Prologue #2
The mark was maybe nine inches long and it had a straight edge across the back of it, and no animal on God's earth grew a straight edge on its heel.
A boot. Vibram lug, or what was left of one. Worn smooth in the center, which meant a lot of miles.
Old, though. Rain had rounded the walls of it. A week, maybe two.
McKenzie crouched beside him. She looked at it for a long moment and her face did not change at all, and that lack of change made Tom's chest hurt in a specific way.
Twelve years old. She should not be able to read a print and keep her face still.
"Ours?" she said.
"No."
"How do you know?"
"You and me and your mother are in packs. Oliver's in the little Danners. None of us has a lug this wide, and none of us walks with that much weight on the outside edge."
"So it's a man."
"Probably. Heavy one, or one carrying weight."
McKenzie looked up the hill, and then down toward the cabin, and Tom watched her work out the same geometry he had already worked out.
Whoever it was had come across the ridge from the north and had gone through here heading west, which took them past the spring and above the cabin and away.
They had not come down. They had not come to the door.
That could mean they had not seen the cabin, which was possible, because from the north side the roofline sat under the trees and the stovepipe smoke thinned to nothing in fifty feet if you burned dry wood.
Or it could mean they had seen it, and had looked at it for a while, and had walked on.
Tom did not like the second one.
"Don't tell your brother and sister," he said. "Tell your mother. Exactly what you saw, not what you think about it."
"Okay."
"Kenz."
She stopped.
"You did good keeping your face still," he said. "But you don't have to do it around me."
McKenzie stood there a second. Then she said, "I'd rather," and kept walking.
He let her go.
The rest of that day was the rest of every day, and Tom was grateful for it.
He pulled the silted fish trap and reset it forty yards downstream where the current ran a clean channel past a log jam, staking the wings with alder and weighting the bottom with river rock so a high flow would not roll it.
Kindra finished the hide and got it onto the stretching frame, and then she and Sofie went down the fence line of the garden pulling the last carrots and beets and packing them in damp sand in the root cellar, layer of sand, layer of root, no two touching, because one rot spreads to twenty.
Onions and garlic they braided and hung. Cabbage went in the cellar hanging by the stem, upside down, roots and all.
Squash went on a shelf where the cellar was driest because squash rots in damp and freezes to mush in cold, and there were maybe eleven feet in that cellar where the temperature would hold between thirty five and forty five all winter, and Kindra knew every inch of those eleven feet.
Oliver worked the smoker.
It was a cedar box Tom had built against the north wall of the woodshed, five feet tall, with a trench running twelve feet from a fire pit dug into the bank. The trench was covered with flat stone and sod, and by the time the smoke traveled twelve feet underground it came out cool.
Cold smoke. Not cooking. Preserving.
Inside hung strips of elk, cut with the grain, quarter inch thick, salted twelve hours and rinsed and dried until they were tacky.
Oliver fed the fire green alder and a handful of chokecherry for flavor, and he checked the flap every hour to keep the draft steady, and he had learned in June that if the smoke ran hot for even twenty minutes the outside of the meat sealed and the inside spoiled and you lost the whole rack.
He had learned that by losing a whole rack.
He had cried about it behind the woodshed where he thought nobody could see, and Tom had stood on the other side of the wall and let him have it in private, which was the only gift he had to give that day.
Oliver did not overheat the smoker anymore.
In the afternoon, Tom ran the trapline with Shyla.
Twelve sets, all of them passive, none of them steel. He had six steel traps left and he was saving those for winter when he might need them, because steel breaks and there is no hardware store in the world anymore.
The rest were snares of braided wire from a coil he had bought in 2019 for eleven dollars and had considered, at the time, a waste of money.
Three rabbits, one of them dry and old. A grouse in a spring pole set. Two empties where something had sprung the snare and pulled free.
He rebuilt both, kneeling in the brush, setting the loop four fingers off the ground and the width of his spread hand across, blocking the trail either side with sticks jammed vertical so the animal had one way through and that way was the loop.
Shyla lay twenty feet off with her head up, facing away from him, watching the trail behind.
She had started doing that in July. He had not taught it to her.
They came back down the bench as the light went orange and the cold began to pour off the high country the way it does in Montana in the last week of September, fast, like water finding a low place.
Tom stopped at the edge of the timber and looked at his home.
Cabin. Woodshed with eleven cords split and stacked, which was two cords more than they had burned last winter and he still thought it might not be enough.
Root cellar. Smoker. The frame with the deer hide on it. The chicken run with nine birds left of the eighteen they had started spring with, the rest lost to a fisher that had gotten in through a gap Tom had not found until it was too late.
Garden, mostly bare now, the beds sheet mulched with river weed and old straw and going to sleep for the winter.
Two hundred yards of open grass in front of it, and his children moving across that grass carrying things, and his wife on the porch with her braid coming down and a knife in her hand, cleaning fish.
Six months. They had made it six months, and they had made it fat, which almost nobody had.
He knew that last part without proof. He knew it because the road had gone quiet in April, and the contrails had stopped in March, and because on a still night in May they had heard shooting from the direction of the valley for nine minutes straight and then nothing ever again.
Dinner was rabbit and fry bread from the last of the flour and a broth thick with fish frames and nettle.
Sofie fell asleep at the table with her cheek on the wood, and Kindra carried her up the ladder to the loft.
McKenzie banked the stove. Oliver checked the door bar. Nobody had to be told.
Later, in the dark, with the kids asleep above them and the wind starting to move in the lodgepole, Kindra put her hand flat on Tom's chest.
"She told me about the print," she said.
"Old. Week or two."
"I know what she told me." Her voice was low and even. "I want to know what you think."
Tom lay looking at the ceiling he had nailed up himself in the summer of 2015.
"I think people are moving," he said. "Summer's over. Everybody who was living off what they scavenged in town has run out. The ones still alive are going to go where there's water and game."
"That's here."
"That's here."
She was quiet a while.
"We could take the wands off the trails," she said. "Stop leaving sign. Burn only at night."
"We're already burning dry."
"Burn only at night, Tom."
He thought about it.
"Starting tomorrow," he said.
Shyla stood up.
Neither of them heard her stand. They only knew because the sound of her breathing changed and then the floorboard by the door creaked under her weight.
Tom sat up.
The dog was at the door with her nose an inch from the crack at the bottom, and her hackles were up in a ridge from her shoulders to her tail, and she was not making a sound.
That was the part that got him. Shyla barked at ravens. She barked at falling snow off the roof.
She was not barking now.
Kindra was already up and reaching for the rifle over the door.
Tom pulled his boots on with his heart slamming and crossed to the window and eased the shutter open one inch, just one, and put his eye to the gap.
The meadow lay silver under a three quarter moon. Frost was coming down on the grass and the whole two hundred yards of open ground glittered like crushed glass.
Nothing moved on it.
He tracked left, along the black wall of timber, and saw nothing, and tracked right, past the woodshed, past the garden fence, and saw nothing.
And then he looked up, past the meadow, past the far treeline, to the shoulder of the north ridge where the country fell away toward the valley and the dead town twenty six miles down it.
There was a light up there.
A small orange point, wavering, the unmistakable flicker of an open fire.
And beside it, a second one.
And beyond that, strung out along the ridge like beads on a wire, spaced maybe a hundred yards apart, Tom counted four more before his hands went cold.
Six fires.
Nobody camps six fires on a bare ridge in a freezing wind unless there are too many of them to sit around one.
Behind him, Shyla finally growled, low in her chest, and out on the frozen meadow something made a sound that was not the wind and was not an elk and was not anything Tom had ever heard on his mountain in eleven years.
It was a whistle.
Two notes, rising.
And from somewhere down by the river, close, much too close, a second whistle answered it.