Chapter 16
Smoke on the Horizon
The smoke rose the first morning while Elias was splitting a cedar rail behind the barn, thin and straight in the still air, a single column climbing from the foothills east of the creek. He stopped with the axe in his hands and watched it the way a man watches weather he does not yet understand. It was not a cook fire. It stood too steady for that, and when it had climbed high it broke, once, into three short puffs, then drew itself tall again.
Willa came around the corner of the barn with the milk pail and saw where he was looking. "That's Kasheen's people," she said, easy as naming a neighbor. "They camp up there when the nights turn."
Elias set the axe down. "They smoke like that often?"
"Often enough that we learned some of it." She shaded her eyes. "Father traded with them since before I can remember. Mother too. Salt, mostly, and cloth, and they brought us meat in the hard winter after she died, and never asked a thing for it that winter. Kasheen is the elder. He is older than the hills look and twice as patient."
The smoke broke again β two puffs this time, close together β and then thinned and was gone, as if a blanket had been dropped over a fire burning underneath all the while.
Maren came out onto the porch with her father's rifle resting in the crook of her arm, not aimed at anything, only carried the way she carried it most mornings now. She studied the foothills a long moment. "Two mornings running it will be, if it comes again tomorrow," she said. "One morning is talk. Two mornings is somebody meaning it."
"Meaning what?" Elias asked.
"That is just the question," Maren said.
They ate breakfast on the porch, the three of them, with the foothills in view, and the sisters told it between them the way people tell a thing they have learned by living beside it rather than by being taught. The band was small β twenty souls, perhaps fewer now, Kasheen's own family and two others joined to it. They moved with the seasons, foothills in the autumn, the low country when the snow came hard. They had never troubled the ranch. Thomas Ellery had ridden up the first year with salt and an open hand, and Kasheen had met him halfway down, and something had been settled between the two old men that neither family had ever seen fit to unsettle.
"The smoke is how they talk over distance," Willa said. "It is not words, exactly. It is more like β like someone clearing their throat before they speak. A single tall column means a camp, people settled, nothing stirring. Puffs mean riders, or news moving. Father said you could not learn it from outside the way you learn a language. You could only learn what it had meant the last few times you saw it."
"And what did it mean the last few times?" Elias asked.
Maren turned her coffee cup slowly in her hands. "Last spring it meant they had seen strangers on the pass road and wanted us to know. The spring before, it meant a child was sick, and Mother rode up with broth and the blue bottle." She looked at the empty sky over the foothills. "It has never meant harm coming from them. Not once. But smoke can carry somebody else's news as easy as their own."
Elias thought of three riders' tracks at the creek crossing, of posts cut clean through, of a smiling man in a town coat with paper in his hand. He thought of how a warning and a threat could wear the same shape at a distance, and how a man could waste the one hour that mattered deciding.
"Will Siki come down?" he asked.
"If there is anything to bring down, he will," Willa said. "Siki is Kasheen's grandson, or near enough β his daughter's boy. He rides like the wind had somewhere to be. He brought word when Father died before the town even knew, because Kasheen had seen the empty house smoke and reckoned something was wrong." Her voice softened on that, and then steadied. "If the smoke is for us, Siki will come."
All day the foothills gave back nothing but their ordinary blue distance. Elias worked the fence line and found his eyes going east more often than his hammer did, and twice he caught Maren on the porch, still, watching the same empty place. Willa alone seemed untroubled, humming at the garden, though toward evening he saw her leave a small pile of salt in a cloth on the porch rail β the old courtesy, ready, in case a rider came in after dark and would not want to wake the house.
The next morning the smoke rose again, in the same place, in the same still air. This time there were four puffs, spaced slow as a man counting on his fingers, and then the long column, and then nothing.