Chapter 2 #3
A crack in the rimrock, eleven feet deep, narrowing to a chamber the size of a small bedroom, with a lip of overhang that kept it dry and a scree slope below it that took no tracks.
You could not see it from twenty feet away. You could not get to it without crossing forty yards of bare rock, which meant nobody stumbled into it and nobody left a trail to it.
They hauled at night, in the frozen hours, four trips a night with packs.
Forty pounds of dried meat. Twenty pounds of pemmican Kindra rendered over three nights, dried meat pounded to powder and mixed with hot fat and berries and pressed into rawhide casings.
Beans, wheat, salt. A cook pot. Two wool blankets and four elk hides. Fire kit. The .22 and two hundred rounds.
Tom stood in the cache on the eighth night, in the dark, with his breath smoking, and he counted it and it was thirty one days of food for six people if they were careful and forty if they were hungry.
Thirty one days.
It felt pitiful and it felt like the most important thing he had ever built.
They came down off the scree at three in the morning and the first snow of the year was falling, fine and dry, the kind that does not stick.
By the ninth day they had done everything they knew how to do.
The garden looked dead. The smoke was buried. The laundry was inside.
The river approach was a funnel with eleven noisemakers and three ambush positions behind it.
There was a cache in the rocks with thirty one days of life in it.
The children knew four separate routes off the property in the dark and had walked each one blindfolded, and Sofie could do the short one to the gulch by herself, and had, twice, crying the first time and not the second.
Every person had a job for when the clapper sounded, and they had drilled it eleven times, and the last three times they had done it in under ninety seconds.
On the ninth night Kindra put her head on Tom's chest in the dark and said, "We might actually be all right."
"We might."
"Say it like you mean it."
"We might actually be all right," Tom said, and he almost did mean it.
At four in the morning, Shyla started screaming.
Not barking. Tom had never heard the sound before and would never forget it, a high broken shriek out in the black beyond the woodshed, and then a crash of brush, and then nothing.
He was out the door in eleven seconds with the Beretta and Kindra was behind him with the lamp shuttered to a slit.
The dog was gone.
There was blood on the frost by the woodshed corner, a long smeared arc of it, and a set of drag marks going down toward the river.
And laid across the chopping block, neat, deliberate, placed where they could not miss it, was Oliver's yoke, snapped clean in half, with a strip of red cloth tied around the break.
Tom did not move for three seconds, which was the longest three seconds of his life.
Then he did the only correct thing, which was the thing every part of him screamed against.
"Back inside," he said.
"Tom, she's."
"Back inside. Now."
Because a blood trail leading down toward the river in the dark is not a thing to follow. It is bait, and Chip Charter had spent nine days explaining exactly how men like Prine used bait, and Tom had listened.
Kindra got it a half second after he said it. She backed to the door with the shuttered lamp low and her body turned sideways.
Charter came out of the woodshed with the .44 already in his hand and did not ask a single question.
"River side," Tom said.
"I see it."
"Don't go down there."
"Wasn't going to." The old man crouched with his back against the shed wall and his eyes on the black gap in the cottonwoods. "You get everybody in a corner that ain't got a window in it and you let me watch this."
They spent the rest of that night in the cabin with the door barred and every person awake.
McKenzie sat on the floor with her back to the interior wall and her hands flat on her knees and did not cry, which was somehow worse.
Oliver cried. He did it quietly, sitting up in the loft with his face against his forearm, and nobody told him to stop.
Sofie asked where Shyla was eleven times, and Kindra answered her the same way eleven times, in the same voice, which took something out of her that Tom could see draining.
Nothing else came.
At six in the morning the sky went the color of old tin and Tom opened the door.
The frost had held everything perfectly.
He read the yard the way he read the river, starting at the edges and working in, and the first thing he found was the truth about the yoke on the chopping block.
"Nobody stood here," he said.
Charter came over stiff legged. "Say again?"
"Look at the frost around the block."
There was one set of boot prints, and they were Tom's from the night before, and they were on top of the frost, not through it.
"Somebody put that yoke there before the frost came down," Tom said. "Before midnight. Then they left."
"Then why'd the dog go off at four?"
"Because she smelled where they'd been."
Tom walked the arc of blood at the woodshed corner and squatted with his nose eight inches from the ground.
It was not much blood. That was the first thing.
It looked like a lot in lamplight and it looked like a great deal less at dawn, a smear maybe fourteen inches long and already gone brown.
And the drag marks were not drag marks.
"Charter."
"I see it."
"Tell me what you see. Don't tell me what I want to hear."
The old man got down on one knee with real effort and put his hand beside the furrow in the duff.
"That ain't a body being dragged," he said. "A body drags with the grain smooth and even. That there is dug. Something ran off with its back end low and its claws in."
"She's alive."
"She was alive eleven hours ago. That's all that says."
Tom followed it forty yards and lost it in the rock at the top of the river bank, and then found two drops of blood on a stone, and then nothing at all.
He stood there with his hands shaking and made himself do the count.
One dog. Six people. A funnel, a cache, ten days of work.
He was not going to spend any of it going down into cottonwoods in the dark after a dog.
He walked back up the hill and it was the hardest walk he had ever taken.
Kindra was on the porch.
"Well?"
"She's hurt and she ran. The yoke was left before she went out, so it wasn't her they came for."
"Then what was it."
"It was a message," Tom said. "They broke my son's yoke and they tied a rag on it, and they put it where I'd find it, and they went home."
"Why?"
"Because it's cheaper than a fight."
Charter came up the steps behind him.
"Ma'am, he's right. That's Prine. That's exactly Prine." He took his hat off and turned it in his hands. "He wants you scared before he ever walks up here. A scared man gives up a fifth. A calm man argues."
"So we're calm," Kindra said.
"So we're calm."
Tom ate breakfast he could not taste, and then he made a decision he had been circling for six days and had not been able to commit to.
"Kenz," he said. "Oliver. Get your coats."
"Where are we going?"
"Down the gulch. Bring the .22."
Sofie stood up from the table. "Me too."
Tom looked at her.
Six years old. Blonde head, chapped cheeks, three days of asking where the dog went.
"You too," he said. "But you sit where I put you and you don't move."
They went a half mile down the gulch to the pit fire ground, where the walls ran up sixty feet on both sides and swallowed sound the way they swallowed smoke.
Tom sat the three of them on a deadfall log and laid the rifle across his knees.
"I want to talk about this gun," he said.
"We know the gun, Dad," Oliver said.
"You know how to shoot it. That's not the same as knowing it." Tom turned it over. "Kenz, tell me what it is."
"Ruger 10/22. Semi auto, .22 long rifle, ten round rotary magazine. We've got four magazines and we've got a fifty round drum that jams so we don't use it."
"Good. Oliver, tell me what it isn't."
The boy thought.
"It isn't a fighting gun."
"Right. Say why."
"Because it's small. The bullet's small."
"Say it better."
Oliver frowned at the rifle.
"Because if you shoot a man with it he doesn't stop," he said finally. "He just gets shot."
"That is exactly right, and I want all three of you to carry that with you forever."
Tom held up a single cartridge between two fingers, forty grains of lead the size of a pencil eraser.
"This will kill a man. It will kill him in an hour or a day or a week. It will not stop him from crossing eleven feet and taking that rifle away from you. Do you understand the difference?"
They nodded.
"So why do I say this is the most valuable gun we own?"
Nobody answered.
"Weight," Tom said.
He set the rifle down and dug in his coat pocket and came out with a fistful of loose .22, a small silver pile in his palm.
"That's a hundred rounds. Feel it."
He passed it to McKenzie and she cupped it and her eyebrows went up.
"That's about thirteen ounces," Tom said. "A hundred rounds of .22 weighs less than a can of beans. A hundred rounds for your mother's Ruger weighs three and a half pounds and takes up four times the space."
He took the handful back.
"We've got four hundred rounds of this. Four hundred. We've got a hundred and fifty of everything else in the world combined, and we will never, ever have more."
"So we could shoot the .22 four hundred times," Oliver said slowly.
"We could shoot it four hundred times, and every single one of those shots can be dinner."
Tom picked the rifle back up.
"Second thing. It's quiet."
"It's not quiet," McKenzie said. "It's loud."
"Compared to what?"
She considered.
"Compared to the magnum."
"The GP100 fired outside is a hundred and sixty five decibels. It'll be heard for two miles up this valley on a still day, and anybody who hears it knows two things instantly. They know there are people, and they know those people have a centerfire handgun worth stealing."