The man arrived on a grey afternoon between one snowfall and the next, walking into camp with a pack on his back and a carved staff he didn't lean on. He was old — older than Korr, older than Mora, old in the way of men who had walked a great many miles and intended to walk more. His face was lined and his hair was white and he moved through the camp like someone who had been welcomed by enough people to stop being surprised by it.

  His name was something Theron couldn't hold. The sounds didn't map onto anything he knew, slipped away each time he tried to fix them. He stopped trying after the second day and thought of him as the old man instead.

  Korr welcomed him at the main fire with the brief formality he used for visitors — not warm, not cold, the tone of a chief who had an established protocol and applied it. The old man listened and responded with equal economy. They understood each other. Something was agreed to. The old man set his pack down near one of the spare structures at the camp's edge and that was that.

  Dorn appeared at Theron's side during the welcome and leaned in. "He travels camp to camp. Stories. Every winter."

  "He does this every year?"

  "Many years." Dorn watched the old man settle himself. "My father saw him. When my father was young."

  He told stories at the fire each evening, starting after the meal when the camp had settled and the children had arranged themselves in the particular way children arranged themselves around a fire when something good was coming — close, cross-legged, faces tipped up.

  Theron sat at the edge of it and watched and listened. His comprehension in the tribe's language had been improving for months, but the old man's dialect was different enough that most of it was texture rather than meaning. He caught a word here and there. Spirit. River. Dark. Man. The shapes of things without the things themselves.

  But the stories were still legible somehow. The body carried them — the old man's hands moving, his voice dropping low for the dangerous parts and rising for the ones that required scale. A spirit that lived in deep water and pulled men under not from hunger but from loneliness. A hunter who outran a storm for three days and arrived somewhere no one had been before, and what he found there. A woman who swallowed the sun to keep it from setting and spent the rest of her life warm from the inside.

  The children didn't move when he told it. That was the thing Theron noticed. Children moved constantly — their bodies always a beat ahead of their attention. But not during the stories. They sat with their eyes wide and still, absorbing it the way ground absorbed rain.

  Dorn translated fragments afterward, leaning toward him and pitching his voice low so as not to cut across the old man's performance. The storm that ate a man. The place where the water has no other side. Theron nodded and watched the children's faces and let the rest go.

  During the days the old man moved through camp quietly. He ate with whoever had food to spare, sat near whoever was working, watched things without inserting himself. Theron observed this from the healing spot and recognized the method — a man learning a place quickly, cataloguing it, storing it for later.

  On the second day the old man came to the healing spot.

  He stood at the boundary stone and waited to be noticed, which Theron did, and then waited to be invited, which Theron did with a gesture toward the patient stone. The old man sat. He looked around at the herb bundles, the stacked hide, the organized rows of tools. He picked up nothing. He asked nothing. He sat with the stillness of a man in no hurry.

  After a while he said something.

  Theron looked toward the camp. Dorn was not nearby. He spread his hands — I don't have enough words — and the old man nodded as if this were an expected and unimportant obstacle.

  He pointed at Theron's hands. Then at the herb bundles. Then at the patient stone.

  Theron understood well enough. He nodded. Yes. I fix things.

  The old man considered this. Then he pointed at his own chest and made a different gesture — hands open, moving outward, like something released.

  Theron thought: I give things. Or: I carry things and leave them here.

  The old man stood and walked back toward the main camp.

  Mora came to the evening stories on the second night.

  She sat at the far edge of the firelight, apart from the main group, her clay cup in both hands. She watched the old man the way she watched everything — steadily, without expression.

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  At one point the old man told something that made the adults laugh. Mora did not laugh. She made a small sound through her nose and looked at her cup.

  He asked Dorn about it afterward.

  "Old story," Dorn said. "She knows it. Different from how he tells it."

  "Better or worse?"

  Dorn thought about it. "Different," he said.

  On the third evening the old man looked at Theron across the fire and said something.

  Dorn glanced at Theron. "He asks. You have stories. From your place."

  The camp was watching him. Not hostile. Just curious.

  Theron thought about it.

  "Yes," he said.

  He told them about the flying man first. A man who climbed into a metal bird and sat inside it and flew above the clouds — higher than any bird, so high the sky turned dark around him, so high he could see the curve of the world. He used his hands for it, tracing the arc of flight, the slow tilt of a banking turn. He made the sound of engines as best he could, which produced a silence in the children followed by a burst of questions that Dorn fielded without looking at Theron.

  Then the woman who talked through stones. A woman in one valley holding a small flat stone to her ear, and another woman in a valley so far away you could not walk there in a lifetime, holding her own stone, and they talked to each other as if they were sitting by the same fire. Voices moving through the stone. Their words going somewhere Theron didn't have the language to explain.

  He stopped there. The fire popped. No one said anything for a moment.

  Then an older boy in the front said something short and flat, and several of the children laughed, and Dorn grinned.

  "He says," Dorn said, "that your stories are very strange."

  "Yes," Theron said.

  He looked across the fire. The old man was watching him with an expression harder to read than curiosity — something more like assessment. He nodded once at Theron. Then he began the next story, and the children settled, and the night closed back in.

  He'd been making notes in his hide-notebook for months — herb names, dosages, treatment sequences, the things he needed not to forget. Shorthand marks he'd developed for speed, not for anyone else to read.

  He looked at the old man holding the camp's attention.

  There was something about the way the stories moved. From him to the children tonight. And before him to whoever had taught him. And before that, and before that. All of it inside one man's head. Everything the old man knew about the spirit in the river, the storm, the woman and the sun — it was there because someone had spoken it and someone had listened and held it. No other mechanism. Just memory passing through mouths.

  He looked down at his notebook.

  He thought: one day he'll die. The old man would die, and some of what he carried would die with him, and no one would know it had been lost.

  The children's faces were tipped toward the fire. They were taking it in. They would carry some of it. Not all.

  Theron looked at his notebook again. Then he put it away and watched the rest of the story.

  Kael came to the healing spot the following morning and didn't sit down. Theron waited him out.

  "Your story," Kael said finally. "The bird. Of metal."

  "Yes."

  "It flies." He traced the arc with his hand, copying Theron's gesture from the night before, almost exactly right. "High."

  "Yes."

  Kael looked at him steadily. He was thirteen and didn't ask questions he considered stupid. "A man made it?"

  "Many men. Working together."

  Kael thought about this. Then he picked up the herb bundle he'd come to get and went back to the steam setup without saying anything else.

  Sora, who had been grinding something and apparently not listening, said: "He thinks about things for a long time before he talks."

  "I noticed."

  "Sometimes he doesn't talk at all." A pause. "That means he's still thinking."

  The old man stayed five days in total. On the fourth evening he told what Dorn said was a long story — one that took most of the night, the fire burning down and being rebuilt twice, the children falling asleep in ones and twos until only the adults were left. Theron understood almost none of it and stayed through all of it anyway.

  He watched the old man's face in the firelight. The lines of it. The way his eyes moved when he reached a part he knew well, the brief still moment before each new section, like a man stepping from one stone to the next across a river.

  Mora was there for all of it. She sat at the far edge again, and this time she didn't look away from the old man at all.

  He left on the morning of the fifth day, the same way he'd arrived — pack on his back, staff in hand. Korr saw him off at the camp edge. A few of the hunters nodded to him. The children who were awake stood and watched him go.

  Theron watched from the healing spot.

  The old man walked south along the river. He didn't look back. After a while he was small against the white and then he was gone.

  Sora appeared at his shoulder. She'd been sitting nearby, quiet — he hadn't noticed the exact moment she'd moved.

  "Your stories," she said. "Were they real?"

  He considered it. "Real," he said. "Somewhere else."

  She held that for a moment. Then she nodded and went back to her herbs.

  That evening Dorn sat with him at the fire and they didn't talk for a while.

  "He will come again," Dorn said. "Next winter."

  "The same stories?"

  "Some same. Some new." Dorn poked at the fire. "He picks up stories. All the camps. Brings River People stories here. Takes ours south. Everything he knows — from listening. Fifty years of it."

  Theron looked at the fire.

  "What happens," he said, "when he dies?"

  Dorn was quiet for a moment. "Some other man learns. Before he dies. Or some of it is lost." He said it without particular feeling. "That is how it always goes."

  The fire settled. Outside, the night was clear and very cold, the stars sharp the way they got in deep winter.

  "Dorn," Theron said.

  "Yes."

  "Can you teach me the old stories? The ones Elta knows. From before Korr's father."

  Dorn looked at him. He didn't ask why. After a moment: "Some I know. Others — you ask Elta."

  "She won't talk to me."

  "Not yet." He turned back to the fire. "I teach you what I know."

  Theron opened his notebook. He wrote stories at the top of a blank page and left the rest empty.