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 around the bend into the trees, and every last bit of it was moving toward him. Kusen reached the porch first and dismounted slow, the way an old man does when he wants to show that the years have not yet taken his strength and dignity away. He stood in front of Elijah and looked at him the same way he had looked at him on that first night in the snow, steady and patient, and holding more behind his eyes than any words could say.
"You gave us what you needed to live," Kusen said. You gave us the food that would have kept you breathing through the winter, and you did not ask us to pay for it. Now my people give you what we have gathered in the months since we left you. It is not payment. It is not trade.