After

The snow went off the low country in the third month and then off the higher slopes, slow, grudging, and there came a morning that was soft in the air the way the first true morning of a spring is soft, a smell of running water and thawing ground coming up the canyon, and she stood in the door of the clinic and breathed it and knew that it was time.

The woman was strong enough now to keep the place. That was the thing that freed her to go. Over the winter the sick gray woman had mended the way Eli never got to, slowly, unevenly, but truly, until she could stand a watch and work a fire and hold a rifle, and her two little ones had put color back in their faces on the elk and Henry's wall of drawings, and Laura had taught her the place the way you hand a thing on, where the water was and how the panels gave their power and how to read the road up from the plain, and how, above all, to keep the lamp. To take in the ones still coming. The woman had wept when Laura told her she was leaving her the keeping of it, and Laura had understood the weeping, because it was a great thing to be handed, the keeping of a lamp, the being trusted to stand between the cold and whoever was still out there on the road, and it was also, she did not say, a great weight, and the woman would learn that part in her own time, the way Laura had.