fever of loneliness, said something cruel to a Métis woman at the Pokegama post who had laughed at his French, and he had seen her face close like a door, and he had not apologized. Small things, mostly. The ordinary small sins of a young man in a hard country. None of them were the kind of thing that sent a whole band onto the open road in February.
And there was the other thing, the one he did not put on the list because he did not let himself look at it directly.
He went back inside. The old woman by the hearth was awake. She watched him come in and hang the lantern and step carefully over sleeping bodies to the one clear patch of floor by the wall, and when he had settled with his back against the logs she said something to him, quietly, in Ojibwe.
He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I don't understand."
She said it again, slower. He caught one word of it. Ziinzibaakwad. Sugar.
Then she closed her eyes again and seemed to sleep, and he sat up the rest of the night with that one word in his head and the other thing, the one he would not look at, sitting just at the edge of the firelight, waiting.
In the morning the storm was still blowing, and the snow had climbed the north wall of the cabin to the eaves.
Sorley woke from a doze he had not meant to take to find the room already in motion. Someone had built the fire back up. Two women were at the hearth with his kettle and their own, melting snow and talking quietly. The twins were sitting on his upturned table, which had been laid flat again and pushed against the wall to make a bench, and they were taking turns pulling the ears of the youngest dog, who bore it with the expression of a creature that has accepted its fate. The blind man was sitting by the door with a wooden flute in his lap, not playing it, running his fingers over the stops. The coughing man was coughing. Makoons and two others had dug a path from the door to the woodpile and were bringing in wood in relays, and the stack against the south wall, which Sorley had built up over three months, was already a third gone.
He did the arithmetic again and this time did not let himself stop at the end of it. At this rate the wood would last four days. The food, with what the band carried, perhaps five. After that they would need to cut green timber in deep snow, and send hunters out, and hope.