"She will be here," Mato said, mounting. It was not hope. It was the way he said the sun would be up.
They rode the last miles to Hay Coulee in silence, each man alone with what the mare had told him, and the light was already going when Erik saw the cut of the coulee open in the plain ahead, dark as a held breath.
Chapter 17 — Hay Coulee
Erik had cut hay in the coulee in August, in the last of the wet weeks before the drought took hold, and he knew it the way a man knows the rooms of his own house in the dark.
It ran near two miles, east to west, a long green wound in the tableland, deep enough that a man standing on the rim could not see the bottom until he was near on top of it. There were two mouths. The west mouth was wide and easy, where the hay wagons had gone in and out, and where any herd would naturally be pushed. The east mouth was narrow and choked with brush and fallen cottonwood, a place a wagon could not pass — but horses could, one and two at a time, if they were led instead of driven. Erik had cursed that brush all August. He blessed it now, silently, in two languages.
They left their horses in a swale a half mile off, with the Caledonia boy to hold them, and went forward on foot in the last of the light, Erik and Mato and Nils and the Swede, spread out along the north rim like men looking for strays — which, Erik thought, in God's sight was exactly what they were.
The herd was there.
It filled the bottom of the coulee from bend to bend, a dark restless lake of horses standing hip to hip in the dusk, heads down to the cropped grass, now and then a ripple going through them as one pushed and another gave way. Erik had known the number in words since the parley. Knowing it in words and seeing it with his eyes were different countries. Several hundred horses. The wealth of a people, their winter, their legs, their name in the world — penned in a ditch on another man's claim, waiting for the snow to hide what had been done to them.
Nils breathed out something in Norwegian that their mother would have washed his mouth for.
"Count the guards," Mato said, and his voice had no temperature in it at all.
They counted together, patiently, the way you count anything that might kill you for a mistake. At the west mouth, where the wide track came down, there was a camp: a fire, a lean-to of wagon canvas, a rope corral with six saddled horses standing ready — ready saddled, Erik noted, which meant men who expected to move fast and in the dark. Four men around the fire. A fifth walked the rim on the far side with a rifle, slow, stopping often to look down at the herd and out at the plain. Five men, then, at the camp. There might be a sixth asleep in the lean-to. There might be a seventh they could not see. Erik chose to plan for seven and be grateful for five.
"Can you see brands?" the Swede whispered.
Two of the coulee horses had come up the slope on their side, grazing toward the rim. In the last light Erik could make out the mark on the nearer one's hip — the band's brand, clean and whole, like the mare's.
"Untouched," he said. "Every one of them, I'll stake my farm on it. They never meant to keep them. They meant them to vanish — agency-bound, blamed, and by spring nobody asking."
"Five men," Nils said, low. "We are five men counting the boy with the horses. And we've got — " he stopped.
"We have more than five men," Erik said. "We have Captain Alcott's company, and we have Gray Elk's riders, and we have the truth, which so far has been worth more than any of it. What we do not have is time. Look at the sky."
The northwestern sky had gone the color of a bruise, purple over iron gray, and the wind had changed its mind in the last hour and now came out of the north with an edge on it that smelled of distance and ice. Every man on that rim had lived by weather and read it the same: snow, and not a little of it, inside of two days, maybe inside of one.
"If the snow comes with the herd still in here," Mato said, "the band walks to the agency on foot, and the horses die in this ditch with the marks of my people on them, and Flint has his empty bottom and his paper town both." He turned his head and looked at Erik, and in the dusk his face was all patience and no mercy. "We take them at first light."
They withdrew the way they had come, slow, one at a time, never two sky-lined at once, and regrouped at the horses. The ride back was not to the farm — there was no time for the farm. At the cross trail above the creek, the Caledonia boy turned his horse toward Prairie Center with Erik's words written plain in his memory for Captain Alcott, and a second message riding in the same head for the council at the well: where the herd was, how it was held, and what the dawn would ask of both companies of men who wanted to be able to live in this valley afterward.
Then Erik, Nils, Mato, and the Swede made a cold camp in the cottonwoods at the east mouth's approach, with no fire, and ate jerky in the dark, and took the watches in turn — two enemies and two brothers, keeping each other alive until morning.