Sorley turned this over for a long moment.
"Why tell me?" he said finally.
"Because now Ingle says we moved the post. And the only way to prove we did not is to say the truth. That the post was always wrong. That the white men set it wrong, and we knew, and we kept quiet. And if I say that in Bayfield, I am telling the agent that I knew the boundary was wrong when I put my mark on the treaty map, and I am telling my own people the same thing. Some of them did not know. Most of them did not know. Waabigwan did not know until this winter." He smiled faintly. "That is part of why she is so angry. Not at you. At me."
"And if you say nothing?"
"If I say nothing, they will say Ozaawaanakwad moved the post. Fraud. They will put that on my name in their books, and on the band's name. When the next treaty comes, and there will always be a next treaty, they will say, those people at Courte Oreilles, they move posts, they cannot be trusted with a line. And they will draw our next boundary with that in their minds. That is worse than losing the trees. I have thought about it a great deal. It is much worse."
He let that sit.
"So I decided," he said, "to tell the truth. All of it. My part too. And then I thought, but who will believe an Indian who says, the post was always wrong and I knew? They will say, of course he says that, he is covering his theft. I needed the man who set it wrong. I needed him to say, it was me, I was drunk, I dropped the pins in the creek, I guessed the count, nobody moved anything. Only you can say that. Merriwether is dead. Your brother is dead. Makoons saw it, but Makoons is an Indian boy who was hiding in the hemlocks. They will not take his word over Ingle's surveyors." He looked at Sorley directly for the first time since he had sat down. "It took me since the fall to find you. Makoons asked at every camp on the Chippewa. Somebody remembered a trapper named Dace up the Namekagon. We started three days ago from the Couderay. The snow caught us at the burn."
"You walked your whole band through February," Sorley said, "to find the drunk who cheated them into keeping their own trees."