"Yes."
"You know that."
"I know it." Yellow Cloud looked down the room toward the fire, where Makoons was crouched feeding split tamarack into the blaze. "He knows it better. He was there. He was fourteen years old and he was told to follow the surveyors and see what they did and tell the old men. So he followed you. He was in the hemlocks on the ridge above Ajijaak the whole day. He saw the tall brother carrying the front of the chain and calling the counts. He saw you at the back, with the pins. He saw the bottle in your coat. He saw you fall down in the creek bottom and lose the pins in the water and get up and pick up what you could find and go on as if nothing had happened. He came back and told my father, the white men's counting has gone crooked, one of them was drunk and dropped his sticks. And my father laughed, and said, good, let them count crooked, perhaps it will be crooked in our favor."
Sorley sat very still.
"And it was," Yellow Cloud said. "It was crooked in our favor."
The thing that had sat at the edge of Sorley's firelight for six years came into the middle of the room and sat down.
He remembered it, of course. He had never stopped remembering it. October of 1852, the third week of the subdivision work in that township, the maples on the ridge so red they seemed to throw heat. He was twenty-five and Ledyard was twenty-eight and they had been chaining through swamp and windfall for a month under a deputy surveyor named Merriwether who was decent and exacting and slow, a widower from Ohio with a bad knee and a habit of reading Psalms aloud at the evening fire. Sorley had been drinking for a week by then, which was not like him. He would not have been able to say why. The work was hard and the country was enormous and empty in a way that pressed on him, and a trader at the mouth of the Namekagon had sold him a flask of high wine, and then another, and he had kept them in his coat and taken a pull whenever the chain stopped. That day he had taken more than a pull. He remembered the creek bottom below the ridge, the cold shock of falling full length into it, the tally pins scattering out of his fist into the brown water and the leaves. Eleven pins. He was supposed to have eleven pins, one for every chain they measured,