"Waabigwan spoke to you," Yellow Cloud said.
"She did."
"She told you the agent will move the line."
"She did."
"She may be right." He stretched his legs out carefully. "I want to tell you something now, and I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything. Because you told me a hard thing about yourself today, and it would not be fair to let you think you are the only one in this house who has been carrying a stone."
Sorley waited.
"When Makoons came back from the ridge that day, six years ago, and told my father the surveyors' count had gone crooked, I was there. I heard it. My father laughed and I laughed too. And when we went to La Pointe for the treaty two years later, and the agent showed us the maps, and I saw that the boundary line along that section would put the whole sugar bush inside, I knew why. I knew it was because of the crooked count. I knew the post on the ridge was in the wrong place. I knew it was ten chains wrong, near enough. Makoons had paced it, after you were gone, from the old blaze on the big hemlock where the count should have been. He was fourteen and he wanted to know." Yellow Cloud's voice did not change. "And I said nothing. I stood in council with the commissioner and the agent and the other chiefs and I said, yes, this line, this section line here, we accept it. And I walked the boundary the next summer with the agent's man and I stood at that post and put my hand on it and said it was good. And I knew it was not."
"You were protecting your people's land," Sorley said.
"Yes. I was. I would do it again, maybe. I do not know." He turned his hands over and looked at them. "But I want you to understand. I did not do it because I thought it was right. I did it because it was useful. My father said, let them count crooked. And I let the crooked thing stand because it was useful to us. It is not so different from what you did. You let the crooked thing stand because it was useful to you. You did not want to be the drunk one. So you let your brother be the one who counted wrong." He paused. "I let the government be the one who counted wrong, and took the trees. It is a better reason than yours, I think. But it is the same kind of silence."