"On the road at all." Makoons considered. "She thinks this whole thing is my uncle's foolishness. She may be right. Half of us think she is right." He shrugged. "Half of us came anyway."
"Came for what?"
Makoons looked at him with an expression Sorley could not read, something between pity and curiosity.
"He said tomorrow," Makoons said. "He is the one who should tell it. It is his story more than mine. Though I am in it." He stretched out on the floor with his arm under his head. "I am in it a little."
Toward the end of the night, when the fire had burned down to a deep orange bed and the room had grown thick and warm with breathing, Sorley went out with a lantern along the rope line to check on the mule. The wind had not eased at all. It came across the clearing in long, heavy surges, and in the lantern light the snow streamed sideways like water out of a sluice. Deacon stood with his rump to the wall of the lean-to and his head low. Two of the band's young men had bedded down in the straw beside him with the dogs that had not fit inside, and they were sleeping back to back, wrapped in a single buffalo robe, and did not stir when the light passed over them.
He stood a while in the lee of the cabin wall with the lantern hooded under his coat. He was thinking about the name. Dace. It was not a common name. Yellow Cloud had said it as if he had been carrying it for a long while, the way a man carries a stone in his pocket, worn smooth by his thumb.
He went through the list of things a man named Dace might have done that thirty-two people would walk through a blizzard to discuss. He did not like the list. He had been in the country fourteen years, and a man did not live fourteen years in the north woods, as a voyageur's hand and a surveyor's chainman and a camp cook and a trapper, without doing a few things he would not have wanted read aloud. He had sold whiskey once, a single keg, in the spring of 1846 when he was nineteen and broke; he had never done it again and had never forgiven himself the first time. He had cut timber on land that was not anyone's to sell him the right to cut. He had once, in a