Strangers

She saw them before they saw the camp. That was Papa's first rule and the only one that had ever kept them alive. You watch the road. You watch it in the morning and you watch it in the long light before dark, and you watch the place where the road bends around the mountain, because that is where a thing will show itself before it knows you are there. She had watched that bend for four years and it had never given her anything but weather and the occasional far dark thread of elk crossing. It gave her the two of them a little after midday, in the flat hard light, and something in her had known before her eyes made them out that the long luck of the empty road was over.

They came on foot. Two of them, small with distance, walking the crown of the dirt road where the going was easiest and a person did not have to watch his feet. She had been carrying water from the pump and she set the buckets down slow so the handles would not ring against the tin, and she stood in the shadow of the shed and watched them the way she had watched antelope, without moving, letting only her eyes do the work, reading them the way Papa had taught her to read anything that moved in open country. Two. Both young, by the walk of them, by the loose way the young carry themselves who have not yet had it beaten out of them. Both thin, thin the way everyone was thin now, thin as a fact and not a look. And armed. She could not see the guns yet but she could see it in how they moved, a certain readiness, a way of holding the free hand.