"Tell her thank you. Tell her I'll wear them."
"She can hear you. You are standing next to her."
"Then why—"
"Because you are her son-in-law," Rides Far said patiently. "It would be shameful for her to speak to you. It would be shameful for you to speak to her. It is a mark of respect."
"It feels like a mark of something."
His wife's mouth twitched. "She also says you have a nose like a hawk and hope that your children will have mine."
Good Lodge Woman, with her back to both of them, cackled.
The second set of rules concerned the cousins. Rides Far had a great many cousins, and some of them, he gathered, stood toward him in a relationship that permitted, even required, merciless teasing. The worst of these was a lean, cheerful man of thirty called Plays With His Horse, who had been the one to bring Eli home across his saddle. Plays With His Horse spoke about forty words of English and used every one of them to torment him. When Wes fell off a half-broken paint colt in the corral, Plays With His Horse sat on the top rail and called him Woodpecker until the whole camp took it up.
"If he did not like you," Rides Far said, "he would be polite."
* * *
At night, in her lodge, they kept to their own robes on opposite sides of the fire, with the striped blanket hung once more across the back where Eli slept. Rides Far had made this plain without making any speech about it. On the first night she had simply laid his robes down on the north side and her own on the south, and gone to sleep, and he had lain awake for a long time listening to the fire settle and his brother breathe and the wind walk round and round the lodge cover, and had felt something that was not quite peace but was its next of kin.