What did you do up there?" "There was a loaded slope," Sona said."I knew it would go.
I watched it for 3 days. The angle, the crust.
I was right." Eli looked at her for a long moment."You planned that." "I planned that there might be a night like this," she said."I did not plan everything.
I did not plan to be here." Sarah got up from the table and put her arms around Sona's waist. Sona looked down at her as if this was something she needed a second to absorb, and then she put one hand on the girl's back and held her there. Eli turned to the stove and stood with his back to both of them, his hand on the coffee pot, and did not say anything for a while.
The man from Greer's party spent 3 days in the barn before Eli rode to Durango and had a conversation with the county sheriff. The sheriff had heard of Greer. The paper Greer carried turned out to be exactly what Sona had said, a document she had never agreed to in a language she could not read, witnessed by men on Greer's payroll. The sheriff was a methodical man.
He sent word south. Greer did not come back.
Spring came to the San Juan country slowly that year, the way it does at altitude, not a sudden change, but a gradual relenting. The snowpack pulled back from the south-facing slopes first. The creek unlocked itself. The first meadowlarks came back to the lower pasture in late March, and Sarah stood at the kitchen window every morning to report their progress.
Sona had stayed, not because she had nowhere to go. Her uncle's band had moved their winter camp, and word had reached her through a Ute man who traded at Durango that her people were well. She had somewhere to go. She stayed because she chose to.
That distinction mattered to her, and she had made it clear to Eli in her plain and quiet She had begun teaching Sarah some Chiricahua words in the evenings, the names of birds and plants, the word for snow, the word for fire, the word for safe. Sarah was quick with language the way children are and practiced relentlessly. She taught Sona in return the multiplication tables and how to read the almanac. On evenings when the fire was low and the cabin settled around them, there was a sound in the house that Eli realized one night in late February was the sound of a house that had people in it again.
He had not let himself think about what that meant for a long time. He thought about it now.
It was an evening in April, that mud season between winter and real spring, when the light stays late and the air carries that edge of green that means things are going to grow again. Sarah was asleep. The cattle were in the lower pasture. The stove had burned down to coals.
Eli had been turning something over in his mind for weeks. He was not a man who talked around things once he'd made them up.
He sat down across from Sona at the table, put his hands flat on the wood, and looked at her."I want to ask you something," he said."And I want you to know that whatever you answer, nothing changes here.