He did not wait to see if they understood. He began dragging things. The table went up on end against the wall. The chair went outside under the eave. His bedding came down off the bunk and went onto the floor in front of the hearth. By the time he turned around the room was filling, and it filled the way water fills a basin, without hurry and without stopping, people stooping through the low door one after another, stamping, shaking snow off blankets, murmuring to one another in voices pitched low out of courtesy to a stranger's house.
They were Ojibwe; he had known that from the first word. Lac Courte Oreilles people, he guessed, or from one of the smaller villages around the Chippewa headwaters, by the beadwork on the women's leggings and the way the men wore their sashes. He had traded with them for six years. He knew enough of their language to buy rice and sugar and ask after the ice, and to understand perhaps one word in four of anything said quickly. They knew enough English, most of them, to deal with traders, and some of them a good deal more than that.
An old woman was carried in by two young men on a blanket sling and set down at the hearth. She was so small under her wrappings that she looked like a bundle of furs until she opened her eyes and studied the ceiling, the walls, the hanging traps, and finally Sorley himself, with an expression of frank, unhurried appraisal that made him feel he had been weighed and the weight written down. A young mother came in with an infant inside her coat, and another woman with twin girls of four or five, one on each hand. There was a boy of about twelve leading a blind man by the sleeve. There were three dogs, which promptly went under the bunk and refused to be moved. There was a man with a bad cough who apologized for it in English each time it took him.
The chief, if he was a chief, came in last, after he had counted them all through the door. He set the bar himself. Then he turned and looked at the room, at his people packed shoulder to shoulder on the floor and the bunk and the woodpile, at the steaming blankets and the children already falling asleep where they sat, and something in his broad face loosened.
"Miigwech," he said. "Thank you."
"It's nothing," Sorley said, which was the kind of thing a man said, and both of them knew it was not true.