Her shoulder healed faster than it had any right to. She changed her own dressings after the first two days using supplies from a small kit in the paint saddle bag, dried herbs he didn't recognize, a small clay pot of something dark and resinous smelling of pine and something else unnamed. Strips of thin leather already cut to size. She was methodical about it as she was methodical about everything. She slept lightly, waking at sounds he had not heard.
Twice in the first week, she was at the window before he was fully conscious, watching the dark outside. A deer moving through the cottonwoods the first time, a distant coyote the second. Her instinct was correct in its vigilance, and he had learned enough to respect it without comment. He cooked mostly because it was one of the things he was competent at trail food, given more care than it usually got. Biscuits and beans and dried venison in the cast iron pot, a pot of strong coffee that he kept refilled because it seemed to anchor the mornings.
The second day, she took over without asking and produced something from the same ingredients that tasted considerably better. She didn't acknowledge the compliment, but she cooked again the day after and the day after that, and by the end of the first week, the cast iron had become hers, and he had become the one who split the wood and kept the fire fed. There was something good about the division. It wasn't anything either of them had arranged. It was simply what the space had demanded, and what they had each supplied, and the result was a routine, which is to say a kind of order. and order in those circumstances was no small thing.
They began trading words. This started as her idea without being announced as such. She would use English words he knew alongside Apache ones he didn't. And when he repeated them back wrong, she corrected him without impatience twice or three times if needed until he had it. He began doing the same with Spanish which she spoke better than English and which bridged many of the gaps between what they could express and what needed expressing.
She taught him ad mountain toe water shill nijani which she rendered as something like I find it beautiful with me used for things that please the heart. He taught her the English word for the specific blue. The sky goes before a good day's weather. Not simply blue, but a quality of blue. He had never quite had a name for an English either.
It turned out she had a word for it in Apache. She demonstrated it twice. He couldn't reproduce it exactly, but he was close enough that she let it pass the third time, which he understood as a kind of progress. She taught him that the Jicarilla marked their horses with pigment symbols specific to the family. Not the band, not tribal insignia, but something closer to a surname passed down through the mother's line.