Chapter 3 #5
Kindra came out with the GP100 already on her hip in the belt rig Tom had cut for her in July.
"Rules," she said.
"You keep the Beretta."
"I don't want the Beretta, you're the one going up a gulch."
"You've got three kids, a hurt dog and a house and you're two hundred yards of open ground from a treeline." Tom set it on the table. "I'm taking the .22 and Kenz is taking nothing, and we are not going up there to fight anybody. If we have to fight we've already lost."
"The .22."
"The .22. It's light, it's quiet, and if we come on a man at forty yards I'd rather have ten rounds I can put in his face than six I have to be right about." He pulled the rifle down. "And if we don't come on anybody, I can shoot a grouse on the way home."
Kindra almost smiled.
"That's Chip talking," she said.
"That's Chip talking," Tom agreed, and this time the name did not break anything on the way out.
They left at six, in the blue dark before real light, and they did not go up the gulch.
They went east out of the yard, up the draw, over the low saddle, and came into the gulch a half mile above the cabin on the opposite side, so that anybody watching the gulch mouth from the timber would be watching an empty trail.
It cost them an hour and a quarter and four hundred feet of extra climbing.
Tom did not care. He had eleven days of Charter in his head now and every single one of them said the same thing: never come at a place the way the place expects you.
They climbed the east wall to the granite bench with the three boulders, and Tom put McKenzie in the middle of them and got down beside her, and they glassed the rimrock with their eyes because there were no binoculars anywhere in the world anymore.
Full light came at 7:20.
At 7:31 McKenzie said, very quietly, "Dad."
"I see it."
Down on the flat at the bottom of the scree, four hundred yards off and two hundred feet below, there was a shape in the open.
It was dark against the frost and it was the wrong shape for a rock and it had things moving on it.
Six ravens. Then eight.
Tom put his hand on the back of his daughter's neck.
"Don't look," he said.
"I already am."
"Kenz."
"He was our friend," McKenzie said, and her voice was the flattest thing Tom had ever heard come out of a child. "Somebody ought to look."
They lay in the rocks for forty minutes and watched the flat.
Nothing else moved. No men. No smoke. The rimrock crack was a black slot in gray stone and it told them nothing from four hundred yards.
At 8:15 Tom said, "We're going down. You stay here."
"No."
"Kenz, I am not arguing about this one."
"You said two sets of eyes."
"And now I'm telling you what the second set is for."
He turned her by the shoulder so she faced upslope.
"You sit in these rocks and you watch that timber on the far side, the whole treeline, from that white snag to the little avalanche chute. That's the only place a man can come from that I won't be able to see. If anything moves in there, anything, you whistle twice and you go up the draw and home.
You do not come down to help me."
"But."
"Look at me." He waited until she did. "I need somebody up high more than I need somebody down low. That's real. I'm not protecting you, I'm using you, and I'd rather tell you the truth about it."
McKenzie held his eyes a second.
"From the white snag to the chute," she said.
"Good girl."
He went down.
It took him twenty five minutes to cover four hundred yards, moving rock to rock, stopping every twenty feet to listen, the .22 across his forearms.
The ravens went up when he was eighty yards out, all at once, in that clattering black explosion they make.
He stopped and let his breathing settle and made himself keep going.
At forty yards he could see the coat.
Dirty white wool, patched at both elbows with beaver hide.
Tom's legs kept walking him forward and that surprised him.
At twenty yards he could see the whole of it and at ten yards he stopped and went down on one knee and put the rifle across his thigh and said, out loud, to nobody, "Chip."
He made himself look for two full minutes.
Not because he wanted to. Because Charter would have made him.
You read the ground, fella. You read it even when it's a person, especially when it's a person, because the ground is the only thing out here that don't lie to you.
So Tom read it.
Six wounds, and he counted them and hated himself for counting them. Not gunshots. Nothing round anywhere. Every one of them was a wedge, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, cut clean and deep with the bone broken outward.
An axe head. A small one, with a narrow bit.
Two fingers of the left hand were gone at the second knuckle and the forearm was opened, and Tom understood what that meant, and had to stand up and walk six feet away and put his hands on his knees.
When he came back he kept reading.
The frost around the body was churned to mud in a rough circle, and there were boot prints everywhere, and he counted heels and got five.
Five men.
Forty yards upslope there was a long scar on the ground where something had been dragged down through the frost, and at the top of the scar a fir root was pulled half out of the dirt.
And laid in the scar, coiled loose where somebody had thrown it after unwrapping it, was a length of braided cord with three lead weights on it.
Tom picked it up.
He had read about these in a book, a long time ago, in a warm house with the lights on.
He put it in his coat.
There was a black smear on the rock eleven feet from the body, a big one, soaked in, and a trail of it going off downhill, and beside it a wad of cloth somebody had used as a compress and then discarded.
Tom crouched over it.
"You got one of them," he said. "You got one, you old man."
He went up the scree to the cache.
He already knew, and he went anyway, because knowing is a thing you can act on and thinking is a thing you carry.
The crack was empty.
Not raided. Emptied. The hide was gone, the stones that had weighted it were thrown out onto the scree, the cook pot gone, the blankets gone, the wheat gone, the beans gone.
Even the salt.
Tom stood in the crack that had taken his family eleven nights to fill and he looked at bare rock and a single burst rawhide casing with the fat scraped out of it by somebody's fingers.
Thirty one days.
He came out and sat down on the lip and put his head back against the stone.
Then he stood up, because there was one more thing, and it was the thing he had been putting off since he was forty yards out.
He went back down to Charter and he took off his own coat and laid it over the old man's head and shoulders, and then he dragged him, eleven feet at a time, resting between, to a place where the rimrock had shed a big slab and left a space underneath.
He rolled him in and he built the wall himself out of whatever was in reach.
It took him an hour and forty minutes and he did it with bare hands in twenty degree air and did not notice until afterward that three of his fingernails had torn.
When it was done he stood there with the stone dust on him.
"Thank you," he said. "I never said it once. So. Thank you for the salt, and the funnel, and the noisemakers, and for telling me what those men are, and for running uphill."
The wind came over the rimrock.
"I'm going to teach my kids what you taught me," Tom said. "And I'm going to tell them where you're buried, and they'll tell theirs. That's the best I've got."
He picked up the .22 and started for the boulders.
He was halfway there when McKenzie whistled twice.
Tom went flat behind a granite shelf so fast he took the skin off his chin.
He got his eye to the gap and looked at the far treeline, at the white snag, at the avalanche chute, and saw nothing at all.
Then he swung right, downhill, toward the mouth of the gulch.
Toward home.
And he saw the smoke.
It was coming up out of the trees on the bench, black and greasy and climbing fast, far too much smoke for a stove and entirely the wrong color, and it was rising from the exact place where the Thorn family's woodshed stood with eleven cords in it.