The old chief's face did something then that no statecraft could hide. "Ja," he said — and Erik understood, startled, that the old man had taken the word off the air between them, off three days of talk at this farm, or off some Norwegian trapper fifty winters back. "I know whose daughter she is."
Gray Elk turned his horse. But before he rode back to the rim, he stopped and looked once more at the house, and Erik saw the father pass over the chief like weather over a field.
"She was my youngest," Gray Elk said, quietly, for Erik alone. "Her mother is gone. Whatever she tells the council — see that they let her finish it."
Chapter 8 — The Chief's Daughter
Mila heard her father's voice through the sod wall, low and even, doing business, and she knew from the sound of it that he had come as a chief and not as a father, and that this was her doing and her shame and her one chance, all three at once.
She had been listening since the first horse blew in the dark. She had dressed sitting down, because standing made the room lean; she had bound her arm again herself, tight, with her teeth helping the good hand, the way the guard women taught each other. The graze burned like a brand laid along the bone. Three days of walking had put a kind of hollow music in her knees, and the good food of this house — coffee, salt pork, bread with crust — sat in her strange and heavy. She was a woman made of other people's mercies this morning, and she hated it with a clean, useful hatred that got her to her feet.
The brother, Nils, stood by the stove pretending not to watch her. Erik came in from the yard with the empty bucket, and he looked at her standing and did not say what a white man usually said — he did not say, you should not, you cannot, lie down. He set the bucket by the door and waited, and she understood that he had already given her father his answer, and that the answer had been she will come on her own feet.
"He asked for me to speak before the council," she said.
"He asked that you choose the hour." Erik's face was hard to read as always, but his voice was not. "He says you will not be fetched out like a sack of meal. His words."
Her eyes filled, treacherously, and she looked at the wall until they cleared. Her father had ridden with hundreds to stand silent around a white man's farm, and his whole demand was that she walk out of it upright. "Then the hour is now," she said. "Help me with nothing. If your hand is under my arm in the doorway, the young men will see a captive. If I fall —" she drew breath — "if I fall, let me fall in the open where my father can see I was walking."
"And if you fall, I pick you up," Erik said, "and let them think what they think. Agreed."
She almost smiled. "Agreed."
The yard was cold and bright. She walked it slowly, each step a decision, the gravel loud under her moccasins, Nils opening the gate wide and standing back from it like a man holding a door for a queen. At the well she stopped, because her father had come down from the rim again with the councillors, and she stood between the white man's house and her people's line, in the middle of the ground, where a person speaking truth ought to stand.
She spoke first in Lakota, because the council was hers before it was anyone's, and her voice — she made it — her voice did not shake.
She told it straight, the way the guard had taught reports since she was a girl small enough to ride the herd's edge. The last night in the winter camp ground. The herd quiet, the guard set, her brother Mato on the far side with the young men. Then horses coming wrong in the dark — not walking, driven, a rush of noise out of the coulee — and white voices, and shooting, not at men but up and wide, to burst the herd and scatter the guard. She told how she had run for the lead mares to turn them and seen the men plain in the muzzle-flashes: white men, not soldiers, no paint, no feathers, men dressed as any men dress, and the one giving orders close enough that she would know his face again in any light God made. She told how the bullet took her arm as she turned, how her horse went down thrashing in the dark, how she had gone into the grass on her belly and lain still while the herd went past like a river, and how she had walked three days after that, following water she could smell and not find, to warn her father — and found the white man's well instead, and the white man, who gave her water and asked her nothing she was not ready to give.
When she stopped, the silence on the rim had changed its nature. It was not threat anymore. It was a people listening.
Her father dismounted then, and came to her, and he did not embrace her — a chief does not, before the council — but he stood close, and looked at the bound arm, and at her face, and what was in his own face was not for the council and everyone there knew it and looked away a little.
"You saw their faces," he said, in English, so that Erik and Nils would carry it rightly.
"I saw them," Mila said. "Give me the one who gave the orders in front of me, and I will put my hand on him."
Gray Elk nodded once, slowly. Then he turned, and raised his voice so that it reached the rim and the house both, and spoke in Lakota, and afterward in English, for the record of both peoples: