land must be described in their way. By the lines. Township this, section that. We said: we want the sugar hill at Ajijaak, it must be inside. And the agent looked at his maps, the surveyors' maps, and said, yes, by the lines the sugar hill can be inside, if the boundary runs along this section line here." Yellow Cloud drew a line on the floorboards with his finger. "And so it was written. And in the summer after the treaty I walked the boundary with the agent's man, and we found the blazes on the trees, and the posts at the corners with the numbers cut in them, and we stood at the corner post on the ridge above Ajijaak and I could look down and see every one of my grandmother's trees on the inside of the line."
He lifted his finger from the floor.
"Last summer," he said, "a man named Ingle came up from the Chippewa Falls mills with three surveyors and a paper from Washington. He said the old lines were wrong. He said the corner post above Ajijaak was not where the numbers said it was. He said it was ten chains too far east, more than six hundred of your feet, and the true section line ran through the middle of the sugar hill, and half the bush, the best half, the old trees, was not inside our boundary at all. It was government land. He had already filed for it. There is white pine on the slope beyond, and he wants a road through the maples to reach it, and he wants the maples too, for his mill."
Sorley found he had put his hands over his face. He took them away.
"And then," Yellow Cloud said, "he said one more thing. He said a corner post does not walk ten chains by itself. He said somebody moved it. He said the Indians moved it, after the survey, to steal government land. And the agent at Bayfield, who is a new agent and does not know us, wrote that down in his book. Fraud, he wrote. He wrote my name next to it. Because I was the one who walked the line and said the post was good."
For a long time Sorley could not say anything at all. The room went on around them. One of the twins was singing under her breath. The blind man had begun, very softly, to play a few notes on his flute, the same four over and over, as if testing the weather of the room.
"Nobody moved that post," Sorley said finally.
"No," said Yellow Cloud.
"It was set wrong. It was set wrong the day we set it."