"Eli," he said. "Eli. Eli."
His brother's eyes opened. They were fever-bright and slow to focus, and for a long moment they moved over Wes's face without knowing it. Then something came into them, very slowly, like a lamp being carried up a long stair.
"Wes," said Eli Harlan. His voice was a ghost of itself. "Took you long enough."
And then, because he was Eli, and because not even a bullet and a river and two years could change what he was, he grinned.
Afterward Wes could not have said how long he knelt there. Long enough for the fire to burn down and for Rides Far to build it up again without a word. Long enough for him to discover that a grown man could weep without making a sound. Eli's hand found his and held on. Neither of them said anything for a while. There was too much to say and no way to start.
At last Rides Far brought a horn cup of something warm and bitter and put it in Eli's free hand, and helped him lift his head to drink, and Wes saw how she did it, the practiced ease of it, her palm flat between his brother's shoulder blades. He saw Eli look at her, too. It was not the look of a man at his nurse. It was the look of a man at his sister.
"She pulled me out," Eli said, when he had drunk. "Did she tell you? No. She wouldn't. She doesn't brag. It's very annoying."
"I do not brag because I do not need to," said Rides Far. "Everyone already knows."
"She was camped on the Yellowstone with her mother's people," Eli said. "Down below the Clarks Fork. Hunting. I came down the river hung up in that cottonwood's roots like a fly in a web. Eleven miles, or twenty, or a hundred, I don't know. She saw the tree go by and saw a hand in it, and she rode that blue mare straight into the current and cut me loose."
"Not that mare," Rides Far said. "Her mother. This one was a yearling then."
"Her mother. Anyway. My head was broken. Here." He touched the scar through his eyebrow, and then the side of his skull above his ear. "For most of that summer I didn't know my own name. I knew the river and I knew I was cold. I knew there was a woman who kept making me drink soup. By the time the leaves turned I knew I was Eli Harlan and I had a brother named Wesley who was probably out of his mind. But I couldn't walk yet. My leg was broken too, and her mother set it, and it set crooked."