"A well is a month of work," he said.
"Then it is a month of work."
"Why?"
She had looked at him with that long, level look of hers. "Because people come to that spring," she said. "They were coming before we came. I saw the digging sticks marks in the ground, and the old fire rings. We are not going to put our house in the middle of somebody's kitchen."
He had argued, and lost, and dug the well, and it had been a month of work and then some, and the water came up hard and tasted of iron. And the next May the women had come, six or seven of them with their children and their digging sticks and their baskets, and set up two lodges in the draw for three weeks while they dug, and Gudny had walked down on the second day with a loaf of bread and a pot of coffee, and come back at dusk with her hands black with dirt and her face lit up like a girl's. She went every day after that while they stayed. She went every year. She learned the names of the plants and the names of the women and the names of their children, and she made Ketti learn them too.
Nils had gone down only a few times. He was shy, and busy, and he did not know what to do with his hands among people whose language he did not have. But he remembered one afternoon in particular, in their second summer, when he had gone down to the draw with the stoneboat to pick rock for the chimney he was building.
There was good rock in the draw. Flat slabs of basalt that had split off the ledge in the frost, and rounded river cobbles that had come from God knew where. And up on the slope above the spring, a little east of it, there was a low heap of stones, flat and round mixed together, half sunk into the sod and grown over at the edges with moss and bitterroot, perhaps four feet long and two feet wide. Nils had looked at it and thought that someone had already done half his work for him, cleared the field and piled the rock, and he had started to load it onto the stoneboat.
He had loaded perhaps five stones when Gudny came down the slope from the spring. She had been there with the women. She did not run, but she came fast, and she put her hand flat on his chest and said, "No. Not those, Nils. Put them back."