I've been asked a time or two why I did it. Why I opened the gate. Why I didn't send her along the way every other man in the valley had. I never had a good answer for those people, so I quit trying to give them one. The truth is, I didn't think about it much.
A woman stood at my gate at dusk, road-worn and straight-backed, and I opened it. That was the whole of the decision. It didn't feel like a decision at all. Her name was Ahti. I didn't know that yet.
When she came up the lane with a gray mare and a bedroll tied behind the saddle, and the look of someone who had been riding since before the dew lifted. I'd been mending the east fence when I heard the horse. I set down my hammer and walked to the gate. She sat the mare without fidgeting and watched me come, and she didn't look away when I looked at her. I asked her what she needed.
She said a night's shelter and a safe road east in the morning, that she'd camp in my barn if that was agreeable, that she needed nothing more and expected nothing. She said it plain, no apology in it, no softening, just the facts laid out for a man to take or leave. I opened the gate. I'd traded with the Crow for eight years, since before I had the east range. Her people wintered near my land two of those years, when the grass was good along the blackthorn and the elk ran heavy in the foothills.
I knew how to read the quality of a person without needing them to explain themselves, and Ahti didn't need explaining. I showed her where to water the mare, showed her the corner of the barn where the hay was dry, told her supper was in an hour if she wanted it. She thanked me once. She didn't thank me again after that, which suited me fine. A woman who knows how to receive a courtesy without turning it into a debt is a woman who knows her own worth.
At supper she told me the rough shape of it, the winter camp scattered, her people moving north, her own errand east, a cousin in the trading post settlement at Garner Creek, someone who needed to know the camp had moved. She'd ride back the way she came when the errand was done. Two weeks, maybe three. I said that was fine. She looked at me across the table like she was measuring something.
I ate my supper. "You don't ask many questions." she said. I told her I'd found questions mostly got in the way. She was quiet a moment, then she said, "The man at the Double Fork Ranch asked enough for both of you, and the one before him." I didn't say anything to that. I knew the men she meant.