Chapter 2 #2
They came. Kindra first, wiping brain slurry off her hands. Then Oliver with the water. Then McKenzie off the woodshed roof, landing light. Sofie last, carrying her beans, with Shyla pacing beside her.
Tom sat them at the table, all of them, and Charter stood in the open doorway with his hat off because he had not been invited in and did not intend to come in.
"I'm going to tell you the truth," Tom said, "and then we're going to work."
Sofie looked up at him with her mother's blue eyes.
"There are men on the other side of the north ridge," he said. "Twenty three of them camped up there Saturday night. They looked down at our place and they counted what we have."
Oliver's face went white.
"Are they coming?" McKenzie said.
"Yes."
Nobody spoke.
"They'll come in about ten days. They'll come in daylight, six of them, and they'll be friendly, and they'll want a fifth of everything in that cellar."
"Then we give it to them," Oliver said quickly. "A fifth's not so bad. We could do a fifth. That's, we've got a hundred and forty pounds of dried meat, so that's twenty eight pounds, and we could still."
He stopped, because his voice had gone up at the end.
"That's good math, buddy," Tom said. "And you're right, a fifth we could survive."
"So?"
"So they'd come back in April and want a third. And in the summer they'd want half. And the fourth time they wouldn't ask, because by then they'd know exactly where our cellar is, exactly how many we are, and exactly how tired we'd be."
He put his hands flat on the table.
"We're not going to get robbed slowly. If we're going to be robbed I'd rather it happen all at once so we know where we stand."
"What do we do," Kindra said.
And that was why he had married her, right there, in five words. Not what are we going to do. What do we do.
"Three things," Tom said. "In this order. First, we make ourselves smaller. Second, we make ourselves harder. Third, we make ourselves able to leave."
"Leave?" Sofie said. "Leave our house?"
"Only if we have to, bug."
"I don't want to leave our house."
"Then we'll make it so we don't have to."
He looked around the table. "But a man who can't leave will accept anything to stay. I won't be that man. So we're going to build a place to go, and then we're going to fight like people who don't need to run, and the second part only works because of the first."
McKenzie was watching Charter in the doorway.
"Is he staying," she said.
"That's up to your mother," Tom said.
Every head turned.
Kindra looked at Chip Charter for a long moment.
"Mister Charter, if you stay you take orders, including mine, and there's going to be a lot of them."
"Ma'am, I have been giving myself orders for eight months and the fella giving them is a known fool."
"Then you're on the crew."
"Thank you kindly."
"Don't thank me yet," Kindra said. "You're going to hate the next ten days."
They started with smaller, because smaller was cheapest.
Tom took the smoker offline first, which hurt, because there were nineteen pounds of elk hanging in it at various stages.
They pulled it all, moved the finished strips to the cellar, and took the rest down to a pit fire in a gulch four hundred yards below the cabin where the smoke could not be seen from any ridge because the gulch walls ate it.
Then he tore the smoker's above ground chimney off entirely and ran the exhaust into a second buried trench that vented out sideways into a rockpile forty feet away, filtering through stone and brush until what came out the far end was invisible at thirty yards.
It cost him six hours of digging with McKenzie and Charter trading the shovel.
It made the smoker take eleven hours longer per rack.
It also erased the single most visible thing on the property.
"Stove next," Kindra said.
They could not bury the stovepipe. But Tom got on the roof with Oliver holding the ladder and built a spark arrestor cap out of a coffee can and hardware cloth and then built a second thing above that, a shallow wooden hood packed with green moss,
which would not stop smoke but would break the column and spread it sideways into the fir branches.
"Now we only burn between full dark and first light," Kindra said. "The house holds heat eleven hours if we bank right. We cook everything for the day at three in the morning."
"That's brutal," Charter said.
"That's what's available."
She was right and everybody knew it, and that was the end of the discussion.
The laundry line came down. Kindra strung a new one inside the woodshed, which meant everything dried slower and smelled like smoke and would freeze solid in December, and she did it anyway.
The garden was the hard one.
"We can't hide a garden," Oliver said.
"No," Tom said. "But we can make it look failed."
They spent a full day on it.
They pulled the remaining stakes and the trellis, dismantled the tidy raised bed edges, and scattered the neat mulch. Then they went up the gulch and hauled down four wheelbarrows of thistle and knapweed and dead grass and spread it over the beds and stomped it in.
They broke down one section of fence and left it broken and laid a fir top across it.
By evening the Thorn garden looked like something that had been abandoned in July by somebody who did not know what they were doing.
Under the sheet mulch, thirty inches down, the soil was the best in the valley and would be ready in April.
"That was clever," Charter admitted.
"That was Kenz's idea," Tom said.
McKenzie shrugged like it was nothing. Her ears had gone red.
Then came harder.
Tom walked the ground with Charter at dusk on the fourth day, and they argued for an hour, and Tom learned more in that hour than he had learned in eleven years of reading books about it.
"Your river side," Charter said.
"I know."
"You know, but let me say it. Your river side is a two hundred foot approach in heavy cottonwood with a screen of willow, and a man can come from the water to your woodshed wall without ever being in the open."
"Kenz built a hedge."
"Your girl built a good hedge and it will stop a fella who ain't looking. It will not stop a fella who is." Charter thumped the brush. "This says look for the gap. So they will look for the gap and they will find one, because there's always one."
"So what do I do."
"You give them the gap."
Tom turned.
"Don't make them hunt for it. Build them a beautiful gap."
Charter grinned in the failing light. "Make one place through this brush that is obvious and easy and just a little bit hidden, so the fella who finds it congratulates himself. And then you put everything you've got looking at that one spot."
Tom stood there in the cold and felt something reorganize in his head.
"A funnel," he said.
"You already know how to build a funnel. You built one in that river out of willow." Charter jerked his chin at the fish weir. "Fish don't swim into the basket because they're stupid. They swim into it because every other direction got harder one inch at a time."
They built the funnel over three days.
They thickened the hedge everywhere except one twelve foot stretch, dragging in thorny rose and dead limbs and weaving them into a mat you could not push through without making noise you could hear at a hundred yards.
At the gap they cut back just enough. Cleared the ground of crackling leaves. Left it inviting.
And then Tom spent a full day on his belly in the willows figuring out where a man would have to stand, and where the light would be at ten in the morning, and where the sound would travel.
Oliver built the noisemakers.
That was his job and he took it seriously, and Tom was careful not to improve on it too much.
The boy strung a waist high trip line of dogbane cord across the gap's far side, painted it with mud so it went invisible, and rigged it to a wooden clapper made of two flat pieces of dry birch that slapped together hard enough to be heard across the meadow.
Then he built four more, in the brush either side, at ankle height, each one tied to a bundle of old cans he had scavenged from their own trash pit.
"Why two heights?" Tom asked.
"Because if he steps over the low one he'll walk into the high one," Oliver said. "And if he ducks the high one, he's looking up, and then he steps in the low one."
Charter laughed out loud.
"Fella," he said to Tom, "your boy is a nasty piece of work and I mean that in the finest way."
The fifth day they moved the guns.
They had exactly two that mattered. The Beretta 92, nine millimeter, three magazines, and sixty one rounds total. The Ruger GP100, .357, and eleven rounds of .357 plus forty four of .38 special which would function but hit softer.
And the .22 rifle, which had four hundred rounds and was worth more than either handgun for putting meat on the table and nothing at all for stopping a man.
Charter's .44 had nineteen rounds. The SP101 had the five in it and sixteen loose.
"That is not enough," Charter said, looking at it all laid out on the table.
"That's what there is."
"I know it. I'm saying it out loud so nobody in this room ever forgets it." The old man's finger moved down the row. "We have got about a hundred and fifty serious rounds between five guns and we cannot make one more. Ever. Every shot is a piece of your life you spend and don't get back."
"So we don't shoot," Kindra said.
"So we don't shoot," Charter agreed. "Not first. Not ever if we can help it. Everything we build for ten days should be built to make them leave without a shot fired, because the day we fire is the day we start losing and can't restock."
McKenzie said, "Then what do we do if they come in?"
Charter looked at her.
"That is the right question and I don't have a good answer to it."
"Then we work on it," Tom said. "Every night, at the table, until we do."
On the sixth day they started the cache.
Tom picked the site a mile and a quarter up the gulch, in a spot he had known about for a decade and had never used for anything.