Chapter 3 #3
He made himself look at the man's face and not at the hatchet, because looking at the hatchet is how they get you talking.
"That cache," he said. "That's mine. I put that up in August."
"That's a lie, and it's not even a good one." Wingman's head tilted an inch. "There's woman's work in that pemmican. Rawhide casings sewn with a running stitch, and berries in the fat. No trapper alive puts berries in the fat. Trappers put in what they've got and then they eat it and complain."
Charter said nothing.
"There's a place on that river with smoke coming out of it," Wingman said. "We know exactly where it is. I sat in their dooryard Saturday night for an hour and eleven minutes and I could have walked in the door."
"Then why didn't you."
"Because a man who walks in a door gets shot standing in the door." Wingman stood, and looked downhill, toward the bench. "And because they built me a road."
"A road."
"They cut a pretty little gap in that brush and they hung tin cans on both sides of it and they laid a cord across it at waist height, painted with mud."
He turned the tomahawk over once in his hand.
"They built me a road, and then they hung a sign on it that said do not use this road. That is the single most useful thing anybody has told me in a month."
Charter shut his eyes for a second.
"How many guns," Wingman said.
"Two."
"How many."
"Two. A nine millimeter automatic and a magnum revolver, and a .22 rifle that's a toy." Charter said it fast and flat, because it was mostly true and true things were the only currency he had left. "No rifle worth the name. No shotgun. You'll have the lot of it by Tuesday noon."
"And the shooters?"
"One man. One woman. Three kids, and the oldest is twelve."
"And the man?"
"He's nothing." Charter spat blood off his lip.
"He's a software fella out of Bozeman with a beard on him. Bought the place in 2015 for the view and played at it on weekends. He's been living off canned goods since April and now the canned goods are gone and he is scared out of his mind and he's going to hand you that cellar to keep his kids."
Wingman looked at him for a long moment.
Down the slope, in the krummholz, the man named Denny had started making a low continuous sound.
"Chip," Wingman said, almost kindly. "I have had four people lie to me since the fourth of April. I got real good at it. It's about the only skill I picked up all summer."
"I ain't lying."
"You are, and the tell is that it's organized."
He crouched again, and now he was close enough that Charter could smell him, woodsmoke and old grease and something sweet underneath.
"Buried smoke trench with a sideways vent into a rockpile. Garden dressed up to look like it failed in July, and dressed up by somebody who knew what a failed garden looks like. Laundry taken in off the line. Weir in the river set downstream of a log jam so a high water don't roll it.
Cache a mile and a quarter up a gulch, across forty yards of bare rock, in a crack you can't see from twenty feet."
He let that sit.
"That ain't a software fella from Bozeman," Wingman said. "That's somebody who's been getting ready for eleven years."
Charter closed his mouth.
"But I appreciate you trying," Wingman said. "That was loyalty. I don't see much of that anymore. Mostly I see arrangements."
"Wallace."
"You ran uphill." Wingman said it like it was the thing he had actually come to discuss. "You had a downhill. You had a river and a hundred places to go. And you ran uphill, away from that house, breaking branches the whole way and making all the noise God let you make."
He stood up.
"You bought them a day," he said. "That's what that was. That's the whole transaction."
Charter got his left elbow under himself and pushed.
"Let me stand up," he said. "I'd rather stand up."
"I know you would."
The first blow came down between his neck and his shoulder.
He heard it before he felt it, a sound like a maul splitting a frozen round, and his right arm simply stopped being a part of him.
He went over onto his side.
He heard himself make a noise he had never made in sixty one years, a long climbing sound with no words anywhere in it, and it did not seem to be under his control at all.
The second came into his back above the hip, and something in there gave way and let go, and the cold came rushing into a place cold had never been.
He was still screaming. He could hear it happening somewhere above him.
He got his left hand up.
The third took two fingers off at the second knuckle and went into the forearm and stuck, and Wingman set a boot on his chest to work it free, patient, the way a man works a wedge out of a green log, rocking it twice before it came.
"Hold still, Chip."
The fourth ended the screaming.
The fifth and the sixth were not necessary, and Wallace Wingman delivered them anyway, and then he crouched and cleaned the head on the old man's capote, wiping it front and back, and checked the edge with his thumb.
"He was the best woodsman in this valley," he said, to nobody in particular.
One of the men said, "He killed Denny."
"Denny killed Denny. Denny came up a hill at a man with a pistol." Wingman slid the tomahawk into the loop on his belt. "Get the cache loaded. All of it, down to the salt. And get Denny somewhere he can die inside, and if there ain't anywhere, get him behind a rock."
"What about him?" A boot nudged what was left of Chip Charter.
Wingman looked down.
"Leave him," he said. "Right where he is, in the open, where the birds can get at him."
"Why?"
"Because that fella down there is going to come looking for him," Wingman said. "And I want him to find this."
He walked out onto the lip of the rimrock and stood looking down the long gray gulch toward the bench and the river.
There was no smoke. These people were smart.
"When do we go down?" somebody asked.
Wallace Wingman worked his thumb over the haft of the hatchet.
"They think Tuesday," he said.
"So?"
"So it's Monday."
Nine miles south and four hundred feet below, Tom Thorn stood at the end of the new hedge with rose thorns in both palms and looked at the sun going down behind the north ridge, and did the only piece of figuring that mattered.
Charter had left at nine in the morning.
It was ten minutes past five.
Eight hours.
A mile and a quarter up and a mile and a quarter back, with fifty minutes of climbing in it and maybe fifteen minutes of stacking.
Two hours and a half, generous. Three if he stopped to rest his knees, which he would have, because he always did and always denied it.
Eight hours was not a man resting his knees.
Tom pulled the last thorn out of his left palm with his teeth and walked up the hill.
Kindra was at the woodshed hanging wet laundry on the inside line, and she read his face before he got to her.
"He's not back," she said.
"No."
"How long do we give him?"
"I already gave him too long."
She hung the shirt she was holding, deliberately, and smoothed it, and then she turned around.
"Say the whole thing," she said. "Don't give me the short version because you think it'll be easier on me."
"He left at nine. It's a two and a half hour round trip and he knows it and he told me noon. Nobody is five hours late in this country for a good reason."
"He could have fallen."
"He could have fallen."
"He's sixty one with a bad knee on frozen scree. That is a real thing that really happens."
"It is." Tom rubbed his face with his wrist because his hands were bloody. "And if he fell and broke something, then he's lying up there right now in fifteen degrees and he's got until about midnight."
Kindra looked past him, up the gulch, where the light had already gone off the rimrock and left it the color of an old bruise.
"And if he didn't fall," she said.
"Then somebody's in the gulch."
"And they know where the cache is."
"And they know where the cache is."
She was quiet for four seconds.
"Which is thirty one days," she said.
"Which is thirty one days."
Tom went in and got the Beretta and put the spare magazine in his left coat pocket, and McKenzie was standing at the bottom of the ladder with the .22 in her hands before he had the coat buttoned.
"No," he said.
"Dad."
"No."
"You can't go up a gulch alone in the dark."
"I'm not going up the gulch."
That stopped her.
"Then what are you doing?"
"I'm going four hundred yards up and finding the last place I can see the rimrock from, and I'm sitting in the rocks and looking at it until full dark, and then I'm coming back down."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"But he's up there."
"He might be up there." Tom crouched so their eyes were level.
"Kenz, listen to me. The worst thing a man can do right now is exactly what his heart tells him to do. My heart says go up that gulch with a lamp and yell his name. And if I do that, and there's five men sitting in that timber, then they get me and then they get all of you,
and Chip Charter dies anyway and takes this whole family with him."
"So we just leave him."
"We look. From distance. In light." He stood. "And at first light, if he's not back, I go up properly and I go up careful and I go up the way he would have gone."
"I'm coming then."
"Kenz."
"You need a second set of eyes and you know it, and Mom can't go because if you both go and it goes bad there's nobody." McKenzie's voice was completely level. "I'm the second most careful person on this mountain and that's a fact, not me being brave."
Tom looked at his twelve year old for a long moment.
"That's a fact," he admitted.
He went alone anyway, that night.
He got four hundred and fifty yards up the east side, out of the gulch bottom, onto a bench of granite where three big boulders sat together and made a shape that nothing standing in it would break up.
He wedged in and got the last of the light on the rimrock.
Nothing.
No movement on the scree. No smoke. No shape on the bare rock where a fallen man would be a dark comma on all that gray.
He watched for forty minutes while the light drained out of the world.
At 6:40 he saw the ravens.