He walked forward, then, and held out his hand, and Nils took it. The newer scar on the back of it was ridged and hot under his fingers.
"I will come into your house now," Tukweyit said. "If the coffee is not cold."
The coffee was not cold. They sat at the table, the three of them, under the chimney, and ate bread and ham, and Tukweyit told them the story of the mare.
He told it plainly, without ornament, the way men told things who had been through too much to want to make it sound like more. Ipnaxa and the old man and the child had reached Looking Glass's village on the Clearwater in two nights, by the Rocky Canyon trail as Nils had said, and found Tukweyit there; he had come down from the Kamiah country with his wife's family when the trouble started. Two weeks later soldiers had come to the village and fired into it, though Looking Glass had said he wanted no part in the fighting, and after that there was no village and no not being part of the fighting, and they had gone with the other bands.
He told them about the Lolo trail, eleven days through deadfall timber so thick the horses' legs bled, and Solvei picking her way over logs with the old man swaying on her back and never once stumbling. He told them about the Bitterroot valley, where the settlers had sold them flour and coffee and the bands had paid in gold. He told them about the Big Hole, but only a little; he said that his sister's husband had died there, and his own wife, whose name was Taxtaxpa, and that he would not say more about it at a table with a child. Ketti, who was eleven and fierce, opened her mouth to say she was not a child and then closed it again when she saw his face.
He told them about the long walk after, through the Yellowstone country with its boiling water and its smell of sulfur, and how the old man had laughed at the geysers and said that the earth was a kettle and somebody had forgotten to take it off the fire. He told them about the snow at the Bears Paw, and the cold, and the siege, and the night on the fourth of October when the word went around that Joseph was going to give up his rifle, and that those who wanted to try for the Grandmother's country should go now, in the dark, on foot or on whatever horses were left.
"Most of the horses were gone by then," he said. "The soldiers took the herd on the first day. A few were in the camp. Your mare was one. She was so thin you could hang a hat on her hips. My grandfather said, I am not going to sit in this hole and wait to be sent to some place I have never heard of. I am going to the Grandmother. So we put him on Solvei, and Tipyelehne in front of him, and my sister and I walked at her head, and we went north through the soldiers' lines in the snow. Two nights. It was very cold. Some people froze. We did not, because the mare carried the old man and the child, and the two of them under one blanket kept each other warm." He looked down into his cup. "If she had fallen, they would have died. I want you to understand that I do not mean that as a manner of speaking."
"I understand," Nils said.