"Shash." He tried it. Butchered it, probably, by the way her mouth twitched. "What's it mean?" "Bear." "That an insult aimed my direction?" "Only if you are slow to understand it." The twitch at her mouth became almost something close to a real smile there and gone so fast he might have imagined it if he hadn't been watching close enough to catch it. "Your turn." She said. "Teach me one." He thought a moment.
"Stubborn." "I already know this word." "Figured you might." That got the ghost of a smile out of her again, quicker this time. And something warm moved through his chest he hadn't felt move through there in longer than he cared to admit, not since before the wagon, before the pine box, before 2 years of learning to live inside a quiet he'd told himself over and over that he preferred. Outside far off, a wolf howled long low answered a moment later by another, farther still. Unoba's whole body went still at the sound, head tilting slightly, listening the way a person listens for meaning inside a language most folks only ever heard as noise. Trouble?
Whit asked. No. She relaxed slow degree by degree. Just old ones talking to each other across the dark. Nothing tonight that concerns us.
You can tell all that? From a howl? I was raised to listen for more than words. She said, "Words are the smallest part of what anything tells you if a person knows how to hear the rest." He thought about that longer than he meant to. Thought about all the things Adaline used to tell him without ever opening her mouth worry in the set of her shoulders, contentment in the way she hummed over dishes, warning in a silence gone half a shade too long.
He'd understood her that way once. Had let himself forget somewhere inside two years of grief that a person could be understood that way again by anybody. "Guess I've got some listening to catch up on." He said. "Guess you do." She almost smiled again. Didn't quite let it land.
But it sat closer than the day before had gotten and closer than the day before that and closer than the day before that and Whit found himself for the first time in longer than he'd tracked looking forward to whatever tomorrow's small degree of closer might turn out to be. Two days after the wolves distant conversation, the smokehouse sat empty enough that Whit figured a hunt was overdue. He said as much over breakfast more thinking aloud than asking. "I'll come." Inaba said. Not a question.
A fact. Already decided before he'd finished the sentence. "Didn't figure you for asking permission." "I was not asking." They set out before the sun had fully cleared the ridge. Whit with his Winchester, Inaba with nothing but a knife at her hip and a bow she'd fashioned herself in the weeks since carved from ash wood he hadn't even noticed missing from the wood pile until she showed him the finished strung with sitchu she wouldn't explain the source of and he decided, wisely, not to ask about. "You made that," he said, eyeing the bow.
"Out of my firewood." "Out of a branch that was never going to be firewood, if you had looked at it twice before deciding otherwise. That branch was earmarked. Earmarked for burning. Now it is earmarked for feeding us both. Tell me which is the better use." He didn't have an answer for that.