The three red lines on the paint's bridle knot were Miguel Aldama's mark inherited from his Apache mother's family. She had kept the mark on the horse after Miguel died because it was the last thing she had of him that could be carried on something living. He understood that without needing it explained further. He had kept one thing of his father's, too. A single survey stake from the Kansas homestead, 4 in of wood with a government mark stamped into the flat end.
He still had it in his saddle bag. He had never shown it to anyone. He listened. He learned to hear what she wasn't saying as well as what she was, which in those early weeks was often more important. There was a morning in the third week when she rose before light and went out without waking him.
He found her an hour later at the edge of the cottonwood stand, facing east, eyes closed, arms at her sides, standing in a specific way he had come to recognize. Feet parallel, weight even, nothing held or braced against anything, not praying in any form he had a name for, more like listening, like she had turned herself into an instrument, waiting for a sound to pass through her. He stood at the tree line a moment and then went back inside. When she came in an hour later, she was carrying two rabbits she had snared at dawn. Weeks later, he raised the question what she had been doing at the tree line.
The Jicarilla had ceremonies for marking the turning of the season. Ceremony she could not perform properly alone without the community that gave them their meaning. But she could do the interior part, the part about orientation. Knowing which direction she was facing, being honest about it, he sat with that for a while. It sounded useful, he finally said, "For a person living the way they were living, she agreed it was more useful than she had expected when she was young and thought orientation was something you could carry in your head without attending to it. " In the fourth week, Levi went to the main house to help Beckwith patch a section of roof that had given way under the accumulated snow weight.
3 hours of wordless practical work. Tar paper, cross-hatched timber bracing, the smell of pine resin, and cold air. Good to use his hands for something uncomplicated. When he came back at dusk, Shenoa was at the table with Beckwith's lamp turned up high, a piece of paper and a pencil before her, drawing something in careful detail. He sat across from her and looked.
It was a map, not a surveyor's precision, but accurate in a way he found striking. the Jicarilla range, the shape of the high ridges, the Rayado Creek drainage, the position of the eastern quarter section relative to the main road north of Cimarron. She had marked the corners with small careful squares and written a notation at the upper corner. He realized after a moment it was Miguel Aldama's name in his own handwriting, copied from memory with a precision that told him she had looked at that signature many times. Where had she learned to read land surveys? Miguel had taught her, she replied, because he believed it mattered that she understand how the land was being described by the systems being imposed on it.