"In the Grandmother's country the Lakota were kind to us. Sitting Bull's people. They had little to share, but they shared it. Some of their young men did not like us, because we had fought with the Crows against them in old times, and they said so. But the old ones said that was before, and now there is only one enemy, and it is hunger." Tukweyit shrugged. "The winter was bad. The buffalo are almost gone, even there. My grandfather died in February, as I said. The mare foaled in April. My sister said that was a fair trade, one old life out and one new one in, and that the old man would have liked it. In June we heard that some of our people who had come back to Lapwai on their own were being allowed to stay, if they did not make trouble. Others were being sent south to the hot country, to be with Joseph. It is not clear how they decide. It may be that nobody decides. My sister wanted to go home. She is a Christian, she went to the school; the agent knows her family. I came with her and the little one as far as Lapwai, with the mare and the colt, and the agent let them stay. He gave me a paper too." He took a folded square of paper from his vest and laid it on the table, very carefully, as though it were made of something more fragile than paper. "It says that I may travel to the Camas Prairie for ten days on private business and that I am to report back to the agency by the first of October."
Nils looked at it without touching it. It was a single sheet in a clerk's hand, signed by the sub-agent, stamped with the seal of the Nez Perce Agency.
"And after the first of October?"
"After that," Tukweyit said, "I go back and he decides whether I stay at Lapwai with my sister or whether I go south to the Indian Territory with the others who fought." He folded the paper again and put it away. "I fought. I will not lie to him about it. I was not on the Salmon River and I did not kill any settler, but I was on the Clearwater and at the Big Hole and at Canyon Creek and at the Bears Paw, and I shot at soldiers who were shooting at my family. If he asks, I will say so."
"He may send you south for it."
"He may." Tukweyit drank the last of his coffee. "So I did not want to wait. There were things to finish first. The horse. The stones." He set the cup down, precisely, in the ring it had left on the table. "And one more thing. But that one can wait until we have done the stones."
They began the next morning at first light.
Nils had thought about how to do it most of the night, lying awake in the dark while Tukweyit slept rolled in his blanket on the floor by the door, having politely refused the bed. A chimney laid up against a cabin wall is not a thing you can take apart from the bottom. It has to come down the way it went up, in reverse, from the top course to the hearth, one stone at a time, and each stone has to be lifted out and set down and not dropped, or the mortar cracks the ones below and the whole stack goes over into the yard like a felled tree.