The wind shoved the door against him and a wall of white came through, and in the white stood a man in a blanket coat crusted to the shoulders with snow, a fur cap pulled low, a scarf of red wool wound across his face so that only his eyes showed. Behind him, in the dark, Sorley could make out other shapes. Two. Five. He stopped counting at a dozen because the snow was moving and the shapes were moving with it and there were more of them than his mind wanted to hold. Some were small. Some were being carried. A dog yelped once and fell silent.
The man pulled the scarf down. He was perhaps fifty, broad in the face, with a grey-shot braid tucked into his coat collar and frost in his eyebrows. He spoke in Ojibwe, quickly, and then, seeing Sorley's face, in English, slow and careful and entirely clear.
"We have old people and children. The snow caught us on the open ground by the burned country. We cannot make the lake tonight. I am asking for your roof."
Sorley looked past him again. He had a single room, sixteen by fourteen. He had a mule shed that would hold the mule and perhaps four people standing. He had beans for himself for a week, a barrel of flour half gone, a side of salt pork, a bag of wild rice he had traded for in the fall, and a few strings of dried apple.
"How many?" he said.
"Thirty-one," the man said. "Thirty-two. My sister's grandson was born at the sugar camp in the fall. I forget to count him because he does not walk yet."
There was a moment, and Sorley would think about it later, when he felt the refusal rise in him. It was not cruelty. It was arithmetic. Thirty-two people in a room where one man lived alone. The fire would not keep up. The air would go bad. If there was sickness among them it would go through the room like a flame through dry grass. His food would be gone in two days. And under the arithmetic was something older and less honest, the plain dumb fear of a solitary man at the sight of a crowd at his door in the dark.
Then a child behind the man began to cry, a thin, worn-out sound with no breath behind it, and the arithmetic stopped mattering.
"Come in," Sorley said. "All of you. Bring the dogs if they'll fit. Old ones near the fire. I'll clear the floor."