He sat on his porch that morning and watched the first patches of brown earth appear in the meadow below, and he wondered if he had made it through the fire only to collapse when the flames were finally behind him. The Apache left on the last day of March. Kusen came to him that morning while the sun was still low and said that the trails would be clear enough now for his people to travel and that they would go south to find the rest of their band in the valleys where the winter had not been so hard. Elijah shook his hand and told him to go in peace and he meant it truly even though he knew that their leaving meant he would face the last stretch of hunger alone. He watched them walk down the meadow toward the treeine, the children running ahead and the old women walking slow but steady on legs that had grown strong again.
And he felt something loosen in his chest that he had not known was tight. They were going to live. Whatever else happened, they were going to see another summer. That was something worth having done. He did not expect to see them again.
Two weeks later, on a morning in April, when the first green shoots were pushing through the mud, and the birds were coming back to sing in the bare branches, Elijah Tanner woke to a sound he did not recognize. It was the sound of hooves, many of them, more than he had ever heard in one place on his little piece of land, and the creek of wheels on the trail that led up from the valley. He pulled himself out of bed, which took longer than it should have because his body was running on nothing but stubbornness, and he walked out onto his porch to see what was coming. What he saw stopped him where he stood, stopped his breath and his thoughts and everything except the simple act of trying to understand what his eyes were showing him. There were wagons coming up the trail, four of them, each one piled high with bundles and sacks and things wrapped in hides.
There were riders alongside the wagons, Apache riders, more of them than he had ever seen in one place, sitting their horses with a kind of quiet pride that spoke of people who knew exactly what they were doing and why. At the front of the whole procession, sitting straight and calm on a painted horse, was Kusen. And even from a distance, Elijah could see that the old man was watching him with something that might have been a smile. Behind the wagons came a herd of horses, maybe 30 head or more. Paints and bays, and a few spotted ones that would have been worth a fortune down in Denver.
Behind the horses came men carrying bundles of furs so thick and heavy they could barely hold them. Pelts of beaver and fox and deer stacked so high they blocked the men's faces from view. The whole line stretched back down the trail as far as Elijah could see, disappearing