The leather stiff and reluctant under his fingers. The cabin was warm enough, the fire crackling, and the wind howling outside like a living thing trying to find its way in. Then he heard a sound that did not belong to the wind or the creek of the cabin settling. It was a thin sound, high and weak, like a coyote pup crying for its mother somewhere out in the darkness. He sat down the bridal and listened with the whole of his attention because a man alone in that country learned to listen for he did not live long.
The sound came again closer now. And this time he knew it was not an animal. No animal made a sound quite like that. A sound that had human desperation in it, even if he could not make out any words. He pulled on his coat, the heavy wool one that his wife had made for him in the first winter of their marriage, and he put on his hat, and took the lantern from its hook by the door.
He picked up his rifle, too, because a man alone in that country did not open his door to the dark without being ready for whatever might come through it. And he stepped out onto the porch with the wind cutting at his face, and the snow swirling so thick 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.