And some nights he was too exhausted to wonder anything at all. The people of Redcliffe kept their distance through the worst of the winter, but they did not forget. Bucker rode by once or twice, not stopping to speak, just looking. Samuel Crew sent his son out with a message saying that any man who fed the enemy could not expect credit at the store come spring, and Elijah sent the boy back with no answer. Old Claraara Hicks came by once, alone on a gray morning when the snow had stopped.
She did not knock or call out. She just walked up to the porch, set down a bundle wrapped in cloth, and walked away again without saying a word. When Elijah opened the bundle, he found dried apples inside, probably the last she had, sweet and brown, and smelling like autumn, even in the depths of winter. He ate them slowly over the next week and thought about what her visit meant. The last week of March came in with a wind that smelled different from all the ones that had come before it.
It was warmer, softer, carrying the first faint hint of the thaw that would come when the sun climbed higher. Elijah woke one morning and heard water dripping from the icicles on his roof. A steady musical sound that seemed like the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. And he knew that the worst was finally over. If he could hold on for another two weeks, maybe three, he would make it through.
The problem was that he had nothing left to hold on with. His stores were gone. Every last handful of grain and every scrap of meat. His animals were thin but alive. His own body felt like a canvas sack with all the grain scooped out, hollow and light and barely able to hold its shape.
He sat on his porch that morning and watched the first patches of brown earth appear in the meadow below, and he wondered if he had made it through the fire only to collapse when the flames were finally behind him. The Apache left on the last day of March. Kusen came to him that morning while the sun was still low and said that the trails would be clear enough now for his people to travel and that they would go south to find the rest of their band in the valleys where the winter had not been so hard. Elijah shook his hand and told him to go in peace and he meant it truly even though he knew that their leaving meant he would face the last stretch of hunger alone. He watched them walk down the meadow toward the treeine, the children running ahead and the old women walking slow but steady on legs that had grown strong again.
And he felt something loosen in his chest that he had not known was tight. They were going to live. Whatever else happened, they were going to see another summer. That was something worth having done. He did not expect to see them again.
Two weeks later, on a morning in April, when the first green shoots were pushing through the mud, and the birds were coming back to sing in the bare branches, Elijah Tanner woke to a sound he did not recognize. It was the sound of hooves, many of them, more than he had ever heard in one place on his little piece of land, and the creek of wheels on the trail that led up from the valley. He pulled himself out of bed, which took longer than it should have because his body was running on nothing but stubbornness, and he walked out onto his porch to see what was coming. What he saw stopped him where he stood, stopped his breath and his thoughts and everything except the simple act of trying to understand what his eyes were showing him. There were wagons coming up the trail, four of them, each one piled high with bundles and sacks and things wrapped in hides.
There were riders alongside the wagons, Apache riders, more of them than he had ever seen in one place, sitting their horses with a kind of quiet pride that spoke of people who knew exactly what they were doing and why. At the front of the whole procession, sitting straight and calm on a painted horse, was Kusen. And even from a distance, Elijah could see that the old man was watching him with something that might have been a smile. Behind the wagons came a herd of horses, maybe 30 head or more. Paints and bays, and a few spotted ones that would have been worth a fortune down in Denver.
Behind the horses came men carrying bundles of furs so thick and heavy they could barely hold them. Pelts of beaver and fox and deer stacked so high they blocked the men's faces from view. The whole line stretched back down the trail as far as Elijah could see, disappearing around the bend into the trees, and every last bit of it was moving toward him. Kusen reached the porch first and dismounted slow, the way an old man does when he wants to show that the years have not yet taken his strength and dignity away. He stood in front of Elijah and looked at him the same way he had looked at him on that first night in the snow, steady and patient, and holding more behind his eyes than any words could say.
"You gave us what you needed to live," Kusen said. You gave us the food that would have kept you breathing through the winter, and you did not ask us to pay for it. Now my people give you what we have gathered in the months since we left you. It is not payment. It is not trade.
Payment is for strangers who owe each other nothing but coins. This is what happens when one hand reaches out to another hand that reached first. This is what my father taught me and what his father taught him. Going back so far that no one remembers the first reaching anymore. Elijah looked at the wagons, looked at the riders, looked at the horses and the furs and the sacks of grain that were being unloaded now and carried toward his barn by men who moved with purpose.
He opened his mouth to say something, to thank them, or to protest or to ask how this was possible, but no words came out because his voice had locked up somewhere in his chest. He felt something hot behind his eyes that he had not felt in years. Not since the day he stood at his wife's grave, he stood on his porch and watched strangers fill his barn with more provisions than he could have earned and 3 years of the hardest work, more than he could use in a decade if he was careful. And he understood suddenly that he had been wrong about something his father used to say. The old man had told him there was always another way through, even when you could not see it yet.