Chapter 1
Nobody slept after that.
Tom sat by the shuttered window with the Beretta on his knee and watched the ridge until the fires burned down to nothing around four in the morning.
They did not come closer. That was the only good thing about the night.
By first light the ridge was empty and the frost had laid a white skin over the meadow, unbroken, no tracks anywhere in the two hundred yards of open ground.
Whoever had whistled by the river had gone back the way they came.
"Six fires," Kindra said, at the stove, with her back to him.
"Six that I could count."
"That's twenty people. Thirty."
"Could be. Could be eight people who don't know how to run a camp."
She turned around and looked at him.
"You don't believe that," she said.
"No," Tom said. "I don't."
They spent the morning doing what they always did, because there was nothing else to do and because standing around being afraid burns calories and produces nothing.
But the work changed shape.
Tom pulled every alder wand off the main trails and reset them further out, a hundred yards deeper into the timber, where a stranger would trip them before he ever saw the roofline.
He walked the north approach twice, once from the top looking down, once from the bottom looking up, trying to see his home the way a hungry man would see it.
From the top it was almost invisible. The cabin sat under a shelf of rock and the trees closed over the roof and even the stovepipe was screened by a big fir he had deliberately left standing.
From the bottom it was a different story, and he knew it, and he had known it for eleven years.
The river side was open.
Kindra reorganized the cellar, which meant she moved the good food to the back behind a false wall of empty crates and left maybe ten days of ugly food up front where anyone poking around would find it and think they had found everything.
She had suggested that in April. Tom had thought it was excessive.
Tom had been wrong about a number of things in April.
McKenzie cut brush for the river approach, dragging in thorny rose and dead fir with the branches left on, weaving a thirty foot hedge that looked like natural blowdown and was not.
Oliver hauled water and kept his mouth shut, which for Oliver was the harder job.
Sofie sat on the porch with Shyla and sorted dried beans by color into four tin cups, and every eleven minutes she asked her mother if the men were coming.
"No, bug."
"But if they do."
"Then we'll be ready. Sort your beans."
At two in the afternoon, Shyla stood up.
She did not growl. Her tail moved once, uncertainly, and her ears went forward and she trotted to the edge of the porch and stood looking down the river trail with her weight on her front feet.
"Tom," Kindra said.
He was already moving.
He came off the woodpile with the Beretta out of his belt and behind his thigh, and he put himself between the trail and the porch, and he heard Kindra's boots cross the boards behind him and the small specific sound of the GP100 coming off the peg by the door.
"Kids inside," she said.
"Kenz, take them," Tom said.
"Dad."
"Take them."
The brush moved at the bottom of the bench and a voice came up out of it, loud and cheerful and utterly unbothered.
"Hello the house! Hello the house, I am a friend, I am one man, I am coming up slow with my hands showing!"
Tom did not answer.
"I said hello the house! Now I can see that smoke and I can smell that smoke and I know somebody's cooking something better than what I got, so how about you say hello back before we both get embarrassed!"
Tom glanced at Kindra.
She had the GP100 down along her leg, hammer down, finger straight, standing at the corner of the cabin where the log wall would eat a bullet.
She nodded once.
"Come up slow," Tom called. "Hands where I can see them. Stop at the fence."
"That is a reasonable request from a reasonable man!"
He came out of the brush.
He was maybe sixty, maybe fifty, it was genuinely hard to tell under the beard, which was gray going white and spread across his chest like something that had grown there without permission.
He wore a wool capote the color of dirty snow, patched at both elbows with what looked like beaver hide, and a wide brimmed felt hat gone shapeless with rain.
Over one shoulder he carried a bedroll and a canvas possibles bag. Over the other, a takedown .22 in a scabbard, barrel down.
And on his hips he wore two revolvers.
The left one rode high and butt forward for a crossdraw, and it was a monster, a long barreled Smith & Wesson in .44 Magnum, eight and three eighths inches of blued steel with the front sight ramp worn bright.
The right one sat low and close, a stubby Ruger SP101, three inch barrel, five shot, .357.
Both holsters were leather he had clearly made himself, and both were oiled, and neither one had a retaining strap.
A man who does not use a retaining strap has thought about it and decided he would rather be fast than careful.
"Chip Charter," the old man announced, stopping at the garden fence exactly as told. "Out of the Bitterroot originally, out of nowhere in particular lately. I trap, I trade, I talk too much. Two out of three of those are useful to you."
"That's far enough."
"It is far enough. I like a man who says a thing and means it." Charter kept his hands out from his sides, palms forward, easy. "You want me to shuck the pistols, I'll shuck the pistols. I'd rather not. Man without a pistol in this country is a man renting his life by the day."
"Keep them," Tom said. "Keep your hands off them."
"Now that is a deal."
Tom took a slow four count and looked past him, down the river trail, at the brush and the cottonwoods and the gray water beyond.
Nothing. No movement, no second man, no shadow that was not a shadow.
"You alone?"
"Alone as a Tuesday." Charter's eyes crinkled. "Was two of us till August. Fella name of Pete. Pete drank out of a beaver pond because he was in a hurry, and then Pete was sick for nine days, and then Pete was not anything at all."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"Well." Charter shrugged the bedroll higher. "Pete was told."
Tom lowered the Beretta, not away, just down.
"You want water, there's a bucket at the spring box and you're welcome to it. You want food, I can spare you a piece of smoked elk and that's the size of it."
"I'll take both and be grateful, and I'll trade you honest for the elk, because I don't take charity and I don't take what I can't pay for." The old man's hand went toward his possibles bag and stopped, deliberate and visible, waiting.
"Slow," Tom said.
"Slow it is."
He drew it out an inch at a time.
Salt. A brick of it, gray and coarse, wrapped in oilcloth, the size of two fists.
Tom felt something in his stomach turn over.
They had maybe three pounds left. Three pounds, and a family of six, and a winter coming, and every strip of meat that went into that smoker needed salt first or it did not come out of the smoker as food.
He had been rationing it since July. He had done the numbers eleven different ways and every way they ran out in January.
"Where," Tom said.
"Ain't that the question." Charter grinned.
"There's a feed store in Deer Lodge with a back room nobody thought about, because everybody who went in that place went for the canned goods and the ammunition and walked right past forty sacks of stock salt. Livestock salt. Same rock, coarser grind, no iodine. Good for hides, good for meat,
good for anything."
"How much you got?"
"Enough that I'd rather trade it than carry it." He hefted the brick. "This much for a pound of that elk and a night in your woodshed out of the wind. I don't ask to come in your house. Never ask a man to come in his house."
Tom did the math and knew he should say no on principle and knew he was going to say yes.
"Kindra," he said.
She came around the corner of the cabin with the Ruger still down along her leg.
And Chip Charter stopped talking.
It was such a sudden thing that it was almost funny. The whole running river of him just shut off, and he stood there at the garden fence with his mouth partway open and the salt brick in his hand, and he looked at her the way a man looks at a thing he has decided he is entitled to look at.
"Well, God almighty," he said.
Kindra's expression did not change.
"Mister, I have been eight months in this country and I have seen four women and three of them were dead." Charter took his hat off. He actually took his hat off. "You are a supermodel. That is what you are. That is a supermodel standing in a dooryard in Montana holding a Ruger."
"It's a GP100," Kindra said.
"It surely is."
"Put your hat back on."
"Hot mama." Charter laughed, delighted with himself, and did not put his hat back on. "I don't mean a thing by it. I mean it as the highest kind of compliment there is. Fella, you have got the single best looking woman between here and the Idaho line and I don't believe there's a close second."
"That's enough," Tom said.
"I'm complimenting your wife."
"You're done complimenting my wife."
"Now hold on." Charter raised the salt brick like a gavel.
"I have walked nine days. Nine. I have not heard a human voice that wasn't mine since the fourth of the month. A man comes out of that country and sees a face like that, he is going to say something about it, and if you begrudge him that then you are a smaller man than your woodpile says you are."
"Say it and move on."
"I'll do better. I'll make it clean and simple."
Charter put his hat over his heart, and he was still grinning, but the grin had gotten out ahead of his eyes somewhere.
"One kiss. On the cheek. In front of God and you and the dog. Thirty years from now I'll be dead in a snowbank and the last good thing I'll have to think about is that I once kissed a supermodel in the Montana mountains."
The silence went on a beat too long.
"No," Tom said.
"I said the cheek."
"I heard what you said. No."
"Ask her."
"I don't need to ask her."