"Say it the way you do everything," Tali said, swinging up onto the gray. "In work, and over time, and without making a speech of it."
"I'm making a speech of it now."
"I am allowing it," she said gravely. "It is the anniversary of you almost dying. A man is allowed some foolishness on his anniversaries. Ride, husband. The willows have grown more in a year than you have."
They rode down out of the canyon in the long light, the water talking beside them all the way, saying nothing that needed answering.
Chapter 30 — The Valley Holds
The household woke in the dark, the way it did on any morning that mattered. Weshka had the fire going and coffee on it before Wade's boots were laced, moving in the lodge dark with the certainty of a woman who had been awake, in some sense, since before he was born.
"A drive day," she said, "is a wedding day with worse food. Eat, grandson. The horses will not wait, and neither will my granddaughter, and she is the more dangerous of the two."
Tali came in from the horses with the cold still on her coat, ate standing the way she did everything on a working morning, checked the slate once against her own head, and was gone again to the herd before the light had properly arrived. Wade watched her go with the plain gratitude of a man whose wife was better at his own trade than he was, and who had long since made his peace with the arithmetic.
Wade walked down to the spring before the light on the morning of the drive, the way a man visits an old friend before a journey, and found it as he had found it every morning of the year: running clear.
The mended channel above the lower spring had grassed over until a stranger would have taken the bank for natural ground, root and stone knit together, and below the place where Vane's sluice had bled it the water came up cold and sweet out of the rock and went down through the cottonwoods in its own old course. A year's work — his work, the band's work, willow stakes and patience — had undone a ditch in a season. Wade cupped a palmful and drank, because some inspections are also ceremonies, and went up to the herd in the first gray light.
The gather was already moving. Forty head of Bar M horses, counted joint and tallied the night before, and the band's remuda with them for the fort remount contract — the second year of it, the price held fair, the riders' wages named in ink. The young men rode the edges of the herd in the dust and the cold early air, Kaslin among them with two of his cousins, no longer a man with anything to prove at another's expense, just a rider doing a rider's work in the open. Weshka stood by the gate with the count slate, though the counting was done, because some offices a person keeps for the dignity of the thing.
The gate count went the way their counts went — Wade reading the brands aloud, Weshka marking, the horses filing through in twos and threes with the dust rising around their legs. One of the contract colts tried the fence twice and was put right the second time by Kaslin, who rode him down without hurry and without temper and brought him back to the string with a hand on his neck, talking to him low, the way a man apologizes to a horse for the necessity of fences. A year ago Kaslin would have made a show of it. Now the camp barely looked up. Amends, Wade thought, are mostly that: a thing done right, at the ordinary hour, until nobody remembers there was ever anything to amend.
Tali rode point.
She went out ahead of the herd on Kaslin's gray mare, sitting the way she sat everything — easy, straight, reading the ground in front of the drive the way other people read print — and the herd took its order from her, horse-wise, the way herds do, and strung out behind her through the canyon mouth in the rising light. She was the best tracker and the best horsewoman in the valley and on that morning the whole camp could see her be it, at the front, where the work was.
Below the cottonwoods, where the ceremony ground ran down toward the spring, Tazlo stood and watched his daughter lead.
Wade reined in beside the old man and said nothing, because there was nothing in the moment that words would not have diminished. The chief watched the drive string out through the canyon throat — watched the point rider small and straight against the light, watched the dust rise gold, watched forty years of his people's road out of the valley opened by his own blood — and his face did what Wade had seen it do only once before, at a council fire, in the moment a question was asked twice: it rested. A father's face, with the growl all spent and nothing underneath it but the plain of pride.
"She rides like her mother," Tazlo said at last.
"She rides like herself," Wade said. "The valley just finally learned how to watch."
The old man grunted, which from Tazlo was as near to laughter as a son-in-law was ever going to be given, and turned back toward the fires and the morning.
Wade touched his horse with a heel and rode out to his place on the flank of the drive, where the dust was thin and the light was coming strong through the canyon mouth. Behind him the spring ran clear below its mended bank, and the lodges stood in their order, and the valley that a flood and a fraud and a father's hard law had all tried, in their turn, to empty — the valley held.
Ahead of the herd, small against the morning, Tali rode point, and led them out.
The End