he could barely see the steps at his feet. What he saw in the yellow circle of lantern light stopped him where he stood. There were people in his yard, more than a dozen of them, huddled together in the snow, like a herd of cattle, too tired and too cold to move another step. They were Apache.
He could see that at once from their clothing and their features. But they were not the painted warriors of the stories men told in the saloons after too much whiskey. The terrifying figures on horseback that swept down from the hills with death in their hands. They were old women with faces lined by decades of sun and wind and sorrow. They were children so small they could barely stand in the deep snow, their legs buried to the knee, and their tiny hands wrapped in rags that were frozen stiff.
There were a few men, yes, but men so thin that their cheekbones stood out like the edge of an axe, and their arms hung loose at their sides because there was no strength left to hold them any other way. They had no horses. They had no weapons that Elijah could see. They had nothing at all except the blankets wrapped around their shoulders and the snow that clung to them like a shroud waiting to be worn. The sound he had heard was coming from a child in the arms of a woman who looked too weak to hold her.
A small girl maybe four or 5 years old whose cry had gone thin and greedy with exhaustion and cold and hunger. The child was not crying the way children cry when they want something they know they can have. She was crying the way living things cry when they do not know if they will still be living when the sun comes up. It was the sound of a life that had been pushed past every limit and was running on nothing but the simple refusal to stop existing. Elijah stood on his porch and looked at them.
And they looked back at him with eyes that held no hope and no fear. They were past both of those things. They had walked past hope somewhere in the mountains and left fear behind somewhere else. And what remained was just the bare fact of being alive and the question of whether that fact would continue. They had reached the end of something and they knew it.
And they were waiting to see what kind of man stood on this porch and what kind of choice he would make. One of the men, the oldest of the group, a man whose hair was gray and whose face was creased with more years than Elijah could easily count, took a single step forward through the snow. He moved slow and careful. The way a man moves when he wants to show that he is not a threat to anyone. And he spoke in broken English that came slow and careful, too.