"You will do it wrong," Tukweyit agreed. "But you will do it."
"And the colt," Nils said.
Tukweyit glanced at him.
"You said he was half mine, if we were being lawyers about it. We aren't being lawyers about it. My half belongs to your niece. Tipyelehne. He was born in the snow in the Grandmother's country and his mother carried her more than a thousand miles and he ought to go to her. But if she'll let him stay here with his mother through the winter, until he's weaned, then she can come in May and take him home. That way she has to come in May. At least once." He stopped. "That was a trick. I'm not good at tricks."
"No," said Tukweyit. "That was a very bad trick. Anybody could see it." He looked down at the stones. "She will like it very much."
He left on the morning of the twenty-ninth of September, to be at the agency by the first.
He went the way he had come, across the stubble toward the north end of the claim, on the gray horse, with a sack of bread and the last of the ham and a jar of Gudny's lingonberry preserves that Ketti had insisted on giving him for Tipyelehne. He did not take the mare. He had never meant to. At the edge of the yard he stopped and got down from the gray, as he had done the first day, and walked over to where Solvei stood at the fence with the colt pressed against her side. He put his hand on her neck and spoke to her for a while in his own language. Then he touched her right ear, gently, and not the left, and stepped back.
"She knows you, now," Nils said.