"Now you know why I said not when tired," he said.
The wind dropped a little after noon, enough that the trees along the bog came back out of the white as grey ghosts, and Makoons and four other men went down toward the cedar swamp on snowshoes with two of Sorley's rifles and one of their own. Sorley went out with three more and an axe and they felled dead tamarack at the edge of the burn until the light began to go. It was a relief to work. He chopped until his shoulders burned and the sweat froze in his beard, and the men with him, who were named Gwiiwizens and Animikiins and a broad-chested older man everyone called Ogimaans, Little Chief, as a joke he did not seem to mind, worked beside him without much talk. Once Ogimaans showed him a better way to set his feet on the slope so the axe did not skate on frozen bark. Once Animikiins laughed at him when a limb dropped and half buried him in snow, and then helped dig him out, still laughing, and Sorley found to his surprise that he was laughing too.
They dragged the wood back on a toboggan the band had brought, and stacked it, and went in. The hunters came back at dark with two deer and the news that the swamp was deep but passable and there were more deer yarded beyond. The room filled with the smell of fresh meat cooking, and the mood in it changed, the way the mood in any crowded house changes when there is enough to eat for the next few days. The twins were fed liver and fell asleep on the table bench together. The coughing man, whose name was Zhingwaak, Pine, ate a whole bowl of broth for the first time and said in English, solemnly, that he was cured, and was overtaken at once by a fit of coughing so long and comical that half the room laughed and he laughed with them, wheezing.
Sorley sat by the door and watched it all and did not know what he felt. He had told no living soul about Crane Lake in six years, and now he had told a man he had known for less than a day, in a room with thirty other people in it, and the roof had not fallen in. The thing was out. It lay on the floor between him and Yellow Cloud like a dead animal neither of them had decided what to do with.
It was Waabigwan who came to him first, of all people.