The smell was sage and smoke and something bitter-green, crushed leaves. The sound was water, somewhere near, running steady and unhurried, which for the first day terrified him in his dreams until the dreams themselves taught him it was only the spring, only the spring, water that stayed where it belonged. And the hand was cool, and it came and went with a cloth — across his forehead, down the cracked side of his face, patient as rain that knows its season.
He burned. He knew that much. The fever took the pain in his ribs and made a forge of it, and he traveled in his head down the canyon with the flood, over and over, counting horses that would not hold still to be counted — thirty, thirty-six, the gray mare slipping sideways under a cottonwood limb — while a dry voice above him said, at intervals, "Drink," and a rim touched his lips, and he drank, because the voice had the sound of a person who had never once been refused by water or horse or sickness, and it did not occur to his fever to be the first.
Sometimes there were two voices. The old woman's came and went like weather — sharp, amused, entirely unsoft — and once, through the fever, he caught her saying, in her granddaughter's tongue, something that made Tali answer with a low sound that might have been laughter, and the cloth on his forehead paused, and went on.
"She says," Tali translated, unasked, later, "that a man who counts horses in his fever will live to count them awake. My grandmother's medicine is mostly such sayings. They work because nobody wants to prove her wrong by dying."
Outside the lodge, the camp was having its own fever, and some of it reached him through the hide walls in the lucid hours — voices raised and lowered, a man's gravelly authority answering a younger man's heat, women coming and going at the door with bowls, with cloths, with the particular silence of people carrying an argument past a sick man's sleep. He understood no words. He understood the shape of it the way you understand weather through a wall: somebody in this camp objected to his being there, under this roof, and somebody else — the gravel voice, the old woman's snort — was holding the door.
Once, at what he later reckoned was the second dawn, he woke clear as a bell and found Tali sitting by the fire with his torn shirt across her knees, mending it with a bone needle, stitching with the concentration of a person doing accounts. The fever had gone out of him like a tide and left him weak and wrung and starving, and the sight of his shirt in her hands — rescued, valued, repaired — undid him more than the flood had.
"You found my shirt worth more than me," he said, hoarse.
"I found you first," she said, not looking up. "The shirt was easier to carry. Eat." She set a bowl by his hand: broth, rich and dark, with meat in it. "Slowly. My grandmother is watching to be right about you."
He ate slowly. It was the best argument he had ever tasted. On the third day he sat up by himself and drank from the cup without the cloth, and Weshka came in and looked at him and delivered judgment in her granddaughter's translation: the river had had its chance and missed, and now there would be talk in this camp, and he had better be well enough to hear it standing.
On the second night the fever made the lodge too small for him, and he tried to get up and go down to the gravel bar himself, to stand his watch like a man, and found Tali sitting awake by the door with her back against the lodge pole, exactly where a person sits who has expected this. She did not argue with him. She put her shoulder under his arm and walked him the three steps to the fire and the three steps back, as if his pride were a real distance that had to be covered, and settled him again without a word of triumph in it.
"My mother," she said once, refilling the cup, "said a sick man is a country. You do not shout at a country. You learn its weather." And later, when the shivering took him so hard the lodge poles seemed to knock together, it was Weshka who came and sat behind him and held his shoulders in her two old hands like a woman holding a frightened horse's head — steady, unembarrassed, humming something under her breath that had no words he could catch, until the fit passed and left him wrung out and ashamed and grateful past speech.
He dreamed that night that the canyon was a throat and the water was rising in it, and he woke with the old woman's hand still anchoring him to the earth, and understood that whatever the camp decided about him, two people in it had already voted with their hands.
That night he slept a whole sleep, dreamless, and woke before dawn with the spring running steady outside and the fire low, and knew he was mended enough to be afraid again — of the empty canyon, the empty corral, the forty horses that a contract and three years of his life were standing on. The counting came after, she had said. He lay in the dark of the lodge and listened to the camp wake around him, and braced himself to begin it.
Chapter 4 — The Returned One
She told him herself, in the end, because she had heard the whisper go past the lodge door once too often and preferred her own telling to the camp's. It was the evening of the third day. Wade sat wrapped in a blanket by the fire with his strength coming back in hours rather than minutes, and Tali spoke while she worked — sorting dried meat, plaiting a length of horsehair rope — the way a person talks who will be listened to exactly once.