They stayed at the sugar camp three weeks. He was given a place in the lodge of Ogimaans's family, and a job, which was hauling sap from the buckets to the boiling kettles on a yoke, and then hauling wood to keep the kettles going, and then hauling sap again. It was the hardest work he had done since the survey, and the best. Nobody made much of his presence. Some of the people from the Couderay villages, the half of the band that had stayed home, watched him with open coolness and one man said something about him in Ojibwe that made the women near him go silent and then made Waabigwan, of all people, turn on the speaker with a few low words that sent him off red-faced. Sorley did not ask what either of them had said. Giizhigookwe, installed by the largest fire in the camp like a general in her headquarters, summoned him on the second day and spent a full hour explaining to him through Makoons what was wrong with his chimney. He listened to every word.
Yellow Cloud was everywhere and nowhere. He went from lodge to lodge as he had in the cabin, crouching, listening, settling things. Twice Sorley saw him in long, hard conversations with men who stood with their arms folded and did not look persuaded. Once, late, he saw him alone by the lake shore, standing very still, looking up the slope at the lodges and the fires and the trees, and Sorley did not go to him.
In the second week the old men held a council in the largest lodge, and Sorley was not invited, and did not expect to be. Makoons told him afterward that Yellow Cloud had stood up and told them everything: the crooked count, the treaty, the corner post he had put his hand on and called good when he knew it was not. Some of the old men had already known; most had not. It had been a long council. Nobody had been happy.
"What did they decide?" Sorley asked.
"They decided he was a fool," Makoons said, "and a liar, and that he should have told them four years ago, and that he is still ogimaa, because nobody else wants to go to Bayfield and say it to the agent." He paused. "Also one of them said that he had always known the story of the drunk white man in the creek was too good to be all true, and that he was glad it was finally the right story, even if it was a worse one. That was my grandmother's brother. He is a hundred years old, maybe. Nobody argues with him."