This was Chief Standing Elk, and he studied the pile of donated supplies for a long, silent moment before turning his full attention to Gideon instead. His welcome was simple, thanks for a kindness he had neither requested nor expected from any settler, and an invitation to sit beside the evening fire and share whatever small meal the village had left to offer a guest. Gideon accepted without a second's hesitation, understanding well the honor being extended by a man who had every reason left to distrust strangers. Over a shared supper of dried meat and roasted corn, the chief's voice grew quiet as he counted out how many the village had lost that winter. Two elders who had guided the people for decades, a pair of infants too small to survive the cold, a young hunter who had gone out after game during the worst storm and never returned.
Despite it all, his people remained determined to rebuild together, exactly as they always had. Gideon found himself listening far more than talking that evening, understanding somewhere deep in his chest that trust out here was earned slowly, through plain action, never handed out cheaply through pretty promises a man might not keep. The village itself, he noticed as the fire crackled on into the night, carried its grief the way any close family does, quietly, in small gestures rather than loud mourning. A row of freshly turned earth sat at the edge of the plateau, marked with simple wooden stakes the elders passed without looking away, the way a person learns to walk past an old wound without flinching. Women worked dyed hides near the lodges, murmuring low between themselves.
And an old man near the fire pit carved a small wooden horse for a grandchild who watched him with rapt, patient attention. Nothing about the place matched the stories Gideon had grown up hearing at the feed store, stories built more out of fear than fact. What he saw instead was a community doing exactly what his own town did after a hard season, counting its losses, tending its children, and finding some way to keep going regardless. It was, as the fire burned low and the coals settled into a deep orange glow, that Standing Elk's daughter joined the circle. She came quietly and sat beside her grandmother, offering Gideon a brief, polite greeting before turning her attention back toward the flames.
Her name was Sikya, and there was a particular stillness about her that Gideon noticed immediately, though he could not have explained exactly why it struck him the way it did. She watched him with the careful curiosity of someone long accustomed to strangers who wanted something from her village, waiting perhaps to see what he would eventually ask of her, the way every other visitor eventually did. He wanted nothing at all, not that night and not in the days that followed, and that simple absence of demand, more than anything, seemed to hold her attention longest. Sikya carried her own private losses, though she rarely brought them up with strangers. Her mother had died bringing a second child into the world, a brother who lived only three days himself, and Sikya had been barely old enough to remember more than the shape of her mother's laugh before both of them were gone.