Sorley stared at him. "What do you mean, the wrong hemlock?"
"I mean," said Makoons, "that if Ingle's men are ten chains off one way, and you were ten chains off the other, maybe neither of you is right, and maybe the sugar bush is in a place nobody has measured yet." He shrugged. "Or maybe I am wrong. I was looking at their stakes from a long way off, in the fall, with snow coming. I could be wrong. You could come in March and help me find out."
He went back in. Sorley stood in the lean-to with the mule breathing beside him and felt, for the first time in a long time, something that was not quite hope but was standing near it.
Zhingwaak's fever broke a little after midnight. Sorley was awake to see it. He saw Yellow Cloud's shoulders, bent over the bunk for six hours, suddenly go loose, and saw him put both hands over his face and sit very still, and then get up and walk carefully through the sleeping room, stepping over bodies, to the door, and go outside. Sorley gave him a few minutes and then followed.
The wind had dropped. It had dropped completely, the way it does sometimes after a long blow, all at once, as if somebody had shut a door. The clearing lay under a sky so thick with stars it looked dusted. The cold was enormous. Yellow Cloud stood at the edge of the shoveled path with his blanket around him and his breath going straight up in the still air.
"He will live," Sorley said.
"He will live." Yellow Cloud did not turn around. "I would not have been able to go home if he did not."
They stood together in the cold.
"I'll come," Sorley said. "To Bayfield. And to the sugar camp before that, if you'll have me. Your nephew thinks Ingle's surveyors started from the wrong tree."
Now Yellow Cloud did turn. His face in the starlight was unreadable.
"He told you that?"
"Just now."
"He did not tell me."
"He said he was saving it."
Yellow Cloud was silent for a moment, and then he began to laugh. It was a low, helpless laugh, the laugh of a man very tired who has just been told something absurd and good, and it went on for a while, and Sorley found himself laughing too, standing in the snow under the stars in front of a house full of sleeping people, the two of them laughing like boys.