"Nobody," Ketti said. "I just thought she might be thirsty. It's a long time to be inside a chimney."
Tukweyit laughed. He sat down on the slope abruptly, as though his legs had gone out from under him, and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes again, and Ketti stood there looking offended and then started laughing too, and Nils sat down beside them on the cold grass above the spring and found, to his considerable surprise, that he was laughing as well. It was not because anything was funny. It was the laughing people do at the end of a hard piece of work, when the weight comes off all at once and the body does not know what to do with itself.
When they had stopped, Tukweyit sat looking at the blue-green ridge of the Clearwater mountains to the northeast, where the first snow had come in a thin line along the tops.
"The one more thing," he said.
Nils waited.
"It is not for me. It is from my sister. She told me to ask you, and to say it the way she said it, so I will." He took a breath. "She said: tell Ordway that every spring for longer than anybody can remember, the women of our family came to that place to dig, and to mend the stones, and to camp a while by the water and talk about the people who were not there anymore. She said: we cannot come now without a paper from the agent, and maybe the agent will not give one, and maybe my brother will be in the hot country and not able to come at all. She said: so we are not asking for the land. We know whose name is on the paper in Lewiston. We are asking for the spring, in May, for three weeks, for as long as you are there. And if we cannot come, we are asking you to mend the stones for us, each year, the way your wife promised. And to teach your girl how. So that someone does."
Nils did not answer at once. He was looking at the stones, and at the spring below them, and at the shallow draw going down toward the creek, where the camas would be blue in May. He was thinking about the claim papers in a tin box under the box bed, with his name on them in a clerk's copperplate, and about Gudny standing in the field with her skirts pinned up saying that they would not put their house in the middle of somebody's kitchen. He was thinking that the paper said what it said, and the law said what it said, and that neither of them had ever once been able to tell him what he was supposed to do.
"There's nothing to ask," he said finally. "Tell her it was always hers. Tell her to come in May. Tell her to bring whoever she wants. If the agent wants a letter saying they have the landowner's leave to camp here, I'll write him one, and I'll ride to Lapwai and hand it to him myself, and if he wants it witnessed I will get Wardell Brisbin to sign it, which I think he will, after yesterday." He rubbed his hands on his trousers. "And if she can't come, I'll mend the stones. Ketti and I will. But I'd rather she came. I'd rather she showed us. We'll do it wrong."