They took down the rest of the gray stones by the end of the third day, and the chimney was a stump of field rock at the hearth, and the cabin wall above it was a gaping square of sky that Nils covered with a wagon sheet nailed to the logs. That night it went down near freezing, and the three of them slept in their coats with the mule and the mare and the gray and the colt all stamping and blowing just outside the wall, and in the morning there was frost on the inside of the canvas. Ketti said it was the most interesting night of her life. Nils, who had lain awake listening to her teeth chatter, did not say what it had been for him.
On the fourth day they carried the stones down to the draw.
They used the stoneboat behind the mule, because there was no other way to move that much rock, but Tukweyit would not let the grinding stone or the painted one go on the stoneboat. He carried them himself, one at a time, a quarter mile across the stubble and down the slope, walking slowly, while Nils led the mule behind him and Ketti walked beside the stoneboat with her hand on the load as though to keep it from being afraid.
At the place above the spring, inside the ring of field stones Nils had laid, the ground was still a shallow sunken oblong, greener than the sod around it. A clump of bitterroot had come up near the head and bloomed and gone to seed. Tukweyit stood at the edge of it for a long time without speaking. Then he took off his hat and laid it on the ground, and knelt, and put both his hands flat on the soil, and spoke for a while in a low voice in his own language. It was not singing exactly. It sounded more like the way a man talks to someone across a table when he has a great deal of news and not much time. Nils thought he heard Ipnaxa's name, and the old man's name, and something that might have been his own, and something that might have been Gudny's. He took Ketti's hand and drew her back a few steps and they waited.
When Tukweyit was finished he stood up and put his hat back on.
"I told her who you were," he said. "And what happened. And that you are putting it right. I thought she should hear it from family."
They put the stones back. Tukweyit set the grinding stone first, over the place he judged was her heart, hollow side up as it would have been when she used it. He set the painted cobble at the head with the stain toward the ground. Then the three of them laid the ledge stones and the creek stones around and over, overlapping, the way Tukweyit remembered seeing it done when he was a boy and his grandfather had brought him here each spring to help with the repairing. He did not remember it exactly. Nobody did. Gudny, who had watched it and perhaps remembered best, was a quarter mile away under the cottonwood. When they were done it was not what it had been, and all three of them knew it, and it was still better than a chimney.
Ketti went down to the spring and came back with her two hands cupped full of water and poured it over the head stone without asking anybody whether she should, and Tukweyit looked at her with an expression Nils could not read and then said, "Yes. That is right. Who told you that?"