Cora did not remember leaving the schoolhouse. She was simply standing over the stone with the deed still in her hand.
There were numbers cut into its face, deep and square, the way a mason cuts them when he expects them to outlast him. Above them, a cross had been cut into the top of the stone, two straight grooves meeting at right angles.
1451.
"I gave them water," the old woman said. She said it in English, slowly, choosing each word. "The first ones. The ones with the long chain and the brass eye on three legs. Before the railroad. Before any of these." She lifted a hand at the schoolhouse, the woodshed, the wire, all of it. "The summer my husband broke his arm. Eight mares had foals in the bottom that year. One of the men cut these numbers. He let me hold the chisel. He showed me how the cross on top points to the four corners." She touched the cross. "We set our winter lodges from this stone for six winters after. The spring is so many steps that way. The foaling ground is so many steps that way. My husband walked it every year. I walked it with him."
Whitcombe had come down the slope behind Cora. He was breathing hard. He stopped a little above them and looked at the stone and something passed over his face very quickly, the way a cloud's shadow crosses a field, and was gone.
"Mrs. Red Willow," he said, "with great respect. That stone was examined by the deputy surveyor who subdivided this township in 1874. It was not found in place. A new corner was set and properly recorded. It's in the field notes. It's on the plat that Miss Lindqvist is holding. Every legal description in this township has been drawn from the corner of record for twelve years. An old stone that turns up in a sandbank—"
"It did not turn up," said the old woman. "It was here."
She put her palm flat on top of it, over the cross.
"The marker never moved."
***
Afterward, Cora would try to remember who saw the surveyor first, and she would decide it had been the boy. The boy was still on the brown horse in the yard, sitting in front of his father, and from up there he could see over the woodshed to the wagon road. He said something and pointed, and Amos turned in the saddle.
A man was walking down off the bench.