had nearly
killed him to set it down. He wasn't sure he could pick it up again.
"You don't have a choice," he said aloud, to the fire, to no one. Slate blew
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softly through his nostrils in the dark, as if in agreement, and Silas almost
smiled.
That night the fever came.
It started as a chill, though the night wasn't cold enough for it. Saya shivered
under both his blankets, teeth chattering, and then the heat rose off her in
waves. Silas kept cool cloths on her forehead and dripped water between her
lips, and somewhere past midnight she began to talk in her sleep โ in her
own language, fast and frightened, and once, clearly, calling for her mother.
Silas sat with his back against the rock wall and listened, and the sound of it
opened a door in him he had kept barred for eight years.
Martha had sung while she worked. That was the thing he remembered first,
always โ not her face, which time had mercifully blurred at the edges, but
the singing. She sang over the washboard and over the stove, old hymns and
nonsense songs, and Lucy had sung with her, six years old and off-key and
delighted with herself, standing on a stool to reach the counter.
Piedra Creek had been running high that spring. Everybody knew it. The
snowmelt was late and heavy, and Silas had ridden out at dawn when the
word came that the old bridge was groaning, to warn the families
downstream โ the Jensens, the widow Larkin, the Mexican sheepherders in
the bottom pasture. Martha had wanted him to stay. Lucy had clung to his
coat at the door.
He had promised to be back before dark.
The storm came faster than anyone expected. A wall of water off the high
country, brown and roaring, took the bridge and the bottom pasture and the
cabin in a single afternoon. By the time Silas fought his way back up the
valley, there was nothing to fight his way back to but scoured mud and
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splintered cottonwood.
They found Martha three days later, a mile downstream. Lucy was beside
her, under the big cottonwood that still stood at the bend. Silas buried them
both there, side by side, and carved their names into a plank with his
skinning knife, and then he kept living, which was the part he had never
forgiven himself for.
People said the flood was nobody's fault. People said the families he warned
owed him their lives. Grief was not a fair judge, and for eight years it had
condemned him every morning, and he had never once appealed the
sentence.
Now, watching this stranger burn with fever in the firelight, he felt the old
terror come up out of the dark like a second flood. What if he failed again?
What if he had promised โ to himself, to no one โ more than he could
deliver, and another person died with his hands on them?
"Stay with me," he whispered. It was not a prayer. He had stopped praying
eight years ago. It was an order, given to no one who could hear it.
Her hand moved on the blanket. Found his wrist. Held on.
"Don't let them take me," she murmured, eyes still closed.
"They won't."
"You don't know what they want."
"Then tell me."
But she was gone again, down into the fever, and he sat with her hand on his
wrist until the sky went gray at the rim of the canyon.
Morning came cold and clean. The fever had broken a little โ her skin was
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damp now instead of dry-hot, which he took for a good sign, having seen the
same turn in a sick calf once. She woke near midmorning, eyes clear for the
first time, and looked down at her bandaged leg, and then up at him, and
said, "Who wrapped this?"
"I did."
She unwound a corner of the bandage, peered at his stitching, and made a
face. "It's ugly."
"It kept you from bleeding to death."
"It's still ugly. Did you boil the cloth?"
"Yes."
"Did you wash your hands?"
"With whiskey."
She stared at him. Then, to his astonishment, she laughed โ a short, pained,
genuine laugh. "Bring me my pouch," she said. "The one on my belt.
Carefully."
He fetched it. She opened it with fingers that trembled and laid out small
bundles of dried leaves and roots on the blanket, wrapped in cloth and tied
with sinew, each one distinct.
"I am a healer," she said, with simple dignity. "Of my people. Now listen,
because I will only say this once and your ugly stitches have earned no
second chances."
For the next hour she instructed him like a schoolmaster with a particularly
dull pupil. This bundle for washing the wound โ the leaves brewed strong,
cooled, used to clean. This one for a poultice โ pounded with a stone, mixed
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with clean fat, laid on thick. This root for fever โ chewed, not swallowed, or
brewed weak. And this one โ she held up a dark bundle and her voice went
flat โ "never touches an open wound. It closes the skin over poison. Men
have died smiling because someone used this wrong."
Silas listened, and repeated back, and did exactly as she said. He told her
what he was going to do before he did it โ "I'm going to lift the bandage
now," "this will sting" โ and after the third time she watched him with an
odd expression.
"You ask permission for everything."
"Seemed polite."
"Most men would not."
He met her eyes. "Then most men ought to learn."