Cosay Srays
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 6
She stayed two days that time.
It wasn’t planned. The first morning she was up before anyone, coffee made and the chickens already fed by the time Coulter came outside to find her checking the fence line along the east pasture, running each post with her hands the way a person did when they were looking for weakness before it became a problem.
He stood at the corner of the barn and watched her work for a moment before she heard him.
She didn’t startle. Just turned her head and looked at him and went back to the next post.
“This one is rotting at the base,” she said when he reached her. “It will not last the winter.”
“I know. Been meaning to get to it.”
“There are three more like it between here and the corral.” She moved to the next one, tested it, moved on. “The corral itself is sound. Someone built it well.”
“My father.”
She nodded. “He knew what he was doing.”
They walked the rest of the fence line together in the early morning quiet, Cosay testing each post and Coulter making note of what needed replacing. The sun was still low and the air had that brief cool quality it got before the heat remembered itself and came back mean. A hawk turned slow circles above the north pasture. The girls were still asleep.
“You do not have to do this,” Coulter said.
“I am here and I do not like being idle.” She tested another post, found it solid, moved on. “My hands need work the same as anyone’s.”
“You could just drink the coffee.”
“I made the coffee so I could do this.” She glanced at him sideways. “Do not confuse the order of things.”
He almost smiled. “Yes ma’am.”
They replaced the worst of the posts that morning, working in the companionable rhythm they seemed to fall into without effort, passing tools back and forth without discussion, each of them reading what the other needed before it was asked for. By midmorning they had three new posts sunk and tamped and Coulter’s shoulders were burning in the good way that came from real work.
They sat on the top rail of the corral with coffee gone lukewarm and looked at what they’d done.
“My father would have liked you,” Coulter said.
“Why.”
“Because you work like someone who respects the land. Like you understand it doesn’t owe you anything.”
Cosay was quiet for a moment. “It does not. But if you treat it honestly it will be honest back.” She drank her coffee. “My people understood that. We did not own the land. We belonged to it. There is a difference.”
“Yeah.” He looked out across the pasture, the dry grass moving in the light wind. “I think about that sometimes. What it means to own something. Whether you really can.”
“You cannot. You can tend it. Steward it. Pass it to your children.” She paused. “But the land was here before you and it will be here after. Owning is just a word people use to feel safer.”
The hawk had found what it was looking for and dropped out of sight behind the ridge. The morning settled around them, warm and unhurried.
“Can I ask you something,” Coulter said.
“You asked me that before.”
“And you said I could ask.”
“So ask.”
He turned his coffee cup in his hands. “Where are you from. Originally. Before the hills.”
The question sat between them for a moment. Cosay looked at the fence line they’d repaired, the new posts pale against the weathered ones.
“Southeast,” she said finally. “The Sacramento Mountains, mostly. Though we moved with the seasons.” She paused. “My father’s band ranged wide. We knew this territory well, all of it, long before there were towns on it.”
“Your family—” He stopped. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.” She was quiet for a moment longer. “My mother and father are gone. My brothers. My sister who was younger than me.” She said it the way people said things they had said many times in their own heads — not without feeling, but with the feeling contained, managed, carried in a particular way. “There were others. Extended family, people of our band. Some died, some were taken to the reservation, some I simply lost track of in the chaos of those years.” She paused. “I was fifteen. I was in the hills when it happened, setting traps with my uncle. By the time we came back there was nothing to come back to.”
Coulter did not say he was sorry. It seemed insufficient for what she’d described, and she didn’t seem to want insufficient things.
“Your uncle,” he said instead.
“He stayed with me for two years. Taught me everything I needed to know to survive alone.” The corner of her mouth moved. “He was a difficult man. Impatient and demanding and absolutely certain he was right about everything.” She paused. “He was usually right about everything. I miss him.”
“What happened to him.”
“He decided to go north. Said he had heard there were still people of our band in the mountains above Taos. He went to find them.” She looked at her hands. “I did not go with him. I do not know why. Perhaps I was afraid of finding out there was no one left.” She was quiet. “I have not heard from him since. That was three years ago.”
The morning had warmed considerably. The girls could be heard inside now, the sounds of them coming awake filtering through the kitchen window — Emmie’s voice, Marie’s answering, the thump of feet on the loft ladder.
“You’ve been completely alone for three years,” Coulter said.
“Yes.”
“And before that, two years with your uncle.”
“Yes.”
“So since you were fifteen.”
“Essentially.”
He sat with that. Turned it over. Fifteen years old and the world taken away in an afternoon and then five years of building a life out of what was left, alone in the hills, surviving on skill and stubbornness and the things a difficult impatient uncle had made sure she knew before he walked north and didn’t come back.
He thought about Emmie at eight years old, how young she seemed to him, how much she still needed. He could not make fifteen and alone compute into anything that didn’t hurt.
“You did well,” he said. “To survive it.”
“I did what was necessary.”
“That’s not nothing.”
She looked at him. “No. It is not.” Something shifted in her expression, very slightly. “You are the first person who has said that to me. Who has treated it as something worth acknowledging rather than something to be suspicious of.”
“Why would anyone be suspicious of it.”
“Because a young Apache woman alone in the territory with a rifle and the skills to use it makes people nervous.” She said it without bitterness, just as fact. “They do not ask how I learned or what it cost. They just decide what I am and act accordingly.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.