He said as much to Yellow Cloud, who was sitting near the door with his back to the logs and a cup of something hot in his hands.
"Yes," Yellow Cloud said. "I have been counting too." He drank. "My nephew says there are deer yarded in the cedar swamp below the falls. If the wind drops a little we can send men down. And you have a good stand of dry tamarack along the bog. Dead from the fire, but standing. It burns fast but it burns."
"You know my bog."
"I know this whole country," Yellow Cloud said, not boasting. "My grandfather made sugar on the hill behind your cabin. Before the fire. The trees are gone now. That is why you could build here. The fire made a clearing for you." He considered his cup. "That is not an accusation. Fire does what fire does."
Sorley sat down beside him. The room was loud enough with children and kettles and dogs that two men could talk quietly near the door without being overheard, or at least without anyone seeming to overhear.
"You said today," he said.
"I said when we were not tired." Yellow Cloud looked at him sideways. "You did not sleep."
"No."
"Then you are tired and we should wait."
"I would rather not wait."
Yellow Cloud nodded slowly, as if Sorley had confirmed something, the way the old woman had nodded about the chimney. He set the cup down on the floor between his feet.
"Six years ago," he said, "in the moon when the leaves fall, men came up the Chippewa with chains and compasses to cut lines through our country. You know this. You were one of them."
Sorley said nothing. Across the room a kettle lid rattled.
"There were four. A man with a compass on a staff, who had spectacles and a bad knee and wrote in a book every hour. A man who cut the line ahead with an axe. And two who carried the chain. Brothers. One tall, who laughed a great deal. One a little shorter, who did not laugh, who wore a blue cap." He looked at Sorley. "I think you still have the cap. It is on the peg."
It was on the peg. Sorley had not worn it in four years. He did not know why he had kept it.
"The tall one was mine," Sorley said. His voice came out flat and strange. "My brother. Ledyard."
"Ledyard," Yellow Cloud repeated, getting his tongue around it. "We called him Baapi. The Laugher. And you we did not call anything, because you did not do anything that needed a name." He paused. "Until the day by Ajijaak Lake."