Chapter 3

The days had a shape now. That was what surprised her most.

She rose before him — he was often already gone, slipping out in the dark the way he did, silent as the fire settling — fed Miya, built up the fire, started whatever was there to start. He returned mid-morning or afternoon with meat or fish or both, and she cooked it, and they ate, and the day continued. Water to fetch. Hides to work. Miya to tend. Hupia appearing at the lodge entrance with something to show her or correct in her, pointing and demonstrating with the patience of a woman who had taught many people many things and expected no thanks for it.

Mary Ellen learned. She had always learned fast — her father’s assessment of her, delivered without sentiment, as accurate as anything he’d ever said. She learned which roots were which and how Grey Wolf took his meat and where the best water was and how to read the camp’s mood from the sounds it made. She learned a handful of Shoshone words, then more than a handful. She learned that Hupia was his mother’s sister and that the elder at the north fire was someone important and that the boy who always seemed to be underfoot was called Tibo and was seven and found Mary Ellen fascinating in the way that seven-year-olds find anything outside their experience fascinating, which meant constantly and without filter.

She learned Grey Wolf.

Not all at once. In pieces, the way you learn terrain — one landmark at a time until you have enough of them to navigate by. She learned that he checked on Miya before he did anything else, every time, without exception. She learned that he was careful with horses in a way that went beyond practicality, that he spoke to them the same way he spoke to Miya — low and even and without impatience. She learned that he was respected in the camp in a way that had nothing to do with his age, that men older than him listened when he spoke, that Chief Sagwitch acknowledged him.

She learned that he watched her. Not the way she’d feared at the beginning — not with hunger or calculation — but with the focused attention of a man tracking something he didn’t fully understand and had decided to understand. When she solved a problem in camp he noted it. When Miya did something new he looked at Mary Ellen first, as if checking her reaction before forming his own.

She filed all of it away without deciding what to do with it.

Six weeks in, she was at the creek with Miya balanced on her hip — the baby liked water, liked the sound of it, went wide-eyed and still in a way she didn’t for much else — when she heard him on the bank behind her. She turned. He was crouching at the water’s edge a few feet away, not looking at her but at Miya, and Miya was looking back at him with the absolute concentrated attention she reserved for things she found important.

He said something to the baby. Miya answered with a sound that was not quite a word and not quite not one.

He laughed.

Mary Ellen stood in the shallows and watched him laugh at his daughter and the thing that had been forming in her for weeks finished forming without ceremony or drama. She looked at the facts the way her father had taught her. He had buried her son. He had waited for her nod. He had stood watch at this creek for six weeks without being asked twice, brought her buckskin, given her space enough to breathe, done every hard thing without cruelty and every small thing without expectation. He was seventeen years old and he was running a household and raising a daughter and treating a captive white woman with more basic decency than a good number of free white men had managed in her experience.