Chapter 3 #2
"Because if he finds the first one he'll think he found it." The boy's jaw was set. "And then he'll relax."
Tom looked down at his ten year old son and thought about a world that taught a boy that, and then he thought about how badly they were going to need it.
"That's the best thing anybody's said today," he said.
Monday night they ate at three in the morning, per the rule, and Tom made himself say it at the table.
"Tomorrow," he said, "if it goes wrong, here's what happens."
"Dad."
"No, we say it out loud, and then we don't have to think about it while it's happening." He looked at each of them. "Clapper sounds, or I whistle twice, or your mother yells. Any of those three. Kenz takes Sofie and Oliver out the back, through the woodshed, up the draw. Not the gulch."
"Not the gulch," McKenzie repeated.
"Not the gulch, because the gulch is where the cache is and the cache is where you'll want to go, and that's exactly why you don't. You go up the draw to the rockslide and you sit in the rockslide and you do not come down for anything. Not for me. Not for your mother. Not if you hear us."
Oliver's eyes were wet.
"Especially if you hear us," Tom said.
"How long do we sit," McKenzie said.
"Until dark of the following day. Then if nobody's come, you take the long route east over the spine and you go to the cache, and you take what's in it, and you go downriver to the Keegan place which is empty and has a stove."
"And then?"
"And then you're twelve and you keep your brother and sister alive, and I am sorry," Tom said. "I am so sorry that's the plan."
McKenzie did not cry.
"I'll do it," she said.
Charter went up the gulch at nine Monday morning, and Tom fought him about it and lost.
"You need every hand here."
"You need every hand on that hedge, and I'm the one hand that ain't worth a damn on a hedge."
Charter shouldered the pack, sixty pounds of pemmican in rawhide casings, the last of what Kindra had rendered.
"I can carry sixty pounds a mile and a quarter and get back by noon. That's what I'm good for anymore, and I would rather be good for that than stand in your yard telling your boy how to tie a knot he already knows how to tie."
"Take the .44."
"I always take the .44."
"Charter."
The old man stopped at the fence.
"Don't go past the rimrock," Tom said. "Load it, come straight back, and don't look at anything."
"Fella, I have been not looking at things for eight months."
He went up the gulch at nine in the morning with the sun trying and failing to come through the overcast and the first hard frost of October crunching under his boots.
He made the cache in fifty one minutes and was pleased about it.
Fifty one minutes, a mile and a quarter, four hundred feet of climb, sixty pounds, sixty one years old.
He crossed the bare rock the way he always did, stepping rock to rock, never twice in the same place, leaving nothing.
He stacked the pemmican in the dry chamber at the back of the crack and covered it with an elk hide and weighted the hide with three flat stones against the pack rats.
Then he counted what was in there.
Forty pounds of dried meat. Now sixty of pemmican. Beans, wheat, salt. A cook pot, two wool blankets, four hides, a fire kit.
Thirty one days for six people, and Tom had said thirty one the way another man would say a prayer.
Charter backed out onto the scree and stood in the cold and looked down the gulch.
From the rimrock you could see a long way, down the gulch and out across the bench and to the river beyond, all of it gray and rust and the black-green of lodgepole under a sky like a lid.
He stood there and breathed and thought about how he had not expected, at sixty one, to have a place to be from.
Then he saw the birds.
Four ravens came up off the timber a half mile down the gulch, all at once, hard, in the wrong direction from the wind.
Charter went flat against the rock.
He counted to two hundred.
Nothing moved.
But the ravens did not come back, and ravens always come back, and that meant whatever put them up was still sitting under that timber and had not moved either.
Between him and home.
He worked it the way he had worked everything for eight months, slow and mean and with no hope in it anywhere.
If they were in the gulch bottom they were on the trail. If they were on the trail they were reading his boot prints in the frost. His prints ran a mile and a quarter straight to this rock.
So he could not go back to the cache and hide in it, because the cache was already a destination with a road to it.
And he could not go down the gulch, because they were in the gulch.
And if he sat still they would come up the gulch and find him sitting still and then they would have him and the cache both.
So he went up.
He came off the scree on the east side and started climbing the shoulder toward the bald above the rimrock, staying in rock where he left nothing, going to all fours in the steep places.
His knees were screaming inside four minutes.
He made three hundred feet of elevation and stopped in a pocket of stunted fir, gasping, and looked back down.
They were on the scree.
Five of them, spread wide, moving slow with their heads down, reading his tracks in the frost as easy as a man reads a road sign.
One stopped and pointed up at the rimrock crack.
Another went into it and came out eleven seconds later holding a rawhide casing of pemmican over his head like a trophy.
Charter closed his eyes.
Thirty one days. That was what just went. Thirty one days of a family's life, and forty of his own nights of hauling it up here in the frozen hours.
He opened his eyes and did the only useful thing left.
He started running uphill, loud, breaking branches on purpose, away from the ranch, to put all five of them behind him and keep them there.
He heard the shout go up.
He heard boots on scree, that particular clatter, men coming fast on bad footing.
He did not look back, because looking back costs you a step and he did not have steps to spend.
The bald was four hundred yards up. Over the top was the north face. Over the north face was nine miles of nothing at all, and if he could crest it he could run the spine east and lose them in the big rockslide and come home the long way in two days.
Two days was Tuesday.
His lungs were tearing. His right knee had gone past pain into a kind of loud wrongness, a thing that was not signaling anymore, just broadcasting.
He got a hundred and fifty yards.
Then something hit his ankles and took them out from under him sideways.
He did not understand it at first.
He went down hard on his shoulder and slid six feet on frozen scree, and the sky swapped places with the ground, and there was weight on his legs and a tightening that would not stop tightening.
Rope.
A weighted throw rope. Three lead balls on braided cord, the kind you throw at the legs of a running animal so it tangles itself with its own momentum.
His legs were wrapped ankle to mid calf, crossed over, and every kick drew it harder.
Charter rolled onto his back and got the .44 out from under his coat.
He fired once at a man coming up through the krummholz forty feet below him, and he hit him, and the man sat down in the brush with a sound like something let out of a bag.
Then the rope went taut.
They had the other end. Of course they had the other end. That is the entire point of a rope.
He came off the slope on his back, frost and gravel scouring up under his coat, and his second shot went into the sky, and his third went into rock, and his fourth did nothing at all because the cylinder came around on a chamber he had never gotten loaded.
Nineteen rounds.
He had told Tom nineteen rounds, at that table, laying it all out and saying out loud that a man should never forget the number.
He had carried nineteen rounds for eight months and never once fired one, and now he had spent three on the sky.
They dragged him forty yards down the slope.
His coat rode up and the rock took the skin off his lower back and both elbows, and a fir root caught him under the arm and turned him half over and something in his shoulder popped.
He kept hold of the Smith the entire way.
He would have been pleased about that if he had been in any state to be pleased about anything.
They stopped him at the bottom, on the flat by the scree, and boots came in around him in a ring.
Somebody stepped on his right wrist and somebody else took the .44 out of his hand, and he heard the man say, "Well, look at this. Look at the barrel on this."
Charter got his eyes to focus.
The man standing over him was not big.
That was the thing nobody ever believed afterward, and it was the reason four separate people had been wrong about him.
Five foot eight, maybe. Narrow through the shoulders. A thin gray face and pale lashes and a mouth that did not seem to have any particular expression available to it.
He wore a canvas coat gone black at the cuffs and a wool cap pulled to the eyebrows.
In his right hand, held down along his leg, loose, he had a tomahawk.
Not an axe. A tomahawk, the light kind, forged head and a straight hickory haft about eighteen inches, the sort of thing a man carries because it weighs nothing and does everything.
"Wallace," Charter said.
"Chip Charter." The man crouched down on his heels, easy, like a fellow sitting down to fix a boot. "Eight months."
"Seven."
"Seven, then." Wingman rested the tomahawk across his knee. "You walked out on the Warden in July and nobody could find you. Smart money said you were dead in a creek. I said no. I said Chip's a trapper, and trappers don't die in creeks. Trappers die in beds when they get old and stupid."
"Ain't in a bed."
"No. You ain't."
Behind him one of the men said, "Wallace. Denny's hit."
"Bad?"
"Gut."
Wingman did not look around.
"Then Denny's hit bad," he said.
Charter's legs were still bound and his back was on fire and there was gravel worked into the meat of both elbows and his right shoulder would not answer.