Chapter 5

Winter was coming. She could feel it in the mornings, in the cold that arrived before dawn and didn’t fully release even when the sun was high, and in the way the camp moved — purposeful, unhurried, the accumulated competence of people who had always known how to meet what was coming.

Three months had passed since the wagon wheel. She knew it by Miya, who was round-cheeked and opinionated now and capable of a laugh that stopped whatever was happening in a ten-foot radius and made everyone look. She knew it by her own Shoshone, which had grown from survival words into something she could actually use — she could follow the evening talk around the fire, she could answer Tibo’s endless questions with something other than gestures, she could argue with Hupia about the correct way to dry meat and occasionally win. The buckskin dress had been replaced with a heavier one. She had made herself proper winter moccasins with Hupia standing over her correcting the stitching, and she no longer thought about her boots.

At some point in the second month she had stopped counting days. She wasn’t sure exactly when.

That evening was quiet in the way the camp sometimes went quiet — not empty, just settled. Miya had gone down early, fed and warm, curled in the cradle board with the red wool blanket tucked around her. The fire was banked. Outside she could hear the camp’s nighttime sounds, distant and ordinary.

Grey Wolf was at the fire’s edge. He had been quiet all evening, not troubled but inward, the way he sometimes went. She had learned not to fill his silences. She sat across from him with her mending and let the fire be enough.

Then she put the mending down.

She looked at him in the firelight — the line of his jaw, his hands easy on his knees, the red shirt she had made him worn soft now with use. All of it had become ordinary in the way that only proximity over time makes things ordinary, and yet when she looked directly at him it wasn’t ordinary at all. It was the grave he had dug with his hands and the nod she had given him and his arms coming around her at the center fire and his word before the elders that meant obligation, responsibility, a thing you answer for. It was three months of mornings and the shape of his days and the way he was with Miya and the patience of him and the certainty, that quality she had identified early and come to rely on without meaning to.