Chapter 2 #4
Tom worked the bolt. "This goes off and at four hundred yards it sounds like a stick breaking. At eight hundred yards nobody hears it at all. A man on that ridge hears a .22 and thinks somebody's plinking cans, and there's nobody left alive who plinks cans,
so what he actually thinks is that he heard a branch."
"So we can hunt without telling anybody we're here," Oliver said.
"We can hunt every day without telling anybody we're here. Which matters more than anything else about it."
Sofie raised her hand like she was at school.
"Bug."
"Can you kill a deer with it?"
Tom looked at her a long moment.
"You can," he said. "You shouldn't. But you can, and I'm going to tell you how, because if it ever comes to it I want you knowing instead of guessing."
He turned the rifle so the three of them could see the sights.
"With this you do not shoot at an animal. You shoot at a spot on an animal the size of a walnut. On a deer that spot is here."
He touched his own head, an inch behind and below his ear.
"On a grouse it's the head. On a rabbit it's the head. You do not shoot a deer in the chest with this, because you will wound it and it will run four miles and die in a creek bottom and feed the coyotes instead of feeding you."
"How close do you have to be?" McKenzie asked.
"Forty yards. Fifty if you're rested and there's no wind and you've got all day."
"That's really close."
"It is really close, and that's the price. The .22 makes you a better hunter because it won't forgive you." Tom set it across his knees again. "Everything in the world is a trade. This gun trades power for weight and noise, and in our situation that is the best trade on earth."
"What about the men," Oliver said.
"What about them?"
"If they come. What do we do with it."
Tom had been waiting for that question and he had not decided how to answer it until right then.
"It's your mother's," he said. "And it's Kenz's. And here's the only thing I will ever say about the .22 and men."
He looked at each of them.
"You do not point it at a person to threaten them. Ever. Because a threat only works if the other fella believes it, and any man who has been shot at knows what a .22 is, and he will walk right through the threat and then you've lost the rifle and probably more.
If this rifle ever comes up at a person it is because somebody is already inside this house and there is nothing left to lose, and then it does not get pointed at a chest. It gets pointed at a face and it gets fired until it's empty."
Oliver went pale.
"That's ugly," Tom said. "I know it's ugly. I would give anything not to be saying it to a ten year old."
"I'm ten and a half."
"You're ten and a half," Tom agreed.
McKenzie took the rifle out of his hands, checked the chamber without being asked, and laid it across her own knees.
"Fifty rounds is a winter of grouse," she said.
"Fifty rounds is a winter of grouse," Tom said. "Now tell me what fifty rounds of .357 is."
"Nothing," McKenzie said. "Fifty rounds of .357 is five minutes of being scared."
Charter, who had come down the gulch behind them and had been standing at the bend listening for the last four minutes, said, "Well, hell."
Tom did not turn around.
"How long you been there?"
"Long enough to hear a man explain ballistics better than any fella I met in sixty one years." Charter came up with his hands in his coat. "And to hear a twelve year old girl say a thing I have been trying to say since the second week of April."
"Which part."
"That the ammunition ain't for fighting. The ammunition is for eating."
The old man sat down heavily on the deadfall.
"Everybody in this valley spent the spring shooting at each other and by June they were out, and then they had all these fine rifles and nothing to put in them, and no way to get a rabbit, and that is exactly why they've got to come take yours."
Tom let that sit.
"That's the whole thing, isn't it," he said.
"That's the whole thing. They ain't coming because they're evil. Some of them are. Mostly they're coming because they burned their seed corn and now they're a machine that only knows how to eat."
Charter looked at the three children. "Y'all are the first people I've met in eight months who still have a future. That's what's in your cellar. That ain't food. That's next year."
They walked back up as the light was going.
Tom put McKenzie on the funnel watch and Oliver on the wood and let Sofie carry the rifle case, which was all she had wanted all day.
Kindra was at the stove when he came in, banked low, cooking their one meal in the safe dark hours, and the cabin smelled like elk and wild onion and the smoke from the buried pipe.
She had her sleeves up and her braid coming apart and there was ash on her cheekbone.
She had been awake for thirty eight of the last forty hours. She had spent three of those hours telling a six year old the same gentle lie about a dog.
Tom stood in the doorway and looked at her and felt the whole weight of ten days come off him all at once.
"What," she said, without turning around.
"Nothing."
"You're staring at me."
"I know it."
She turned around with the wooden spoon still in her hand.
"Tom Thorn, if you have bad news I want it now and not after dinner."
"It's not bad news." He crossed the room. "Kindra, you are the best looking woman in the state of Montana and I have thought so every day for eleven years."
"Stop."
"I will not stop."
"There's ash on my face."
"There is." He took the spoon out of her hand and set it on the stove edge. "Kindra, let's get it on babe."
She laughed, out loud, the first real one in ten days.
"Oh, Tom!"
"Let's get it on." He had her hand now. "Let's get it on."
"The kids."
"Kenz is on watch till nine. Oliver's splitting. Sofie's asleep in the loft with her beans."
"The soup."
"The soup will keep."
"Tom."
"Let's get it on," he said again, grinning like a fool in a cold cabin in a dying world, and she put both hands on his beard and pulled his face down to hers.
The soup kept.
Afterward they lay in the dark under three wool blankets and an elk hide, and the stove ticked as it cooled, and for eleven minutes nothing on earth was wrong.
"Say it," she said, into his chest.
"Say what."
"What you actually came in here to say. You've been carrying it since the gulch."
Tom looked at the ceiling.
"I don't think ten days was right," he said.
"Charter said ten."
"Charter said ten based on Prine's load. But Prine didn't send six men to break a yoke. He sent one, at night, quiet, and that man walked past our funnel and past eleven noisemakers and got to within twenty feet of this door."
Kindra went very still.
"None of the lines tripped," she said.
"Not one."
"Then he came in on a route we didn't cover."
"Or he came in on one we did cover, and he saw them all, and he stepped over them, and he wanted us to know he could."
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"How long, then," Kindra said.
"I don't know. Sooner than ten."
At eleven that night McKenzie came off the funnel watch and Tom took it, and he sat in the willows with his back against a cottonwood and the Beretta in his lap and the cold coming up through the ground into his hips.
The moon came up around one.
And at twenty minutes after, Tom heard a sound in the brush forty yards downstream, low and dragging and irregular, a thing moving badly.
He did not raise the pistol. He put his thumb on the hammer and made himself breathe.
The sound came closer. Ten yards. Five.
The willows parted at ground level and something came out onto the open gravel and stopped, swaying.
It was Shyla.
Her right shoulder was laid open in three parallel furrows and her coat was black with dried blood down to the elbow, and she stood there shaking with her head low and her eyes on him.
Tom was on his knees in the frost with his hands on her before he knew he had moved.
"Good girl. Good girl, you're okay, you're okay."
And then his hands found the thing around her neck.
Somebody had cut her collar off. In its place, knotted tight into the fur at her throat, was a strip of red cloth, and threaded through the knot was a folded square of paper.