"I thought there was going to be shouting." He picked up the stone he had set down. "My sister will be disappointed. She likes a story with shouting in it."
That night after supper they sat by lamplight at the table, because there was no fire, and Tukweyit told Nils the one thing his grandfather had said that would help them find the right stones.
"He said there were two stones that were not from the ledge or the creek. He said when they covered his mother, his own father went back into the lodge and brought out her grinding stone, the flat one she used to pound kouse into cakes, and laid it over her heart. And his mother's sister brought a round stone from the river with red paint on one side, the kind we use, and laid it at her head with the paint side down, toward her, so that it would be the last thing and the first thing." He held his hands a little apart. "The grinding stone is this big. It is worn hollow on top from use. The painted one is perhaps like a large potato. The paint will be faded. Perhaps it is gone."
Nils sat very still. Then he got up and took the lamp and went out to the wagon sheet in the dark, and Tukweyit and Ketti came after him. He walked along the rows of stone with the lamp held low, and stopped, and crouched, and turned one of the cobbles over.
On its underside, faint as a fingerprint in the yellow light, there was a smear of rust-colored stain, worn almost to nothing. Nils remembered it. He remembered noticing it the day he laid it into the chimney, and thinking it was iron in the rock, and turning that face inward so it would not show.
"I put it facing in," he said. "Toward the flue. I thought it was ugly."
Tukweyit knelt beside him and did not touch the stone. After a while he said, very quietly, something in his own language that Nils did not understand, and then he said, "Toward the fire, then. Well. She was warm, at least, these two winters. That is something." He wiped his face with the back of his scarred hand. "The grinding stone was not in what we took down today. It must be lower."
It was. They found it the next afternoon, three courses above the hearth, where Nils had set it hollow side down because the hollow made it rock and he wanted it to sit flat. When he chiseled it loose and handed it down, Tukweyit took it in both arms like something living and held it against his chest for a moment before he set it down. Ketti, without being told, went and got the clean flour sack and spread it on the grass, and he laid the stone on that.