known they called his brother that. It seemed exactly right. Ledyard had laughed at everything: at the mosquitoes, at Merriwether's Psalms, at the endless windfall, at Sorley's seriousness. He had laughed, Sorley realized, when he wrote that letter to Merriwether saying it was his own fault. Sorley had never seen that letter. But he knew it as surely as if he had held it. Ledyard would have written it laughing, and sealed it, and never said a word to his younger brother about it, because saying a word would have made the gift into a debt.
And Sorley had let it be a gift. He had let it be a gift for six years, and had built a house sixteen by fourteen so there would be no corner where he could not see who was coming.
Toward dawn the old woman, Giizhigookwe, woke again. She looked at him for a while in the dim light. Then she said, in Ojibwe, slowly and very clearly, a sentence he understood in its entirety, because she chose every word so that he would.
She said: The sugar does not care who drew the line. It comes up the same.
Then she added something he did not understand, and laughed, a small dry sound like a twig breaking, and turned her face toward the fire.
In the morning he asked Makoons what the last part had been.
Makoons grinned. "She says your chimney still draws to the left," he said, "and when you come to the sugar camp she will show you how to build one that doesn't."
The snow did not stop that morning. It thinned, and thickened again, and by midday the wind had come back around to the north with a meanness in it, and Yellow Cloud stood in the doorway a long time looking at the sky and then came in and said they would stay one more night if the house would have them.
"The house will have you," Sorley said, and was surprised at how easily it came out.
It was a harder day than the first two. The novelty of the shelter had worn off and the closeness had not. The children were restless and there was nowhere to put them. Two of the men argued over something Sorley could not follow and Ogimaans took them both outside into the snow for a quarter of an hour and they came back quiet and red-faced and did not speak to each other until supper. The infant cried for most of the afternoon with some trouble in its