A Mother's Journey
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 13: Five Crows
~ Emmie ~
She had been aware of him the way you were aware of weather.
Not thinking about him constantly, not watching for him the way she watched for Kanti, but aware — the way the skin was aware of a change in temperature before the mind registered it, the way the body knew something before it had words for the knowing. He was present at the edges of her days, capable and self-contained and watching, and she had learned the particular quality of his watching the way she had learned the camp’s other rhythms, as simply one of the facts of the place she was now living.
She had not spoken to him. He had not spoken to her.
This had begun to feel, somewhere around the tenth day, less like mutual disinterest and more like something else — something with a shape to it, a deliberateness, as though the not-speaking was itself a kind of communication between two people who had not yet agreed on what they were communicating.
She was working at the edge of camp on the morning of the thirteenth day, splitting wood with the camp’s small hatchet in a technique the grandmother had shown her that was more efficient than anything she had known before — using the grain rather than fighting it, letting the wood tell you where it wanted to open. She was getting better at it. She was getting better at most things, slowly, the way you got better at a language by speaking it badly until you spoke it less badly and then, one day, speaking it without thinking about speaking it.
Kanti was nearby. He was always nearby, moving in the orbit she had established for him — close enough to be seen, far enough to be exploring, checking in at intervals with the regularity of something that knew its own pattern. She tracked him without appearing to, the way she had learned to track him, the way the grandmother tracked everything in the camp simultaneously while appearing to look at nothing in particular.
She heard the footsteps in the snow behind her and knew before she turned that it was not one of the women.
The footsteps had a different weight to them. A different deliberateness.
She finished the split she was working on before she turned. She did this not to be rude but because she had learned, in thirteen days, that in this place you finished what you were doing before you addressed what interrupted you, that this was not curtness but respect — respect for the work, respect for the person arriving, respect for the idea that both things deserved to be done properly.
She set the hatchet down and turned.
Five Crows stood six feet from her.
This was the closest she had been to him. She had seen him across fires and across the camp and once across the river when he was working with the horses, but always at a distance, always with the width of the space between them. Now he was six feet away and she could see him clearly — the strong planes of his face, the controlled economy of how he held himself, the dark eyes that were doing what they always did, reading her with that thorough, unhurried attention.
He was perhaps twenty-five. Perhaps older — it was hard to tell with men who moved through the world the way he moved through it, as though they had already made peace with everything the world was likely to show them and were simply proceeding. He was not as tall as she had thought from a distance, but he was broad through the shoulders in the way of men who worked hard with their bodies, and he had a stillness that took up more space than movement would have.
He looked at the wood she had split. He looked at the hatchet. He looked at her.
Then he said her name.
“Mother Who Sings.”
It was the first time she had heard it in his voice and it landed differently than it did in anyone else’s — not wrong, not uncomfortable, just different, the way the same word in a different key was still the same word but carried differently, arrived differently, meant to the ear something it hadn’t meant before.
She waited.
He spoke. Not to her directly — he spoke toward the space between them, carefully, in the measured way of someone who had thought about what they were going to say before saying it and was now saying exactly that and nothing extra. She caught perhaps a third of it — her Cayuse was growing daily but still had great gaps in it — and what she caught was something about the wood and the storm coming and the supply.
She looked at the woodpile behind her. She looked at the sky, which she had not looked at carefully this morning, and saw what he apparently had seen — the particular low, flat quality of clouds building to the northwest, the kind she recognized now from the storm that had driven them to the granite overhang. More snow coming. Real snow, not a dusting.
She looked back at him. “More wood,” she said, in Cayuse, knowing the words for this at least. “We need more.”
Something moved in his face — brief, almost imperceptible. She thought it might have been surprise, that she had understood. Or something else. She couldn’t read him well enough yet to be certain.
“Yes,” he said. In English. Just the one word, just the confirmation, but in her language, which told her he had some and had chosen this moment to use it.
She picked up the hatchet. “I’ll get more,” she said. “I know where the good deadfall is, upstream.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he said something she didn’t catch and turned and walked away and she stood with the hatchet and watched him go and tried to determine what had just happened.
Suki materialized at her elbow with the timing she had perfected over thirteen days. “He says he will help,” Suki said. “He says the deadfall upstream is far and the storm is coming fast.”
Emmie looked at Suki. “He’s coming with me?”
“He is already going,” Suki said, nodding toward where Five Crows was moving along the river bank with an axe over his shoulder, not looking back. “I think you should follow.”
She followed.
They worked in silence for the better part of an hour, moving through the snow-muffled timber above the camp, locating the deadfall she had found on an earlier foraging trip and working it systematically. He was efficient in the way she was coming to recognize as characteristic of him — no wasted motion, no unnecessary effort, each stroke of the axe placed with the same deliberateness he brought to everything. She matched his pace as well as she could and did not speak because he did not speak and the silence between them was not uncomfortable exactly but it had a texture to it, a density, the silence of two people who were each aware of the other and were managing that awareness carefully.
She was reaching for a section of log when she slipped.
The snow was deeper here, away from the camp’s packed paths, and her boot found ice beneath it and went out from under her and she went down hard on one knee with a sharp intake of breath.
His hand was there before she had finished falling.
Not grabbing — steadying. His hand at her elbow, firm and certain, arresting the fall and holding her until she found her footing, and then releasing. The whole thing over in perhaps two seconds, as automatic and unremarkable as catching a thing that fell, as though his hand had simply gone where it was needed without consulting the rest of him.
She straightened. Brushed the snow from her knee. “Thank you,” she said.
He said something brief. She thought it meant be careful or watch your footing, something practical, something that didn’t require her to respond to anything except the practicality of it.
But his hand had been there before she finished falling.
She filed that away with the other things she was filing.
They carried the wood back to camp in two trips, stacking it with the existing supply under the shelter the camp used for fuel, and the clouds had moved considerably closer by the time they finished, the light going flat and gray in the way she now recognized as the hour before snow. She looked at the stacked wood and calculated — enough. More than enough. She had learned to calculate for contingency rather than need, for what might happen rather than what was planned.
She was aware that he was still beside her, looking at the same woodpile.
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