"Among my people," said Rides Far, "when a man wishes to marry a woman, he does not wait to be commanded. He goes to her family. He brings horses. He ties them at her father's door. And then he waits to see if they are accepted." She nudged the painted parfleche with the toe of her moccasin. "That is a shirt I made for you this winter. You may wear it when you go. If you go."
For one moment longer he stood there with his mouth open. Then he turned and ran.
* * *
He came back an hour later leading five horses on a single rope: the two bays and the buckskin and the spotted gray that Strikes Twice had given him on his wedding day, and, at the end of the line, limping not at all now and looking deeply suspicious of the whole procedure, the sorrel gelding Deacon. They were every horse he owned. He led them through the camp past Eli, who had come out of his own new lodge to watch and was laughing so hard he had to hold on to the door poles, past Plays With His Horse, who shouted Woodpecker! and was joined by a dozen voices, and he tied all five of them at the door of the lodge of Strikes Twice, and stepped back, and waited.
The chief came out. He looked at the horses for a long time. He walked down the line and looked at each one, at their feet and their teeth and their eyes, exactly as he had once looked at a half-frozen cowboy by firelight. When he reached Deacon he stopped and looked at Wes over the sorrel's back, and said something in Crow.
Behind him, in the door of her own lodge, Good Lodge Woman put her blanket over her head and called out loudly to the air.
Rides Far had come up beside Wes. He felt her hand slip into his, and stay there.
"My father says," she translated, "that it is the first time a man has paid for one of his daughters with the horses he gave him himself." She paused. "He says it is also the first time a man has asked her properly, and that he is old, and has waited a long time to see it, and it is a good gift." Her fingers tightened. "My mother says you may keep the hawk nose. She has grown used to it."
Strikes Twice untied the rope. He led the five horses away toward his herd, and as he passed his daughter he touched her once on the top of the head, lightly, the way a man touches something he has been keeping safe and has decided at last to set down.
When Wes and Rides Far walked back through the camp to her lodge, his saddle was still sitting on the grass outside the door. She bent and picked it up herself—it was heavy, and she did not let him help—and carried it inside, and set it in its place against the poles, and he followed her in, and the door flap fell shut behind them on the gold-green morning, and the sound of the creek, and the sound of a great many people laughing.