EMP Wilderness Homestead

Prologue

The river ran low and cold that morning, the way it always did in late September, and Tom Thorn crouched on the gravel bar with his hands in water that hurt.

Six months without power. Six months of silence where the world used to hum.

He worked the willow weir with his fingers, feeling for the gap in the weave. The current pushed at his forearms like a living thing wanting past him.

There. A rotted lash of spruce root, chewed through by winter and grit.

He pulled the cordage from his coat pocket, the stuff McKenzie had twisted out of dogbane fiber, and wrapped the joint tight. Three turns, cinch, reverse the wrap, cinch again. His hands knew the pattern without his brain.

The weir was a V of woven willow set into the shallows, narrowing to a funnel mouth, and behind the mouth sat a basket trap the size of a bathtub. Fish swam downstream, found the walls, followed the walls, and ended up in the basket.

They did not have to hunt the fish. The river delivered them.

He lifted the basket lid and counted. Four whitefish, two decent cutthroat, one sucker.

Seven fish before breakfast. Not a bad morning.

He killed each one with a quick rap behind the skull using the smooth stone he kept in his coat for exactly that, then slid them into a burlap sack. Waste no motion. Waste nothing at all.

The sucker he set aside. Bony, muddy tasting, but Shyla would eat it raw and grateful, and the guts went into the garden trench.

Upstream, the beaver pond sat flat and gray under a sky the color of wet ash. He studied it the way he studied everything now, looking for what had changed since yesterday.

Nothing had changed. That was the answer he wanted.

He stood, knees popping, forty two years old and feeling every winter of it. Then he shouldered the sack and started the climb up the bench toward the cabin.

Shyla met him halfway.

She came through the lodgepole like smoke moving sideways, ninety pounds of malamute crossed with something wilder, her coat the pale gold of winter grass. Her ears were up. Her tail was level, not wagging.

"What," Tom said.

The dog turned her head north, toward the ridge, and held it there.

He waited. She held it for a five count, then let it go and pushed her nose into the burlap sack.

"Yeah, I know. You get the ugly one."

But he looked north too, and he kept looking a moment longer than he needed to.

The cabin sat in a pocket of the mountain where three benches stacked up like stairs, and Tom had chosen it eleven years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with the view.

One road in, and that road was a two track that washed out most springs.

Good water above the house so gravity did the work.

Southern exposure for the garden. Timber on three sides and open ground on the fourth, so nothing could walk up on them from anywhere except across two hundred yards of bare grass.

People had called him paranoid. Kindra's mother had called him worse.

Nobody was calling him anything now.

He came out of the trees at the woodshed and stopped, because he always stopped there, and he ran his eyes over the place the way a pilot runs a preflight.

Smoke from the stovepipe, thin and nearly clear. Good. Kindra was burning the dry lodgepole and not the green stuff.

Laundry on the line. Trip lines intact on the north and east approaches, the little bent alder wands standing where he had set them.

Garden fence standing. Root cellar door shut and latched.

The solar panels were still bolted to the south roof, dead as tombstones, four thousand dollars of black glass that had cooked itself the day everything stopped. He left them up because taking them down felt like admitting something.

"Fish?" Oliver called from the porch.

"Seven."

"Seven?"

The boy came off the steps at a dead run, ten years old, blond hair sticking out from under a wool watch cap that had belonged to his grandfather. He took the sack without being asked.

That was the thing about the last six months. Nobody had to be asked anymore.

"Guts to the trench," Tom said. "Heads and frames go in the stock pot, not the trench. And check the smoker while you're back there. The flap was sagging yesterday."

"I fixed the flap."

"Then tell me you fixed the flap."

Oliver grinned. "I fixed the flap."

Inside, the cabin smelled like woodsmoke and rendered fat and the sharp green bite of the herbs drying in bundles from the ceiling joists.

Kindra stood at the counter with her sleeves shoved to the elbow and her hands red to the wrist. She was working a deer hide through the wringing stage, twisting it around a smooth peg set in the wall, squeezing out the brain slurry she had soaked it in for two days.

Thirty two years old. Blonde hair pulled back in a braid gone loose at the edges, blue eyes, a face that used to stop conversations in grocery store aisles.

She had taken a decade of jokes about that face and about their ages, at family dinners, at the bank, from a woman at a church potluck in Bozeman who had assumed Kindra was his daughter.

Tom had stopped explaining somewhere around year three. Kindra had never bothered to start.

"Seven," he said.

"I heard." She didn't look up. "The trap on the north side of the pond is empty again."

"It's silted in. I'll pull it and reset it downstream of the log jam."

"Do it before it rains." She twisted the hide, and the muscles stood out in her forearms. "The barometer's dropping."

They had no barometer. She meant her left knee, which had been wrecked in a horse fall at nineteen and had never once been wrong about weather.

McKenzie sat cross legged by the window with a coffee can of brass between her knees.

Twelve years old, brown hair, her mother's jawline and her father's flat unimpressed stare. She had a decapping tool in one hand and a spent .22 case in the other, and she was sorting the brass into three piles.

Reloadable. Suspect. Scrap.

"Forty one good," she said, without being asked. "Nine cracked at the neck. The rest are scrap."

"Rimfire doesn't reload, Kenz."

"I know that." She held up a .223 case. "I'm sorting everything. The rimfire scrap goes in the melt bucket for sinkers and jig heads."

Tom stood there a second.

Eleven years ago he had bought this land and started teaching a four year old girl to identify tracks in mud, and half the reason was that he genuinely enjoyed it and half the reason was a feeling in his gut he could never name to anybody without sounding like a lunatic.

He had never once imagined it would actually be useful.

"That's good thinking," he said.

"I know," McKenzie said.

Sofie was under the table.

She was six, blonde as summer wheat, and she had built a village out of pinecones and bark and was narrating its history in a low voice to Shyla, who lay with her chin on her paws and her eyebrows moving.

"Hey, bug," Tom said.

"The pinecone people got an EMP," Sofie informed him gravely.

"Did they."

"Yes. But they were fine because they already lived in the woods."

Kindra's shoulders shook once, silently, over the deer hide.

"Smart pinecone people," Tom said.

Breakfast was fish and the last of the summer squash, fried in bear grease in the big cast iron pan, with a pot of pine needle tea because the coffee had run out in June and Tom had made his peace with that in a way he had told nobody about.

They ate fast and they ate everything.

Then the day started.

The day always started the same way, which was with the list, and the list lived in Tom's head because paper was too valuable to spend on things he could remember.

Water. Fire. Food. Security. Repair.

In that order, every single day, and if any one of them was neglected for a week they would be in trouble, and if any one was neglected for a month they would be dead.

"Water," he said.

"Full," Kindra answered. "But the spring box needs cleaned. There's silt in the screen, the flow's down maybe a third."

"Kenz and I'll do it."

The spring sat four hundred yards up the draw, and eleven years ago Tom had dug it out and set a cedar box into the seep and run three hundred feet of black poly pipe down to the cabin.

No pump. No power. Just the mountain and gravity and a difference of ninety vertical feet.

He and McKenzie hiked up with a shovel and a screen brush and a fistful of clean gravel.

"Why'd you make it cedar?" she asked, on the climb. She already knew. She asked things she knew because she liked to check his answers against her memory.

"Rot resistant. Doesn't leach anything that'll make you sick. And there was a cedar down across the trail the year I built it."

"So mostly because there was a cedar down across the trail."

"Mostly," Tom admitted.

They pulled the lid. The water came up clear and cold out of the hillside, eight gallons a minute at spring melt, maybe two right now in the dry end of the year.

Silt had built on the intake screen, a gray film of fine glacial flour.

McKenzie went to her belly on the wet moss without being told and worked the brush around the screen, then cupped the silt out with her hands and flung it downhill. Tom raked out the settling chamber and laid fresh gravel over the seep face to keep the flow from stirring up the bottom.

"Mom says we're going to have to boil again in the spring," McKenzie said.

"Mom's right. Spring runoff brings surface water down through the cracks. Anything that walks on that hillside ends up in this box."

"Giardia."

"Giardia," he agreed. "And worse."

They set the lid, weighted it with three flat rocks, and started down.

Halfway back, Tom stopped at the alder wand he had set across the game trail.

It was bent.

Not broken. Not snapped off. Bent, the way a wand bends when something heavy pushes past it and it springs back not quite true.

He went down on one knee.

The soil here was duff over clay, and it held prints badly, but it held them.

Elk, mostly. A cow and a calf moving through sometime in the last two days.

And under the elk, older, half filled with needle cast, something else.

"Dad?"

"Shh."

He put his face close. He could smell wet earth and rotting fir needles.