The man looked at him for a long moment. In the firelight his face was weathered and patient and very tired, and Sorley had the strange sense that he was being recognized, though he was sure he had never seen this man in his life.
"My name is Ozaawaanakwad," the man said. "Yellow Cloud, the traders say. You are Dace."
"Sorley Dace. Yes." He frowned. "You know my name."
"I know it," Yellow Cloud said. He began unwinding the red scarf from his neck, slowly, as if the act needed all his attention. "We came a long way because of what you did."
Sorley stood in the middle of his own crowded floor with snow melting off the shoulders of thirty-two strangers and felt, for no reason he could name, a cold run down the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the open door.
"I don't follow you," he said.
"No," Yellow Cloud said. "Not tonight. Tonight we will eat if you have something, and we will sleep, and tomorrow we will see if the snow stops. It is not a thing to talk about tired." He hung the scarf on a peg beside Sorley's coat, as if he had always hung it there. "But it is the reason we were on that road. I want you to know that much, so that you do not lie awake thinking we came to your door by accident."
Sorley, of course, lay awake thinking exactly that, and a good deal else besides.
There was no sleeping that first night in any real sense, not for him. He cooked. He did not know what else to do with himself. He put every pot he owned on the fire and boiled the wild rice with the salt pork cut fine through it, and when that was gone he made a thin flour gravy with the pork fat and doled it out in tin cups, bark dishes, a gourd, the lid of a kettle. The women of the band had their own food, it turned out, more than he expected: a sack of parched rice, cakes of maple sugar wrapped in birchbark, a quantity of dried fish so strong it made his eyes water. They added it to the pot without being asked, and without asking him either, and he understood that this was not a household being fed by a stranger but two households, briefly, becoming one.
The old woman at the hearth was named Giizhigookwe. Sky Woman, one of the young men told him, though he said it with the half-smile of someone translating something that did not quite translate. She was Yellow Cloud's aunt, or perhaps his mother's cousin; the relationship took several minutes of explanation and Sorley lost the thread twice. She ate three spoonfuls of rice, sipped the broth, and then spoke to him directly, in Ojibwe, a long sentence that ended in a question.