Apache healers in the Sacramento country worked with what the high desert gave them. Osha root for breathing, yaka for aching joints, sumac berries for fever, wild onion for infected wounds, and boiled inner willow bark for easing the blood and pain. Toma had known nearly 300 plants by shape, scent, and use. Nia had inherited most of that knowledge. She pointed out plants growing on the same land clay had crossed for years without ever realizing they had names or purposes.
She dug osha root from rocky soil near the creek and laid it across the porch rail to dry. She showed him which berries the deer avoided and explained why. One morning she found a sheep with a badly infected wound on its leg from a wire cut. Nia cleaned it, wrapped it, and applied a pus made from cactus pulp and charcoal ash. By the fourth day, the sheep walked without a limp.
Klay watched the animal cross the pen and realized he needed to reconsider several things he had thought he understood. That evening, he asked her about the pus. Clay Ror sat across from Nia at the table and asked her to explain exactly how she had made it. She started at the beginning, step by step. She left nothing out.
She explained how much cactus pulp should be mixed with the charcoal ash, why the charcoal mattered, and how it helped draw infection from a wound the way dry earth pulled in water after a storm. She also showed him how the mixture had to be placed so the wound could still breathe without losing the effect of the medicine. Klay took out a scrap of paper and wrote down several of her instructions. Nia watched him write, and something in her expression softened when she realized he felt no shame in admitting there were things he did not know. "Your father taught you all of this?"
Klay asked. "It did not sound entirely like a question." Most of it," she answered. "The rest I had to learn after he was gone. Some knowledge only comes when life gives you no choice but to find it."
She was quiet for a moment before continuing. My father always said I should trust what I could see and prove before trusting what I wished were true. A faint smile touched her mouth at the memory. He also said, "Hope is useful when you're trying to endure, but it is a poor guide when you're trying to heal someone." Klay nodded slowly.
"That advice reaches farther than medicine." "Yes." Nia lowered her eyes. He believed that, too. That night, Klay added one more word to the small card he kept tucked inside his shirt pocket.
It was not an Apache word. He simply wrote healer. Beside it, he wrote Toma's name. For some reason, Clay felt it would be wrong if no one ever wrote that name with respect again. On a clear morning in the middle of December, the first real snow of winter finally came.
During the night, nearly 4 in of white covered the ground. At dawn, Clay stepped outside the cabin and found Nia standing in the middle of the yard, perfectly still. She was looking toward the Sacramento mountains, whose peaks had disappeared behind a heavy sheet of gray cloud. The wool blanket rested around her shoulders, and snowflakes continued drifting down one by one. Clay walked over and stopped beside her.