Chapter 2 — What the Tracks Said
He rode out the next morning to look at the far fence and to take the measure of the creek, and the prairie told him its news in the order the prairie always told it: first in tracks, then in rumors, and only last in words.
The creek pools were lower than they had been at week's start, each one ringed with the writing of everything that drank: deer, coyote, the fine stitch-work of birds, cattle hooves punching the mud to lace. Erik watered his mare at the largest pool and sat a while, letting her blow. North of the creek, where the bottom land began — the wide, grass-rich bottom that belonged to the Red Willow band by treaty, as every man in the valley knew whether he liked it or not — he could see the band's camp: a scatter of tipis, smoke rising straight in the windless morning, the pony herd grazing out under its guards like a slow brown river.
Only the herd was smaller than it should have been. Erik frowned and counted without meaning to, the way a farmer counts. In September the Red Willow herd had been four hundred head and better, the band's whole wealth, fat on the bottom grass. What grazed up there now was perhaps half that. And the camp had shifted — he could see fresh travois scars in the dry grass, drag-marks running west and coming back, as if the band had begun a move and then thought better of it, or begun one and been stopped.
He rode down into the bottom to read those scars at close quarters, because a thing seen from a hill is a guess and a thing seen from the saddle is a fact. The travois marks were plain: the band had loaded to move — lodgepoles dragging, bundles high — had gone west perhaps two miles toward the agency road, and had turned back, the return drag-marks scoring over the going ones. Turned back, or been turned. He sat his mare in the middle of that doubled track and thought about the annuity payment the autumn before, when he had stood at the agency fence and watched Gray Elk receive the government's beef and flour for his people, and the old chief had counted every sack aloud in front of the agent, unhurried, missing nothing, a man bookkeeping for a nation in a voice like slow water. Whatever had stopped that man's move, Erik thought, it had not been confusion. It had been a reason. A people does not unpack its whole life on the prairie for a whim, and it does not pack it again for one either.
He rode the fence line home by the long way, thinking, and at the section corner he found the second piece of news: tracks, many of them, crossing his own land at the northwest — horses in a bunch, driven hard, the prints deep and splayed, going from the bottom land toward Hay Coulee and the Flint claim beyond. Driven, not grazed. A man herding walks his horses loose and lets them string out; these had been pushed, at a trot, in the dark or near it, by riders whose own mounts' tracks flanked the bunch. He followed the sign a quarter mile out of plain stubbornness. Shod horses, the bunch. Band ponies went unshod. Whoever had driven those horses out of the bottom had ridden iron.
"Ja," he said aloud, to no one. "Ja, that is a thing to remember."
In the afternoon Nils came back from Prairie Center with the salt and the mail sack and the third piece of news, which was the rumor, and the rumor had outrun them all.
"Horses are missing all over," Nils said, unloading at the door. "Pederson lost six off his north pasture. The Widow Agard lost four and her boy's saddle pony. And in town they're saying—" He stopped, and looked at Erik, and chose his words the way a man chooses footing on ice. "They're saying the band's taken to raiding, Erik. They're saying that's where the horses went. Flint was in the store talking about it. He says the savages are stocking up to run for the north before the agency move, and settlers' horses are how they mean to do it."
"Flint says a great many things," Erik said. "Flint has plats drawn for a town on land that is not his. A man with a town to sell needs the land empty, Nils. Remember who profits when you hear who is blamed."
He told Nils about the tracks, then — the shod horses, driven hard, the bunch moving away from the band's bottom toward Hay Coulee; and about the pony herd halved, and the travois scars that ran out and came back. Nils listened with his mouth open.
"If the band was stealing horses," Erik said, "there would be more horses in the bottom, not fewer. A thief's storehouse fills. It does not empty."
"Will you tell them in town?" Nils asked.
"I will tell anyone who asks me what I saw," Erik said. "I will not ride in with a story half-read. Tracks are a page, Nils. I have read one page."
But all the rest of that day, at the fence work and at the trough and at the table after dark, the page stayed open in his mind: the driven bunch, the iron shoes, the halved herd grazing up the creek as if it were waiting for the rest of itself to come home. Fear was doing its work in the valley — that was the plainest track of all, and it ran through every farmyard and store porch between the creek and Prairie Center. It needed only a spark. Erik banked the stove, set the journal on the table unopened, and went to bed with the sound of the windmill turning over a farm that suddenly felt very small in a very large and frightened country.