She brought him a bowl of venison and set it down on the floor beside him with a definite small thump. Then, instead of leaving, she sat down an arm's length away, wrapped her blanket closer, and looked at him with her sharp face and her silver earrings flashing in the firelight.
"You know what he will ask you," she said. Her English was slower than Makoons's, more formal, learned perhaps from a mission school.
"I think so."
"He will ask you to go to Bayfield in the spring and tell the agent what you told him today. That the post was set wrong. That nobody moved it."
"Yes."
"And you will say yes."
Sorley considered this. "I don't know what I'll say."
Waabigwan looked at him with something that might have been approval. "Good. Then I will tell you what I think, and you can think about it, and maybe you will say no." She folded her hands. "I think it is foolishness. I think he walked thirty-two people through the snow to find one white man, a man who was drunk once and hid it, because he thinks your word will save us. I do not think your word will save us. I think the agent will listen to you and write it down and then say, very good, the post was set wrong, so now we will set it right. Ten chains west. Through the middle of the sugar bush. And Ingle will build his road and cut the maples, and we will have no fraud on our name, and we will also have no trees." She lifted her chin. "My sister's husband would rather be called a thief and keep the trees, I think, if he were honest. But he is a very honest man. That is his trouble."
"You'd rather I stayed home."
"I would rather none of you had ever come into this country with your chains," Waabigwan said. "But since you did, I would rather we did not hang our sugar bush on the word of a drunk man in a blue cap." She paused. "I am sorry. That was hard. But it is what I think. Eat your food."
She got up and went back to the women by the hearth. Sorley ate his food. It was very good.
Later that night, when most of the room was asleep, Yellow Cloud came and sat by him again. For a while neither of them spoke. The blind man, whose name was Gichi-Bizhiki and who had once, Makoons said, been the best caller of moose on the whole Chippewa, was playing his flute again, so quietly it was almost not a sound at all.