But now she pushed through the crowd of men like they were nothing but fence posts in her way. And she walked right up to the front where everyone could see her. And she looked at each man in turn with eyes that were sharp and cold and completely unimpressed. I remember the winter of 61," she said, and her voice was stronger than anyone expected. My husband and I were starving in a cabin 50 mi from here because the supply wagon had broken an axle, and no one in the world knew we were there.
We had eaten the last of our food 3 days before, and we were too weak to walk out. Do you know who found us? Do you know who brought us meat and guided us out of the mountains before the next storm buried that cabin? She paused and looked around at the faces of the men who were suddenly not meeting her eyes. "It was not any of you," she said.
"It was not any of your fathers. It was a band of Shashonyi who had no reason to help us and every reason to let us die. They did not ask what language we spoke. They did not ask what our fathers had done. They only saw two people who would not last another week, and they did what was right.
She let the silence stretch out, let it grow heavy and uncomfortable. Then she turned and walked back toward her cabin without looking at any of them again, her footsteps crunching in the frozen snow. Some of the men shuffled their feet. A few grumbled that Shosonyi were not the same as Apache, but the fire had gone out of the argument. And when Bucker suggested again that someone should ride out to Tanner's place, nobody stepped forward to be the first man through the door.
Elijah Tanner, for his part, was not spending much time thinking about what the town might do or say. He was thinking about grain, about the arithmetic of survival, about the numbers that would not add up no matter how many times he ran them through his head. He had counted his stores the night the Apache arrived, counting every sack and every bucket. He had counted them again the next morning, hoping the numbers might have changed in the darkness, and they had not changed at all. The math was simple and brutal.
He had enough grain to last himself until the end of March, if he ate carefully, and did not share a single handful with anyone else. The Apache band, all 14 of them, including the children and the elders, would need more than twice that much to make it through