"It is not a good answer."
"No."
"It is the true answer, though." Makoons pulled his knees up. "I am glad. I think I am glad. I will have to think about it." He looked at Sorley sideways. "You could still tell them your post was right. That you were not drunk. That your count was good. Nobody alive could say different except me."
"You'd say different."
"I would," Makoons agreed. "I am only telling you that you could."
That night Sorley told Yellow Cloud. He told him by the lake, with the stars out again over the ice, and Yellow Cloud listened to the whole of it and asked three precise questions about bearings that showed he had understood every word, and then stood for a long while with his hands under his blanket.
"The old grove," he said.
"The old grove."
"Giizhigookwe will want to know."
"I'll tell her if you want."
"No," Yellow Cloud said. "I will." He turned his face to the hill, black against the stars, with the faint glow of the banked fires along it. "You know, when I walked the line four years ago and put my hand on your post, I told myself that it did not matter whether the line was true, only whether it was ours. And this winter I told myself that what mattered was that the truth be told, whatever it cost. And now I find I do not believe either one all the way." He was quiet. "I would like to keep the old grove. I would like to stand in front of the agent and say, here is the line, the true one, measured by a drunk white man's brother's ghost and my nephew and a sober Dace, and the true line gives us most of what we asked for. And then I would like to say, and the old grove too, because my aunt was born there, and because your Ingle has a whole forest of pine and does not need fifty sugar maples, and because a line is a scratch and we were there first. I would like to say all of that in the same breath and have it be one honest thing." He sighed. "I do not know if it is one honest thing. Perhaps it is two. Perhaps a man has to say both of them and let the agent choose."
"Perhaps he chooses wrong," Sorley said.