Crane Lake. Sorley closed his eyes.
It was the other thing, then. The one at the edge of the firelight. He had known since the old woman said sugar, and perhaps since the knock, and perhaps for six years.
"Tell me what you think I did," he said, "and I will tell you if it is true."
Yellow Cloud was quiet a moment. When he spoke again his voice had changed. He was not speaking to Sorley, quite, but to some council in his own head, laying the thing out stone by stone the way it would have to be laid out for his own people.
"Above Ajijaak Lake there is a hill with sugar maples. Old trees. My family's camp has been there since before the Frenchmen. My grandmother's grandmother made sugar there. Giizhigookwe was born in a lodge on that hill. Forty families make sugar in that bush in the spring. More, in a good year. You understand what that means. It is not a field. It is not a village. But it is the place where the people go when the snow breaks and the first food of the year comes out of the trees. Children learn there. The old people tell things there they do not tell anywhere else. When I was a boy I thought the world began on that hill."
Sorley nodded. He knew the sugar camps. He had traded for their sugar every spring for six years; the cones and cakes of it were wrapped in birchbark on his shelf right now.
"When the surveyors came," Yellow Cloud went on, "we watched them. We watched everything they did. We did not understand it all, but we understood enough. The lines were for selling. Whatever side of a line a thing fell on decided whose it would be. The old men said, these lines are nothing, a line is a scratch, the land does not know about it. But the young men had worked at the mills and on the rivers and they said, no, the line is everything to them. A white man will kill you over a line he cannot see."
"That's so," Sorley said.
"Two years after the surveyors, we made the treaty at La Pointe. You know this also. The government agreed that each band would keep land. A reservation, they call it. Ours would be at Lac Courte Oreilles, around the lakes. But they said the