He thought, too, of the volunteers. If they found a Nimiipuu woman on a settler's mare, they would call it theft at best and evidence at worst. If they found out he had given it to her, they would call him a word he did not want to think about with his daughter asleep twenty feet away.
He looked at the old man in the grass. The old man was looking back at him with a perfectly level, unhurried attention, the way a man looks at weather he has seen a great many times before.
"Wait," Nils said.
He went back inside and stood for a moment by the table with his hand on the back of the chair. Then he took down the bridle from its peg, and the saddle blanket, and the old Mexican saddle he had bought with the mare. He took half the bacon wrapped in its cloth and the end of the loaf and a sack of dried apples, and he put them in a flour sack. He went to the curtain and looked at Ketti, who was nine and slept on her stomach with one arm hanging off the side of the bed, and he did not wake her.
When he came out with the saddle on his hip, Ipnaxa did not thank him. She closed her eyes for a moment, just a moment, and when she opened them they were wet and she was angry about it.
"She is called Solvei," he said, and found that his voice was not quite steady either. "She does not like her left ear touched. She will go all night if you let her drink at the creeks. Don't let her have too much at once when she is hot."
"I know horses," Ipnaxa said. It was not rude. It was simply true, and it was the first thing she had said that sounded like herself rather than like someone trying to stay alive. "I will not hurt your horse."
They saddled the mare together in the dark. Nils lifted the old man, who weighed no more than a half-grown boy, and set him in the saddle, and the old man took the reins in hands like knotted rope and settled himself as though he had been born on a horse, which very likely he had. Then he leaned down and said something to Nils in his own language. It was a long sentence, spoken slowly, and Nils caught only one word in it, a word he knew because Gudny had used it: the word for the spring.
"What did he say?"