Her voice flat. "Elias forced his muscles to relax." He sat back, running a hand through his hair. "I told you I've done a lot of things. Drifters sleep heavy," she said.
"Soldiers sleep with one eye open." "Which army were you with?" "Does it matter?" Elias asked. "Defensive.
It matters if they are the ones hunting us," she said. "They aren't hunting you." Elias lied. Not for me. Winona didn't press, but the look she gave him said she knew a lie when she heard one.
The truth of the tribe's situation began to clarify for Elias. Pieced together from Winona's angry whispers and the heated debates in the council circle. The enemy wasn't just the cold. It was a man named Silas Vain, the Indian agent at the nearest reservation post, and his partner, a traitor named McCrae. Winona explained it to him one night when the anger was too much to keep inside.
They count us like cattle, she said, pacing the small space of the lodge. The government sends flour, blankets, beef. Vain takes half and sells it to the miners. He gives us the moldy flour, the beef that is sick. And when the young men get angry and steal a cow to feed their families.
McCrae reports it as a raid. They're manufacturing a war. Elias said the strategy familiar and sickening. Yes, she hissed. If we are hostile, the army comes.
If the army comes, the tribe is moved or killed, and Vain gets the land for grazing leases. The injustice of it burned in her voice. Elias watched her, seeing the fire light catch the sharp angles of her face. She was fierce, terrifyingly so, and now she continued, stopping her pacing to look at him. The scouts say the town of Silver Creek is calling for protection.
They say there are rumors, rumors about a wild woman, she said, her lip curling. And her stolen white husband. They say I bewitched you, that you are a captive, tortured into submission. Ellas let out a dry, humorless laugh. If only they knew you were the one torturing me with this broth.
Winona didn't smile, but the tension in her shoulders dropped an inch. Why do you speak their language so well? Elias asked, seizing the moment of quiet. It's not just trading talk. You speak it like like a school girl.
She finished. She sat down, pulling her knees to her chest. She stared into the fire, her expression distant. I was 12. She said, "The missionaries came.
They told my father that if he wanted to save his people, his children had to learn the white man's paper. So he sent me." Elias waited. He knew this story. He had seen the schools.
They cut my hair, she said, touching the thick braid on her shoulder. They took my clothes. If I spoke my own tongue, they put soap in my mouth. If I prayed to the four directions, they hit my hands with a ruler until they bled. She held out her hands.
In the fire light, Elias could see faint silvery scars across her knuckles. "I stayed for 3 years." She said, "I learned their Bible. I learned their arithmetic. I learned that they hate us not for what we do, but for what we are.
She looked at him, her eyes hard and dry. I came back. I washed the soap from my mouth, but I kept the words. I sharpened them. Now I use them against them.
Elias felt a profound ache in his chest. He reached out, not touching her, but letting his hand rest on the fur between them. I am sorry, he said. Do not be sorry. She repeated her mantra.
It made me useful. The intimacy between them grew not from romance, but from the shared weight of survival. It was in the way she would check his temperature with the back of her hand, her touch cool and efficient. It was in the way he would wake before dawn to stoke the fire so she wouldn't wake up to the cold. But the line between gratitude and desire was thinning.
A blizzard struck the camp 2 weeks later. It was a white wall of fury that buried the lodges halfway to the smoke holes. The wind sounded like a freight train screaming through the canyon. The lodge poles creaked and groaned, bending under the pressure. They couldn't leave the lodge.
For 2 days, they were sealed in together. On the second night, the storm reached a fever pitch. A massive gust slammed into the lodge, shaking the ground. Winona gasped, sitting up straight in the darkness. Elias was beside her in an instant.
He didn't think. He just moved. He grabbed her arm, steadying her. "It's holding," he said, his voice close to her ear. "The poles are deep.
It's holding. I hate the wind," she whispered. A rare admission of fear. "It sounds like the spirits of the dead." "I'm here," Elias said.
"I'm right here." "He didn't let go of her arm." "In the dark, the boundaries they had drawn seemed to dissolve. I can't sleep," he confessed, the words tumbling out. Not when the wind is like this.
I can't sleep unless I know you are safe. Winona turned toward him. He couldn't see her face, but he could feel her breath on his cheek. She took his hand, the hand that had killed men, the hand that had deserted a post, and she placed it flat against her chest. He felt the strong, steady thrum of her heart through the soft deer skin of her dress.
"I am safe," she said. "Feel it. It does not waver." His hand rested there over her life force. It was an intimacy more profound than nakedness.
He felt the heat of her skin, the rhythm of her blood. Elias. She breathed. He leaned in. It wasn't a conscious decision.
It was magnetism. Suddenly, the lodge flap shook violently. Not the wind, a hand. Someone was outside. Elias jerked back, snatching his hand away.