One of the men said something in their own language, and the others laughed, not unkindly. The woman did not laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved.
"He says you are the first white man he has ever heard speak in a voice like a woodpecker." She nudged the roan closer and, before he could think what she meant to do, reached over and took the reins out of his useless hands. "Come. My father's camp is not far. Try not to fall off. If you fall off I will have to pick you up, and you are heavier than you look."
* * *
He did not remember much of the ride. He remembered that the man with the Winchester put a buffalo robe around him without being asked, and that it smelled of smoke and sage and the animal it had been. He remembered the woman's voice speaking low to Deacon in a language that was all soft consonants and long falling vowels, and that the sorrel, who did not like strangers, put his ears forward and listened to her as if she were telling him something he needed to know.
And he remembered, because his mind went there whenever he was frightened or cold or alone, the Yellowstone in June.
The river had been bank-full that year, the color of coffee with the milk stirred in, running so fast that the drift logs went by like freight cars. Pike's foreman at the time, a man named Garrity, had wanted to wait three days for the water to drop. Wes had been the one who said they could make it. He had been twenty-six and sure of himself, and the buyer in Miles City was paying a premium for early delivery, and Pike had promised a bonus to the man who got the herd across. Eli, his brother, had been twenty, riding swing on the downstream side because that was the most dangerous place and Eli always wanted the most dangerous place.
Halfway across, a cottonwood the size of a church steeple had come down the current with its root ball turning like a wheel. Wes had seen it. He had shouted. Eli had turned his head, grinning, the way he always grinned, as if the whole world were a joke being told for his benefit, and then the tree had taken him and his horse and three steers and rolled them under, and the brown water had closed over the place where they had been as if nothing had ever been there at all.
Wes had searched the banks for nine days. He had found the horse on a gravel bar eleven miles down. He had found Eli's hat caught in a willow. He had not found Eli. In the end he had written to their mother in Missouri, and she had written back one line, which he still carried in his shirt pocket because he could not bring himself to burn it: I always knew you would be the one to bring him home or the one to lose him.
He had not gone home since.
* * *
The camp sat in a bend of Pryor Creek, where the cottonwoods stood thick enough to break the wind, and when Wes came into it out of the storm it seemed to him like a town of lamps. There were perhaps forty lodges, tall ones, their poles rising high above the smoke flaps in a crown of black lines against the snow, and every one of them glowed from inside with the fire at its heart, so that the painted hides shone amber and rose. Dogs came out to bark at him. Children stood in doorways and stared. Somewhere a man was singing, and over everything lay the smell of cottonwood smoke and boiling meat that went straight through his chest and made him want to weep.