A man can survive a hungry belly, but a man cannot survive a hard heart. Then Elijah Tanner set down his rifle on the porch railing where anyone watching could see that he was choosing not to hold it, and he lifted the lantern higher so its light would reach farther into the yard. "Come inside," he said. "All of you, we will figure the rest out come morning. Tonight you will be warm and you will eat what I have to give." The old man looked at him for a long moment.
His dark eyes searching Elijah's face for the trick that must surely be hiding behind such an offer or the cruelty that would show itself once they were inside and helpless. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find something that satisfied him. Because after a moment he turned and spoke quietly to the others in a language Elijah did not understand. Then they began to move toward the cabin slowly, painfully like people for whom every step was a victory against a body that wanted nothing more than to lie down in the snow and stop. The people of Redcliffe learned what Elijah Tanner had done before the week was out.
A man named Harlon Bucker, who ran cattle on the next spread over, and who had never liked Elijah for reasons that probably had more to do with an old dispute about a fence line than anything else, had ridden up to borrow a harness pin, and noticed that the smoke from Elijah's chimney was rising thicker than any one man alone would need. He rode around the back of the barn where he could see without being seen, and what he saw there made him turn his horse around and ride home without bothering to ask about the harness pin. By nightfall, the whole town knew. By the next morning, a group of men was standing in front of the general store, their breath rising white in the freezing air and their voices rising too with the particular heat that comes when men are scared and looking for someone to blame. What Tanner has done, Bucker said, pacing back and forth on the wooden porch with his hands jammed in his pockets, is put every man, woman, and child in this valley at risk.
Those people are killers. Their fathers burned out half the territory before the army put them down. And now he has a whole band of them camped on his place eating food that should be keeping white families alive. Someone needs to ride out there and set him straight. There were nods around the circle.
Someone said that maybe Tanner had gone soft in the head from living alone too long. Someone else said that it did not really matter why he had done it, only that he had to stop before the consequences caught up with all of them. A few men mentioned things they remembered from the old days. Raids and fires and the sounds that came from cabins that no one reached in time, and the fear grew thicker with every word. Samuel Crew, the storekeeper who sold flour and coffee and ammunition to everyone in the valley, cleared his throat and said what everyone else was thinking, but no one had wanted to say out loud.
If those Apache get through the winter strong enough to walk, he said, "What is to stop them from remembering where the ranches are? What is to stop them from coming back in the summer with their cousins and their horses and doing what their people have always done when they find weakness? It was an ugly thought, and it hung in the cold air like the smoke from their breath. Some of the men looked away because they did not want to be the ones caught agreeing with it. But others nodded harder, their jaws set and their eyes narrow.
And someone suggested that maybe they should ride out there armed and give Tanner a choice. Send the Apache back into the snow or face the consequences. But before anyone could fetch a horse or a rifle, a voice from the back of the group cut through the murmur. It was old Clara Hicks, the widow who lived in the smallest cabin at the edge of town. She had not said 10 words to anyone in public since her husband died in the chalera outbreak of 74.
But now she pushed through the crowd of men like they were nothing but fence posts in her way. And she walked right up to the front where everyone could see her. And she looked at each man in turn with eyes that were sharp and cold and completely unimpressed. I remember the winter of 61," she said, and her voice was stronger than anyone expected. My husband and I were starving in a cabin 50 mi from here because the supply wagon had broken an axle, and no one in the world knew we were there.
We had eaten the last of our food 3 days before, and we were too weak to walk out. Do you know who found us? Do you know who brought us meat and guided us out of the mountains before the next storm buried that cabin? She paused and looked around at the faces of the men who were suddenly not meeting her eyes. "It was not any of you," she said.
"It was not any of your fathers. It was a band of Shashonyi who had no reason to help us and every reason to let us die. They did not ask what language we spoke. They did not ask what our fathers had done. They only saw two people who would not last another week, and they did what was right.
She let the silence stretch out, let it grow heavy and uncomfortable. Then she turned and walked back toward her cabin without looking at any of them again, her footsteps crunching in the frozen snow. Some of the men shuffled their feet. A few grumbled that Shosonyi were not the same as Apache, but the fire had gone out of the argument. And when Bucker suggested again that someone should ride out to Tanner's place, nobody stepped forward to be the first man through the door.
Elijah Tanner, for his part, was not spending much time thinking about what the town might do or say. He was thinking about grain, about the arithmetic of survival, about the numbers that would not add up no matter how many times he ran them through his head. He had counted his stores the night the Apache arrived, counting every sack and every bucket. He had counted them again the next morning, hoping the numbers might have changed in the darkness, and they had not changed at all. The math was simple and brutal.