Erik said nothing. He stood by the well with the letter inside his coat and watched the wagon load, and felt the strange flat quiet that comes when a thing that has been wound tighter and tighter for days finally stops winding. Nils, beside him, blew out a long breath. "Han snakker sant, da," Nils said under his breath — he speaks true, then — and Erik nodded, once, at the wagon, at the yard, at all of it.
Chapter 24 — The Move
They were ready to move by the second morning, because that is the way of her people when a thing is decided: it is done wholly, and at once, and without looking over the shoulder.
Mila walked the camp ground at the farm's edge in the hour before the light, where her father's people had slept two nights under truce, and counted what a girl of the horse guard counts without thinking: the picket lines struck, the travois poles lashed, the lodge covers folded in their order, the old women already at the cook fires with the last of the agency flour. Her left arm was bound tight to her side under her dress, the graze beneath it a hot line that complained at every reach, and she did not reach with it. She had learned the wound's terms the way you learn a horse's — what it would allow, and what it would not, and no arguing.
Her father waited by the horse lines with a gift in his hand that was not a gift: a lead rope, and on the end of it a bay gelding, deep-chested, quiet-eyed, one of the herd's best that had come out of the coulee with its band brand old and clean on its hip.
"You rode out with the herd as a guard," Gray Elk said. "You come home from that duty on foot, three days, with your blood on the grass. It is not the way back that a guard should have." He put the rope in her good hand. "This one is yours. From your father's herd and your father's hand. Ride with your people today, Kimimila. Not behind them."
"I walked into that farm afoot and half-dead of thirst," she said, "and I ride out of it on my father's horse. There are worse balances in this world, até."
"There are," he said. "Your friend's well is one of the better ones." He said it plainly, the way he said all true things, and she knew he counted Erik Halvorsen's well among the balances of her life and had decided its weight himself. "Come. The snow will not wait for our farewells, and there is one farewell still owed at the farm."
Before the rope was in her hand she had done the other work of the morning, the work nobody assigns and everybody notices when it is left undone. She had gone to the lodge of the horse guard's widows — for two of the guard had wives, and those women had spent three days not knowing if their men were dead or only scattered — and carried them word herself, from her own mouth, of how their husbands had fought the herd's taking and lived. She had sat with old Winyan, who had no English and pretended to have no patience, and drunk the bitter tea and been scolded for the state of her arm in the tone her people use for love. And she had stood a moment alone at the picket line where the herd horses stamped and blew in the cold, and put her forehead, briefly, against the neck of a mare she had helped foal two springs past, and said nothing at all, because some accounting is not done in words.
That was the balance she carried to the horse lines: the herd whole, the guard alive, her father's name standing clean in a record white men would keep in their own courthouse. Against it, one arm that would be months mending, a winter at the agency instead of the winter camp, and a valley she had crossed three days afoot that she would now cross again in four days' riding, with her people's whole life packed on poles behind horses. She found the account, on the whole, better than it had any right to be — because of a well, and a man who had drawn water before he asked questions.
She swung up — carefully, with her brother Mato's knee for a step and her good arm doing the work — and settled into the saddle with the small private triumph of a thing done that six days before could not be done at all. The bay stood like a stone until she asked him, and then he went like water. Around her the camp was dissolving into motion: the herd drifting out under Mato's riders, the families falling into their traveling order, the dogs ranging, the children set atop the travois loads like small bright cargo. The agency was four days. Beyond it, winter, and the ration house, and whatever the next year asked.
She rode the length of her people's readiness once, slowly, the way her father had taught her to ride a camp before a move — looking for the unlashed bundle, the limping horse, the child uncounted. A cousin waved. An old woman — her mother's sister — lifted a hand from a travois and called something teasing about daughters who go visiting farmers and come back with stories, and Mila laughed, and the laugh did not hurt, and she marked that too among the balances.
She thought of the farm as she rode the camp's length: the sod house smelling of coffee and lamp oil, the trough she had fallen against half-dead and the hand — a stranger's hand, an enemy's on every paper — that had lifted the dipper to her mouth before it asked her name. Whatever the winter asked of her people, she would carry that with her into it: proof, from the inside of her own worst week, that the papers lied about more than horses.