The knock never came. When Cole Brennan opened his door at dawn, there was only a small bundle on the step wrapped in a faded red blanket and tied with a braided cord. Beyond the fence, an Apache woman sat astride her paint mare in the gray light, straight-backed, her braids pulled over one shoulder. She did not wave. She did not smile.
She only inclined her head toward the bundle, turned her horse, and rode away without a word. Cole knelt and pulled the cord loose. What he found inside made his knees go weak. It had been lost for three generations, and it belonged to a man he had never met. Cole Brennan ran 40 head of cattle on a creek bottom ranch at the edge of the territory, and he ran them alone.
He was thirty-six, long and lean, with a sunburned neck and a quiet face that did not give much away. He had come west after the war with a saddle and a letter of introduction to a man who had died before he arrived. For ten years he had made the land produce what it could. He was not rich. He was not famous.
He was, by common agreement, a decent man who kept his word and his distance. The Apache camp lay two days north in the cottonwood country by the river. Most of the settlers in the valley spoke of it the way you speak of weather you cannot predict. Cole had never given them trouble, and they had never given him any. He had once left a bag of salt at the creek crossing in a hard winter and found, next morning, a neatly skinned rabbit hanging from his gatepost.
Neither side ever spoke of it. It was a trade conducted entirely in silence. The woman first came to his fence in the fall. She appeared at sunset on a paint mare and sat at the edge of his pasture, watching his cattle with a clear, steady, evaluating gaze. She was perhaps 30, tall and strong, her black hair braided with a strip of red cloth, a dark blanket coat belted at the waist.
There was something in her face that made it hard to look away. It was not only beauty, though she had that. It was the stillness, the sense of a person who had decided long ago what she would and would not be afraid of. Cole lifted a hand. She inclined her head.
Then she rode off. She came again the next week and the next, always at dusk, always at the same fence post, always alone. He began to look for her. He caught himself standing on the porch with a cup of coffee at the hour she was due. He told himself it was nothing.
On the fifth evening, he walked out to the fence. "Evening," he said, because that was all he could think of. "Evening," she answered in careful English. "You've been looking at my cattle. I have been looking at your fence." She nodded at the western post where the wire hung slack.
"It will fall in the first hard wind. You have a break there, and the creek rises in spring." Cole turned and looked. She was right. He had meant to mend it for a month. "I'll see to it." "Good." She gathered the reins.
"I am Nalin." "Cole." "I know," said Nalin. "The people at the crossing call you the quiet one." She rode away, and he stood at the fence a long while, strangely light-headed, as if he had been given a compliment he had not expected and did not know how to hold. That winter was hard. Snow lay deep across the valley. A blue norther came down in January and stayed for nine days.
On the sixth day, Cole found a stray calf half-buried in a drift near the creek and carried it home inside his coat. He was halfway through thawing it by the stove when the door rattled. Nalin stood on his porch, snow caked on her shoulders. A young boy of seven or eight clinging to her coat. The boy was shaking so hard his teeth chattered.
"His mother is sick," she said. "We have no more wood at the camp. The elders say wait. I do not want to wait." Cole did not say a word. He took the boy in his arms and put him by the stove.
He loaded the sled with split oak and wrapped three of his own blankets in oilcloth. He rode out with her in the dark, through the drifts, across two frozen creeks, to the camp where an old woman lay burning with fever. He stayed three days. He split wood until his palms bled. He sat with the sick woman through the worst of the nights, spooning broth between her lips.
On the fourth morning, she lifted her head and asked for water. An old man with a face like carved cedar stood in the doorway of the lodge and watched Cole work. He was the chief, Cole learned later, called Taza. He said nothing. But when Cole left, the old man touched two fingers to his own heart, lifted them, and held them out.