His sheathed bowie knife was in his bed within easy reach, where it had been each night for the past twenty-eight years. Jim clamped his eyes shut and stroked the leather-wrapped handle with his fingertips. The blade was as sharp and as long as his thigh and he had used it to cut apart hundreds of buffalo, elk, deer, and bears. It had skinned a thousand beaver and he had shaved with it back when he shaved, and it had pierced the insides of three Indian bucks; two Arikara and a Pawnee. But he’d never used it to kill a friend. Jim felt ashamed and he opened his hand beneath the robes and released the knife handle. It was freezing inside the cabin, as it had been every morning for six weeks. The cold had made the chinking between the logs contract, crack, and fall out in chunks. The series of gaps let wind blow through the walls and a half-dozen inch-high snowdrifts had formed across the top of his robes, striping them, making them look, as Ezra pointed out each and every morning, as if he were sleeping under a zebra hide.
