"He is not hurt," the woman said, in an English that was careful and a little formal, the English of the mission school at Lapwai. "He is old. He walked from the Cottonwood Creek since the sun went down and now he cannot walk more."
"Come in," Nils said. "Bring him in. I will help."
"No," she said. "Thank you. If someone comes, it is better we are not in your house. For you, and for us." She shifted the child higher. "You are Ordway. Your wife was Gudny."
He had not heard anyone say his wife's name in a long time. It went through him like cold water.
"Yes."
"She dug kouse with my mother and my aunts at the place by the spring. Every year, before she was sick." The woman glanced past him into the cabin, then out at the dark prairie behind her, then back. "My name is Ipnaxa. My husband's people are on the Clearwater, at Looking Glass's village. We were going to them. We had three horses. Yesterday on the creek some men took them."
"Soldiers?"
"Men from Mount Idaho. They said our horses belonged to the hostiles now, so they belonged to them." Something moved in her face, quickly, and was put away. "They did not hurt us. They could have. One of them wanted to. The others said no, it was enough to take the horses. So we are walking. My grandfather cannot walk to the Clearwater. It is twenty miles more."
Nils understood then what she was going to ask, and understood also that she was not going to ask it until he showed her he understood, because asking a stranger for a horse in that country was asking him to hand over half his chances of staying alive. He thought of the mare in the lean-to. She was a bay with one white hind foot, nine years old, a little short in the back and broad in the chest, bought from a freighter in Lewiston the spring Gudny was still well. Her name was Solvei. She pulled the plow and the stoneboat. She carried him to Mount Idaho for flour and nails. When Ketti had the croup the winter before last, Solvei had carried him through snow to the doctor at Grangeville and back again in one night with a bottle of ipecac in his coat. She was the only horse he owned. Without her, the claim was just ground.