He looked helplessly at the young man.
"She says your chimney draws badly to the left," the young man said, "and she asks if you built it yourself."
"I did," Sorley said.
The old woman nodded as if this confirmed something, and closed her eyes.
The young man's name was Makoons. Little Bear. He was about twenty, lean and quick, with a long scar along one forearm that he said came from a sawmill on the Chippewa where he had worked two summers stacking boards. His English was good and had a faint lumber-camp roughness to it, and he used it with a kind of amused precision, as if he enjoyed watching English do things it had not been built for.
"You have a lot of traps," he said, looking up at the rafters.
"I run a line up toward the Totagatic. Marten, fisher, a few mink."
"Mink on the Totagatic," Makoons said thoughtfully. "Not many anymore."
"No. Not many."
Makoons nodded. "There used to be. My uncle says. Before the camps." He said it without accusation, simply as a fact about the world, and turned back to the fire.
Sorley watched Yellow Cloud move through the room. He did not sit for a long time. He went from family to family, crouching to speak with each, checking a child's feet, laying a hand on the coughing man's shoulder, settling a dispute between the two dogs that were trying to occupy the same spot under the bunk. He spoke softly and nobody raised a voice to him. But it was not the deference Sorley had seen at the trading posts, where certain men were spoken to carefully because they could make trouble. It looked more like the way men on a river crew spoke to a good pilot. Respect, and a certain amount of argument, and the knowledge that he would be the one who answered for it if the boat went onto the rocks.
At one point a woman about Yellow Cloud's age, sharp-faced, with silver earrings, said something to him in a low, hard voice. He answered her quietly. She said something else, gesturing toward Sorley without looking at him, and Yellow Cloud shook his head, once, and she turned away with her mouth set.
"His wife's sister," Makoons said, following Sorley's gaze. "Waabigwan. She thinks we should not have come."
"To my door?"