in a hoarse whisper that he could walk. Giizhigookwe rode in the blanket sling between two young men and surveyed the morning with the same frank attention she had given Sorley's ceiling. The twins waved from the back of the line until the trees took them. Waabigwan, passing him at the door, stopped and looked him up and down.
"So you are coming," she said.
"I'm coming."
"Then do not get drunk," she said, and went on, and he could not tell whether it was a joke, and decided that it did not need to be.
Yellow Cloud went last, as he had come in last. He took the red scarf down from the peg beside Sorley's coat and wound it around his neck. He looked at the room, which was suddenly enormous, the floor scuffed and littered with spruce boughs and bark dishes and the gnawed bones the dogs had left under the bunk.
"Your wood is gone," he said.
"I'll cut more."
"Your food is gone."
"I'll manage. You left me half a deer."
"That was Waabigwan," Yellow Cloud said. "Do not thank her. She will say she did not want to carry it." He held out his hand, the way white men did, and Sorley took it, and then Yellow Cloud did something else, which was to put his other hand flat for a moment against the logs of the doorframe, as if he were feeling for warmth in them. "The moon of the crust on the snow," he said. "Makoons will come for you."
Then he was gone down the trail after his people, and the clearing was white and empty, and Sorley stood in the door of his house for a long time listening to a silence that had changed its shape.
He spent the rest of February cutting wood and running his line, and found he did not mind the solitude as much as he had expected, or minded it differently. He rebuilt the chimney. He did it badly, and then took it apart and did it again. He oiled the rifle, mended the mule's harness, and one evening took down the blue cap from its peg and turned it over in his hands for an hour, and then put it on, and wore it the next day on the trapline, and the day after.
He also wrote, by lamplight, over several evenings, a plain account of what had happened on the ridge above Ajijaak Lake in October of 1852. He wrote it as a surveyor would have, with dates and bearings and distances where he could remember them,