"Come and eat," Nils said.
Tukweyit did not move. "Before I come into your house," he said, "I should tell you why I came. So that you can decide whether you want me in it."
"You brought my horse back."
"Yes. I said I would, or my sister said I would, which in our family is the same thing. And she is your horse, and she carried my grandfather more than a thousand miles over the Lolo and down the Bitterroot and up through the Yellowstone country and across the Missouri and through the snow at the Bears Paw and into the Grandmother's country, and she never once put him down. When we had nothing else to give a horse she ate cottonwood bark and kept walking. I want you to know that. If you had given him a worse horse he would have died in the mountains, in the first week." He turned the hat in his fingers. "But the horse is not the only reason we came."
Nils waited.
"My grandfather's name was Teekáyu," Tukweyit said. "He was born at your spring. Not near it. At it. His mother's people wintered in the draw there, in a lodge dug down into the ground, every winter of his childhood, and every spring they dug camas there and kouse on the slope above it. His mother died at that spring when he was perhaps ten years old, in the winter of the big snow, before any Bostons came, before the missionaries even. They could not dig the ground to bury her because it was frozen, so they laid her on the slope above the water where the soil is thin, and covered her with stones from the ledge and from the creek, so that the wolves could not reach her. Every spring after that, when the family came to dig, they repaired the stones. Every year. For sixty years, more or less."
Nils felt the yard go very quiet around him. Somewhere out on the prairie a meadowlark was singing, a long falling phrase, over and over.
"When your people came and put a fence around the prairie," Tukweyit went on, "and said that this hundred and sixty acres was yours, my grandfather thought that would be the end of it. That you would plow her up. Many places, that is what happened. But your wife came down to the draw with bread the first spring and sat with my aunts, and in the second spring my grandfather came himself, and he showed her the stones, and told her who was under them. And she said that she would see that nobody disturbed them. And she said she would tell her husband."