Cosay Srays
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 7
She was gone four days.
Coulter told himself that was fine, that he’d known she was going back to the hills, that four days was a reasonable amount of time to check traps and tend to whatever a person needed to tend to when they lived alone. He told himself this several times over the course of those four days and got better at believing it each time.
The girls were less philosophical about it.
Emmie threw herself into her lessons with a focused intensity that meant she was thinking about something else entirely. Marie took to sitting on the porch steps in the late afternoon, facing south, which was not where the hills were but was the direction of the road into the ranch, and watching it with the patient certainty of someone who had decided a thing was going to happen and was prepared to wait it out.
On the third day Coulter found her there after supper.
“She said she’d be back,” he said, sitting down beside her.
“I know.”
“Then why are you sitting here looking at the road.”
“Because sitting here makes the time go faster.” Marie picked at a splinter on the step. “Does it bother you that she’s gone?”
“She went to check her traps. She’ll be back when she’s back.”
Marie looked at him with her mother’s eyes. “That’s not what I asked.”
Coulter looked at the road. “Yeah,” he said. “It bothers me some.”
Marie nodded, satisfied, and went back to watching.
She came back on the fourth day in the late morning with two beaver pelts tied behind her saddle and a rabbit she’d shot that morning, still warm. She rode up to the house and held the rabbit out to Coulter before she’d fully dismounted, matter of fact as anything.
“Thought you could use this.”
He took it. “You didn’t have to.”
“I was coming anyway.”
The girls materialized from nowhere, the way they did when Cosay arrived, as if they had some sense that operated below ordinary hearing. Marie grabbed Cosay’s hand the moment her boots hit the ground. Emmie went straight to Nah-lin and began her usual assessment of the horse’s wellbeing, which Nah-lin tolerated with the patience of an animal that had decided this particular human was acceptable.
“Did you get many?” Emmie asked, meaning the traps.
“Enough. The beaver are moving south along the creek. Good pelts this time of year.”
“Can we come sometime? To check the traps?”
Cosay glanced at Coulter. He raised an eyebrow, leaving it to her.
“Not yet,” she said. “The hills are not easy country. When you are ready I will take you.”
“How will you know when we’re ready?”
“I will know.”
Emmie accepted this with only minor dissatisfaction and went back to Nah-lin. Marie was still holding Cosay’s hand, showing no intention of releasing it.
“Come inside,” Marie said. “Papa made soup.”
“Did he.”
“It’s actually good this time,” Emmie called from the corral. “He didn’t burn it.”
“I never burned it,” Coulter said.
“The cornbread last Tuesday.”
“That was the pan, not me.”
“The pan didn’t put the cornbread in too hot.”
Cosay looked at him with something close to amusement. He gestured toward the house. “Soup’s inside.”
They ate at the table, the four of them, and it felt less like a visit than it had before, less like something being carefully negotiated. Cosay sat in her chair by the door and ate and listened to the girls and answered questions and pushed back on Emmie’s logic when it needed pushing back on, which it regularly did, and the meal had the texture of something ordinary.
Coulter thought about that word. Ordinary. How long it had been since ordinary felt like enough. How somewhere in the past weeks it had started feeling like more than enough.
After the dishes were done Cosay brought the rabbit in from the porch and set it on the board.
“Today I show you how to skin it,” she said to the girls.
Marie wrinkled her nose predictably. Emmie’s eyes lit up equally predictably.
“Both of you,” Cosay said, looking at Marie. “You do not have to like it. You have to learn it.”
“Why?”
“Because knowing how to do something and choosing not to do it is very different from not knowing how at all. One gives you a choice. The other gives you nothing.”
Marie considered this with the seriousness she brought to arguments she suspected she was going to lose. “Fine,” she said.
Cosay worked through it with the patience of a good teacher, showing each step twice before she let them try. Emmie was fearless and a little too fast, needing to be slowed down. Marie was reluctant and precise, her small hands careful and deliberate once she committed to it. Cosay corrected without criticism, redirected without frustration, and by the end both girls had done the thing they’d been shown and knew they could do it again.
“You did well,” Cosay said.
Marie looked at her hands. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought.”
“Most things are not.”
“Was it bad the first time you did it?”
“My hands shook,” Cosay said. “My uncle told me that was normal and to keep going anyway.”
“Did they stop shaking?”
“Eventually. After enough times.” She began cleaning the board. “That is true of most things that are worth learning.”
Coulter had been working on a harness nearby, close enough to watch, far enough to stay out of it. He set down the harness now and came to the counter.
“I’ll put the rabbit on for supper,” he said.
“We just had soup,” Emmie said.
“Tomorrow then.”
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