He entered the sacred river. Iron Sky said he's soaking wet and his boots don't match each other. Seth looked down. His right boot was the brown one. His left boot was the dark one, which was the result of dressing in the dark at 4 in the morning in March and then not having occasion to correct it in the weeks since because it was the sort of thing that stopped matching when other things were matching more.
They're both boots, Seth said. She looked at him. I'm Seth Callaway, Seth said. Rancher from New Mexico. I got lost following a map that turned out to be wrong.
Found your river by accident and I genuinely had no idea it was sacred. I apologize for the trespass. I'd like to understand what happens next. Dawn. Iron Sky's voice carried the particular parental tone of a man addressing an adult child who is behaving like a version of herself he recognizes and is not entirely surprised by.
This is not a conversation for the road. Dawn, he filed the name without reaction. The council meets tomorrow at first light. Dawn said to Seth directly as though iron sky had not spoken, which Seth noted. Until then, you're a guest.
Don't leave the camp perimeter. Don't touch anything in the corral. A beat, especially not the black stallion on the north end. He doesn't like strangers, and he'll tell you. So at volume.
She turned and walked back toward the east side of the camp without looking at him again. Seth watched her go, turned to Iron Sky. Iron Sky had the expression of a man watching a situation he had anticipated without being able to do much about it. "She is my daughter," he said in the tone of both explanation and conclusion. They gave Seth a tent near the south wall.
It was small and clean. Furs on the ground for sleeping, a gap at the top for airflow, a clay pot of water, and a wrapped portion of dried meat left just inside the entrance. He sat in it for a while with his wet clothes slowly drying in the warm evening air, and tried to think through what he knew. He was in an Apache camp somewhere in the Arizona Canyon country, position unknown. His Remington was still on the saddle, and no one had taken it from him, which he chose to interpret as a reasonable sign.
His horse was being watered and fed. He had been given food and a place to sleep. And the chief had addressed him in English and shown something that was, if not warmth, at least the distant relative of respect. He was not in immediate danger. He was in a complicated situation which was different.
Tomorrow the council would meet and someone would decide something. Seth ate the dried meat and sat with a particular kind of tiredness that was not the tiredness of the body, but the tiredness of a mind that had been carrying weight for a long time and was still carrying it even when it was permitted to set it down. He thought about Ruth. He did this less than he used to, not because he thought about her less, but because the thinking had changed in character, had become less like falling, and more like standing near something vast, and learning to stand near it without losing his footing. He thought about the way she named the horses, the specificity of it, how she claimed she could tell a horse's personality within 10 minutes of meeting it.
Gerald had been named Gerald because Ruth said he had the face of someone's pompous uncle. Seth had not seen it at the time. He had seen it eventually. He thought about this camp, about the horses, about whoever had bred those horses generation by generation in this hidden valley with these rock walls, selecting for intelligence and endurance and some quality he couldn't name yet, but could see in the way they moved. He had sold his ranch without a plan.
He had followed a wrong map into a sacred river. He was sitting in an Apache camp in wet socks with a council meeting scheduled for the morning. He was objectively in a ridiculous situation. He was also for the first time in 2 years thinking about something that was not the past. He went to the entrance of the tent when the sun was almost down because he had spent his life reading the last light of the day over open ground and it was a habit too old to break.
The camp was moving through its evening rhythms. Cook fires built up. The sound of a child being called in. Someone's voice in Apache, low and repetitive, which might have been a song or might have been a prayer and which carried in the cooling air with the cleanness that sound carried in desert evening when the heat stopped bending it. He almost walked back inside.
Dawn was sitting on a large flat rock at the camp's east edge facing the canyon wall, not looking at the sunset, but looking at the rock itself or at something on the other side of the rock that only existed in her attention. "You should have walked back inside. Can I sit? " Seth said the rock doesn't belong to anyone. He sat left enough distance between them that she would not feel crowded, which was the same distance he maintained around horses he was first getting acquainted with. And he registered the absurdity of this only briefly before letting it pass.
They were quiet for a while. The canyon walls caught the last light and held it going from red to dark orange to a deep reddish brown as the sun dropped. The air cooled fast the way desert air did without negotiation. Dawn spoke first. How long did you have your ranch?
13 years, Seth said. 600 acres. Horses and cattle both, but mostly cattle. I was working towards shifting more to horses. Better margins if you know how to breed.
Why did you sell it? He was quiet for a moment. The way he was quiet was the answer, and she seemed to understand that because she didn't push it. My wife died, Seth said. Typhoid fever, spring of 71.
She was carrying our first child. He looked at the rock wall, which was the same thing he always looked at. When he said this, whatever wall was available, I couldn't stay there after. Dawn was quiet for a moment. That was not uncomfortable.
I was eight when my mother died, she said. I don't remember her well enough anymore, and I am more angry about that than I am about the dying. Seth looked at her sideways. She was not looking at him. Elder Mary raised me, Dawn continued.
She's the old woman who was watching you when you rode in. She was holding a grinding stone and staring. I noticed her. Everyone notices her. She notices everyone first.
A very small pause. She will want to talk to you. I would be honest with her. She has a way of knowing when someone isn't. I've been told I'm honest to a fault, Seth said.
Is that a fault? He thought about it. Depends on what you're being honest about. She turned and looked at him then directly and he meant the look because looking away would have been the wrong thing to do and he knew it. I have lived with this tradition since I was old enough to understand what it meant.
Dawn said, "Every year, every season, there was always the question underneath everything else. My father believes in it. The elders believe in it. I was told the river would choose when the time was right and that I had to trust the river's judgment even when I did not agree with it. " A pause. I have been disagreeing with a river for 15 years.
“Does it listen?” “Rivers don't listen,” Dawn said. They just keep moving. Sounds like you've thought about this. I've had 15 years. Not bitter, just accurate.