Didn't try very hard to find one, either. They tracked a small herd of pronghorn through the low draws east of the property. Witt, moving the way the war had taught him, slow, deliberate, reading wind and ground. Both and Yanaba, moving in a way that made his own careful woodcraft look clumsy by comparison. She read sign he walked straight past.
Caught the herd's direction a full quarter mile before he'd have guessed it himself. "How do you know that?" he whispered, the third time she corrected a read he'd have sworn was nothing. "Same way you know cattle," she whispered back. "You have spent your whole life reading one animal's habits. I have spent mine reading several.
It is not magic, only practice." "Feels like magic from here." "Then you have not been paying attention to your own skill. You read that storm three nights back before the sky gave any sign of it. I watched you do it." He hadn't realized she'd noticed. Filed it away, same as everything else about her. He was slowly, carefully collecting.
The shot, when it came, was his, clean, quick, the animal down before it knew to be afraid. But the work after was hers as much as his, both of them field dressing the carcass with the same wordless rhythm they'd found mending fence. Her strength doing in minutes what would have cost him the better part of an hour alone. "You've done this before," he said. "More than hunting for supper." "I fed a war party for three winters, she said simply, wiping her hands clean in the dry grass.
A woman who cannot provide is not kept long as a warrior, whatever her skill with a blade. I learned early which skills a man's pride would allow me to keep, and which I needed to be quietly better at than anyone thought to ask. Then why you're better at this than half the men I served with? Probably. There it was again, quicker now, surer of itself each time it surfaced.
Though I have not met the men you served with, perhaps your standard is simply low. Ma'am, I believe that's twice now you've made a joke. I do not joke. You keep saying that. Getting less convincing every time you say it.
They walked back toward the cabin in the long gold light of late afternoon, the pronghorn slung between them, and Whit found himself doing something he hadn't done in two years without forcing it. Laughing. Easy. Unplanned. The kind that arrived without him deciding first whether he'd earned it.
Yenaba watched him do it, something soft moving behind her eyes she didn't bother hiding this time. There it is, she said quietly. There's what? The sound a man makes when he remembers he is still alive, not only surviving. She shifted the weight of the carcass on her shoulder, gaze fixed forward again, though something in her voice had gone gentler than he'd heard it yet.