Chapter 2
Tom did not sleep that night either, and neither did anybody else.
They ran the cabin dark. No lamp, no candle, the stove damped down to a red coal bed with the draft nearly closed so the pipe would not glow.
Kindra sat on the stairs to the loft with the GP100 across her knees and a wool blanket over her shoulders and her eyes open in the dark.
Tom took the window. Charter took the woodshed and refused a blanket and said he had slept colder than this in a snowbank with a dead mule for a windbreak, and Tom believed him.
Nothing came.
The moon crossed and the frost came down and at five in the morning a bull elk walked the meadow edge and blew and moved on, and that was the entire event of the night.
By first light Tom was not relieved. He was worse.
Because a count that finished on Saturday night means somebody makes a decision on Sunday, and Sunday was today.
He went out at gray light with his coffee that was not coffee and found Charter already up, squatting by the cold fire pit with a stick, drawing in the ash.
"You sleep?" Tom said.
"Two hours. That's what I get anymore." The old man did not look up. "Come see this."
Tom crouched.
Charter had drawn the valley. Crude, but right. The river running north to south in a long curve, the bench, the ridge above with six dots on it, and a wandering line coming down from the northeast.
"That's the Deer Lodge road," Charter said, tapping. "Runs dead until here, where the slide came off in the spring. Anything on wheels stops at the slide."
"They've got wheels?"
"They've got two trucks that run and about eleven that don't. Old stuff. Seventies, some diesel farm rigs. Points ignition, no computers. The pulse didn't touch them."
Tom had known that in theory. Hearing it said out loud was different.
"How many drivers?"
"Three that I saw. They don't waste fuel. Fuel's the thing they guard hardest, tighter than the food, tighter than the women."
Charter dragged the stick. "Which means anything that comes up this river comes on foot, and on foot from the slide is nine miles, and nine miles with a load is a full day out and a full day back."
"So they have to camp."
"They have to camp." Charter looked up, and his eyes were the pale blue of an old dog's. "Which is what those fires were. That ridge is their overnight. They walked in Saturday, they sat up there and looked down at your smoke, and they whistled themselves finished."
"Then where are they now."
"Walked back Sunday morning, most likely. Before you were up."
Tom stood.
"Show me."
They went up.
It took two hours to climb the north ridge, and they went the hard way, not the game trail, staying in the timber and coming up through the rockslide where nobody with sense would walk.
Charter moved slower than Tom but he never stopped and he never made a sound, and he put his feet down the way a heron puts its feet down, toe first, weight after.
Sixty one years old with bad knees. Tom recalculated the man twice on the way up.
They came out on the shoulder a hundred yards east of the fires and lay in the krummholz for eleven minutes before Charter finally nodded.
Empty.
They went in carefully anyway.
Six rings of blackened stone, spaced out along two hundred yards of open ridge.
Tom put his hand flat in the first one. Cold clear through. Two days, maybe more.
"Read it," Charter said.
It was not a challenge. It was an old man genuinely wanting to know what a younger one could see.
Tom walked the camp.
"Twenty three," he said, after a while.
"How do you get twenty three?"
"Six fires. Bed depressions in the duff, I can count them where the frost settled different." He pointed. "Four at that one. Three, five, four, four, three at the others. Twenty three sleeping."
"That's good. What else."
"They're not soldiers."
"Tell me why."
"Because a disciplined camp buries its trash and polices its ground." Tom toed a flattened can. "There's eleven cans in this one ring alone. And no latrine. They just went downhill of the fires, all of them, which means in three days this camp stinks and they'd have to move it."
Charter grunted approval.
"But they're not stupid either," Tom said. "Look at the spacing."
"What about it?"
"Every fire's sited so it can see the next one and nothing else. And every one's got a rock at its back. That's somebody who's been shot at." He turned slowly. "And nobody bedded on the downhill side of any fire. They all slept uphill, with the fire between them and the drop. That's deliberate."
"That's a man named Gully Prine," Charter said.
Tom looked at him.
"He ran a road crew for the state for eighteen years before he ran a crew inside," Charter said.
"He is not a smart man in the way you're thinking. He cannot read but about a hundred words. But he has run men in cold weather his whole life and he knows exactly how long a job takes and exactly how much a man will carry before he quits."
"He's in charge?"
"He's the one that matters. There's another one above him, a talker, calls himself the Warden, which is a stupid name and he knows it's a stupid name and he uses it anyway because it works on people." Charter spat. "Warden makes the speeches. Prine moves the bodies."
Tom walked to the ridge edge.
From here you could see the whole of it, and he made himself look, and it was bad.
The cabin roof was invisible under the fir, exactly as designed.
But the meadow was not. And the garden was not. And the two hundred yards of cleared grass that was Tom's best defensive feature was, from up here, an enormous green flag that said a person lives below this.
And the smoke. Even burning dry, even burning small, there was a thread of it visible against the dark timber if you knew where to look.
"They didn't need to see the house," he said.
"No sir. They needed to see the ground."
"How much do they know?"
"From up here? They know you've got a garden that size, which tells them how many mouths. They know you've got a cleared yard, which tells them you've got a saw or a strong back. They know your smoke is thin and blue and not gray, which tells any woodsman you're burning seasoned lodgepole,
which tells him you put up wood on purpose in the summer, which tells him you are organized."
Charter turned and looked down at the Thorn place with something close to grief.
"You're the best target they've found in five months," he said. "You're a granary with a door on it."
They came down the back side, and Tom did not speak for the first mile.
Then he said, "Walk me through it. What do they actually do."
"They send six."
"Six."
"Always six. Prine's number. Six men can carry a hundred and eighty pounds out and still fight, and six is small enough that if you kill them all he's only down six."
Charter ducked a branch. "They come in daylight. That surprises people. They come at maybe ten in the morning with their hands empty and one man talking."
"Like you did."
"Exactly like I did. Where do you think I learned it."
"And then?"
"The talker tells you the arrangement. Says they're organizing the valley. Says there's law again and you're under it and the law needs feeding. He's pleasant about it. He'll compliment your children."
Charter stepped over a deadfall. "And while he's talking, two of them have drifted. One toward your outbuildings and one toward your back corner. By the time you notice, they're inside your ground and you're surrounded standing in your own dooryard."
"And if you say no?"
"First visit, nobody says no, because the first visit they only ask for maybe a fifth. It's designed so you'll pay it. A fifth hurts but a fifth ain't dying." The old man's voice went dry. "That's the whole trick of it. Every single step is small enough to say yes to."
"Until the barn," Tom said.
"Until the barn."
They came down onto the bench in the early afternoon and Tom stopped at the edge of the timber and looked at his home for the second time in three days, and it looked entirely different than it had on Friday.
Kindra was at the frame working the deer hide, softening it, pulling it back and forth over a smooth length of rope as it dried, because a brained hide that dries without working turns to rawhide and rawhide is not a coat.
McKenzie was on the roof of the woodshed with a hatchet, doing something to the ridge that Tom had not asked her to do.
Oliver was coming up from the river with two buckets on a yoke he had made himself out of a fir sapling and two lengths of rope, and he was not spilling.
Sofie was sitting on the porch steps with Shyla, sorting beans into her four tin cups.
Tom looked at them and thought: a fifth.
A fifth of the cellar. A fifth of the meat. A fifth of the eleven cords.
He thought about what a fifth meant in February, and then he thought about what the second visit meant, and the third.
"How long," he said.
"Sir?"
"Between the count and the first visit. How long."
Charter scratched under his beard.
"With Prine? Depends on his load. He's got six or eight places he's working right now and he sequences them by distance and weather. Nine miles is far for him."
The old man squinted at the sky, at the gray flat overcast sliding down off the high country.
"But it's the end of September, and he knows the passes go in October, and he knows once the snow comes he can't get a loaded man up this river till April."
"So."
"So he ain't going to sit on you." Charter said it plainly. "I'd say ten days. Might be fourteen. I would not plan on more than ten."
Ten days.
Tom felt it settle into his chest like a stone dropped into a still pond, and the rings went out through everything.
Ten days to change eleven years of how they lived.
"All right," he said.
"That's all? All right?"
"What else would you like me to say?"
Charter laughed, a short surprised bark.
"Most men shout. Or they start making plans out loud, big ones, so they can hear themselves being brave."
"Shouting doesn't dig."
Tom walked down to the cabin and called them in.