Chapter 2 #2
She had Zachary counting things, because Zachary needed a job or he would spiral, and because counting was actually useful.
"Sixty three of the tall jars," Zachary reported. "And eighty one of the short ones. And the lids are, um. The lids are in the red bin and there's a lot."
"How many is a lot."
"Like two hundred."
"Count them."
He went happily.
Hazel got the real work.
"Freezer," Imogen said. "It's been off for thirteen hours and it's still cold but it's a clock now, and I want everything out of it processed by tonight."
"All of it?"
"All of it. Your father shot an elk in September. That elk is eleven hundred dollars of protein and it is currently sitting in a box that no longer works."
Joe came in from the shed.
"I can do the pressure canner," he said. "Ninety minutes at eleven pounds for quarts, meat, this elevation."
"Fifteen pounds," Imogen said.
"Eleven."
"Joe."
"Eleven at sea level. We are at sixty two hundred feet and the chart says fifteen and the chart has been right longer than either of us has been alive."
Imogen paused.
"You're correct," she said. "I hate that you're correct."
"I have a laminated card."
"I know you have a laminated card. You have forty laminated cards."
"Forty three."
They processed meat for six hours.
Joe ran the canner on the propane burner in the mudroom with the window cracked, four quarts at a time, and he did not walk away from it once, because a pressure canner that loses its pressure in the middle of a cycle means every jar in it has to be redone or thrown out and there was no version of
this year where he was going to throw out elk.
Imogen came through between patient checks and taught Sylvie to trim silverskin off a backstrap.
"Thin as you can. It won't render, it just gets tough."
"I've never cut meat before."
"You've never had to. Now you do. Hold the knife lower, let the blade do it."
Hazel salted what would not fit in jars.
She laid strips of the round out on racks, quarter inch thick, cut with the grain because Joe had taught her that cutting against the grain made jerky that crumbled, and she rubbed each one with salt and a little of the brown sugar out of the second bucket.
Then she hung the racks in the smoke shed and built a smudge fire of green aspen and let it go all afternoon at a temperature low enough that she had to check it every twenty minutes with the back of her hand.
"You're not using the thermometer," Joe said.
"The thermometer's in the box and the box is for after."
"The box is for now, Haze. Now is after."
She considered that.
"Then I'll use it tomorrow," she said. "Today I want to know if I can do it without."
Joe went outside and split wood for a while so nobody would see his face.
At four o'clock Imogen went out with Bill Tandy and came back an hour later with her sleeves rolled up and a bundle of plants in a bandana.
She laid them out on the counter and named them for the kids, one at a time.
"Yarrow. This is the fern looking one, white flower heads. You crush the leaves and pack them on a bleeding cut and it will slow it down. It is not magic and it is not a substitute for pressure, but in the field it is better than a dirty shirt."
"What's the tall one," said Zachary.
"Mullein. The fuzzy leaves. You dry it and you make tea for a cough and it actually works, and if you are very desperate it is also the softest thing growing on this mountain and I will let you draw your own conclusions."
Zachary drew his conclusions and turned scarlet and everyone laughed.
"This one matters most," Imogen said. She held up a low green mat of a plant with fat oval leaves.
"Plantain. Not the banana. This. It grows in every trail and every driveway and every place people walk, and chewed up and put on a sting or a splinter or an infected scrape it will pull the inflammation right down. My grandmother called it the bandage plant."
"Can you eat it?"
"You can eat it. It tastes like a lawn."
She set down the last handful.
"And this is the one you do not touch," she said.
"Water hemlock. It grows by the creek, it has a flower head like a wild carrot, and there is enough poison in a root the size of your thumb to kill a cow. Look at the stem. The purple streaking. Look at it and remember it and if you see it, you walk around it."
Hazel leaned in and looked for a long time.
"Why do you even know all this," Sylvie asked.
Imogen shrugged.
"Because in eleven months of being dragged into the mountains against my will," she said, "I decided that if I was going to be here, I was going to be the most dangerous person on the property."
Joe, from across the room, said, "She is, for the record."
"I am, for the record."
They ate at seven. Elk and potatoes and the last of the real butter.
Tobin Kessick's fever broke at nine fourteen.
Imogen was sitting beside him with her fingers on his wrist and she felt the sweat come up on his skin and she closed her eyes and let out a breath she had been holding for eleven hours.
"He's turning," she said.
Sylvie made a noise like she had been hit.
"He's not out. He's got days of this. But he turned, and he turned on his own, and that means his body's still in the fight."
Sylvie slid off the chair onto her knees beside the table and put her forehead down on her brother's arm.
Joe went outside.
He stood on the porch in the dark and looked up at a completely ordinary sky.
No green. No red. Just stars, and the black shoulder of the ridge, and the enormous silence of a valley where thirty two thousand people had no electricity and no explanation.
Mack came out and leaned against his leg.
After a while the door opened and Hazel came out with a blanket around her shoulders.
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"Somebody shot that kid."
Joe did not answer right away.
"Yeah," he said.
"On the first night. Before anybody was even hungry yet."
"Yeah."
Hazel pulled the blanket tighter.
"That's really fast," she said.
Joe put his arm around his daughter's shoulders and they stood there together and looked at the dark.
"Yes it is," he said.
He could not sleep.
At eleven thirty he gave up and went down to the shed with a headlamp on red and opened the plywood box.
The screen was intact. The ground strap was tight. The bags inside were sealed and the desiccant packs were still blue.
He took out the smallest radio, a handheld with a rubber duck antenna, and a battery pack, and he carried them up to the porch and sat down on the step.
He put in the battery and turned it on.
The squelch hissed.
He worked up the bands slowly, the way he had practiced, and found nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
Then, at the top end of the seventy centimeter band, a carrier came up clean and strong and close.
A man's voice. Calm. Unhurried. Reading something.
"...county road eleven, past the second cattle guard, gate on the north side. Forty acres on the bench. Solar array, south facing roof, generator noise reported yesterday. Livestock present. Water source uphill."
Joe stopped breathing.
"Family of four," the voice said. "Plus a dog."
A pause. The hiss of an open key.
"That's the Henfry place. Confirm you copy."
And another voice, closer than the first, said, "Copy. We're already on it."