What he had left was 300 acres of Rocky Mountain pasture, 40 head of cattle he was trying to keep alive through the winter, a border collie named Roscoe who slept under the stove, and Sarah, 8 years old. Clara's brown eyes. Clara's stubborn quiet. Sarah had learned not to ask her father why he sometimes stood at the window and looked at nothing for a long time.
She had learned to put a hand on his arm instead. They had a routine, the two of them. Up before first light. Eli would build the fire and put water on while Sarah set the table.
He would go out and break the ice on the water troughs, fork hay to the cattle, check the fence line closest to the timber where the elk like to push through in deep snow. Sarah would have porridge ready when he came back in, stomping snow off his boots on the mat Clara had braided herself from rags she'd saved all one summer. It was a good life. A quiet life.
Eli told himself that most mornings, and believed it about half the time.
The night the woman knocked, the temperature had dropped hard after sundown. Eli had gone out at dusk to check on the cattle and come back frozen through. He'd stoked the fire high and told Sarah to stay close to it. The blizzard came in around 9:00, not a gradual thing, but a wall of wind that hit the ridge like something thrown.
Roscoe pushed himself tight against the bottom of the stove and didn't move again. Eli was reading, or trying to read, the same page of the same almanac he'd been on for a week when the knock came. Three slow knocks. Deliberate.
Not the frantic hammering of a man in trouble. Considered patient, he picked up the rifle from beside the chair, crossed to the door, and opened it.
She had been walking for 2 days. Her name was Sona. In the language of her people, the Chiricahua Apache, the name meant golden. Her mother had given it to her because she had been born in the hour when the morning light first touches the ridgeline and the whole eastern sky goes amber before the sun crests.
Sona was 22 years old. And she had covered 40 miles through the deepest winter the San Juan country had seen in a decade, on foot, alone, in buckskin and moccasins. She had left because she had to. Her band had wintered near the Piedra River, in the breaks below the mesa, where the canyons cut the worst of the north wind.
They had wintered there many years running, but that fall a trader named Greer had come to the camp with whiskey and the kind of smile that doesn't reach a man's eyes. He had a paper, he said. A paper with marks on it. He told Sona's uncle, the band's headman that season, that Sona had agreed to go with him as his wife.
The paper was a lie. Sona had signed nothing. She had been shown a document and asked if she could read it. She said no.
Greer had taken that as a yes and written what he liked. Her uncle was not a foolish man. But Greer had six armed riders with him and a federal land agent's badge that may or may not have been real, and it was not a time to start a fight the band could not finish. He told Sona quietly, the night before Greer planned to take her, that she needed to be gone before morning.
She had taken dried meat, a wool blanket, moccasins with double-thick elk hide soles her aunt had made her, and a knife. She traveled north and west, away from Greer's likely routes, toward the higher country where she judged no one would follow in this kind of cold. She crossed one ridge too many. By the second night she was losing the feeling in her feet.