belly, and its young mother, who was barely seventeen, walked it up and down the six feet of clear floor by the door until her face was grey with tiredness, and then Waabigwan took the baby from her without a word and walked it herself, humming, and the girl slept sitting up against the wall.
And Zhingwaak's cough got worse.
By the middle of the afternoon he was burning with fever and could not keep down broth, and the women moved him to the bunk, the one raised place in the room, and the joking about his cure stopped. Sorley watched Yellow Cloud's face as he crouched by the bunk with his hand on the man's chest, and saw something there he had not seen before, a kind of naked fear held very carefully in check. Zhingwaak was his wife's brother, Makoons said. Yellow Cloud's wife had stayed at the Couderay with the half of the band that thought the journey was foolishness. She had made him promise to bring her brother back.
"He wanted to come," Makoons said. "My uncle told him to stay home, with that cough. He said, if you are going to find the man who set the post, I want to see his face. He was there too, at the treaty. He signed with my uncle." Makoons looked at the bunk. "He did not know about the count. My uncle told him this winter. He was angry for a week. Then he said, all right, I will come."
Giizhigookwe directed the doctoring from the hearth. She had two of the women boil something from a pouch she wore around her neck, a bundle of roots and bark that smelled bitter and green, and they made Zhingwaak breathe the steam of it under a blanket, and drink a little, and then she sat with her eyes closed and her lips moving for a long time. Sorley did not know whether she was praying or thinking or both. He did what he could think to do, which was keep the fire high and the kettle full and go out into the wind every hour for more wood, and once he went out to the lean-to and stood with his forehead against Deacon's rough neck for a while, because there was no one in the house to whom he could have explained why.
In the evening Makoons came and found him in the lean-to.
"My uncle is with him," he said. "The old woman says he will live. She says it is the kind that goes to the edge and comes back. She is usually right." He leaned against the post. Snow blew in around his moccasins. "I want to say something to you. Not for him. For me."