Chapter 4 #3
"Is that what you're doing."
"I'm testing it very thoroughly." She squeezed again. "This is scientific work."
"You're a scientist."
"I am an unpaid scientist in a cold house with a barrel of ashes and a dead bear." She poured the dipper over his shoulders and the water ran down him and steamed off the floor. "And this is the best thing I have made all year, including the pemmican, and the pemmican is gone, so it's not close."
He caught her wrist as she came around front.
"Kindra."
"Don't."
"I'm not. I'm just saying your name."
She looked up at him. Her hair was down and damp at the temples and her sleeves were rolled past the elbow and there was still a streak of pitch on her cheekbone from four days ago.
"About Monday night," he said.
"Tom."
"No, I want to say it while I'm standing naked in a bucket, because I can't get any smaller than this." He kept hold of her wrist, loosely. "I was wrong. Not about wanting you. About how I asked, and about throwing that spoon, and about where I put it when you said no."
She didn't say anything.
"And you were right that I'd been asking you about jobs for six days," he said. "So I'm asking now, and it isn't a job. How are you?"
Kindra's chin moved.
"I'm tired," she said. "I'm so tired, Tom."
"I know."
"I held my hand over our son's mouth so he wouldn't scream while he watched his own work burn, and I'd do it again, and I'm going to see it for the rest of my life."
"I know."
"And I keep waiting for there to be a bottom to it and there isn't one. It just keeps going down."
He pulled her in.
She came, and her arms went around his wet back, and she pressed her forehead into his chest and stayed there while the water ran off him and soaked the whole front of her shirt and neither of them cared.
"There's a bottom," he said, into her hair. "We're standing on it. That's what this is. You made soap out of ashes and a dead bear on the worst week of our lives. That's the bottom and it's got a floor in it."
She laughed, wetly.
"That's the dumbest thing you've ever said."
"It's true, though."
"It is true, though."
He got out of the tub and she had a cloth ready and they dried him standing on the hearth stones in front of the stove, and then she handed him the clean set of wool she had been hiding under the bed since August for exactly this.
Tom Thorn stood in his own cabin in dry clothes with clean hair, warm for the first time in three weeks.
"Your turn," he said.
"The water's filthy."
"I'll heat more."
"Tom, that's four buckets from the spring in the rain."
"Then I'll carry four buckets from the spring in the rain," he said, and he was already reaching for his coat.
He went out at half past three with the yoke over his shoulders, in the rain, and he was forty yards up the path toward the spring box when he stopped.
The spring box lid was off.
He had set it himself eleven days ago with three flat rocks on it and he had checked it Sunday morning.
The lid was off and lying in the moss six feet away, and the three rocks were gone, and the water in the box was the color of weak tea.
Tom knelt and put his hand in it and brought it out and smelled it.
Then he looked past the box, up the seep face, to where the water came out of the hillside.
Somebody had taken a shovel to the ground above it.
And laid at the base of the seep, opened up and spilling, where every drop of water that fed his family had to run through it, was the gutted carcass of a coyote.
Tom did not touch it.
That was the first rule and he made himself follow it even with his heart going like a hammer.
He backed off the seep the way he had come, stepping in his own prints, and he stood in the rain at forty feet and looked at the whole of it.
The coyote had been opened from the sternum to the pelvis and the cavity emptied, and it had been laid across the seep face with the opening downhill so the wash ran straight through it.
Around it, the ground had been chopped up with a shovel or a mattock, the sod turned over in eleven or twelve spade widths, exposing raw dirt above the water.
That was the smarter part. That was the part that scared him.
A dead animal in a spring is a nasty trick that lasts a week. Broken ground above a seep face means every rain from now until spring carries silt and surface water and whatever walks on that hillside directly down into the fracture that feeds the box.
You could not fix that with a shovel. You could not fix it at all.
"Tom."
Kindra had come up the path behind him with the Beretta out and a coat thrown over her wet shirt.
"Don't come past me," he said.
She stopped where she was and looked.
He watched her face work through it in exactly the order his own had. Disgust first. Then anger. Then the cold, flat thing that arrived when she got to the math.
"The water," she said.
"The water."
"How bad?"
"Bad." He wiped the rain off his face. "The box is contaminated and I can't clean it, because whatever's in that carcass has been sitting in the seep since at least this morning and it's already gone into the gravel. And even if I pulled the box and burned it and built a new one,
the ground above it's broken. Every rain from here to June comes down dirty."
"Can we boil it?"
"We can boil it. Boiling kills what's alive. It doesn't touch what's dead." Tom shook his head slowly. "And that spring's been running clean for eleven years because there were forty feet of undisturbed sod and duff filtering it. That was the filter. That's gone."
"So we lost the spring."
"We lost the spring."
Kindra lowered the pistol and stood in the rain and said, very quietly, a word Tom had heard her say maybe four times in eleven years.
"That's three," she said.
"Three?"
"The dog. The wood. The water." She turned her head and looked at him. "He's not robbing us, Tom. He's dismantling us. He's taking out one system at a time and he's doing it in order of how long it takes to replace."
Tom stood there in the rain with the yoke still on his shoulders.
"You're right," he said.
"I hate being right."
"No, listen. That's actually useful." He pulled the yoke off and set it down. "Because if he's working a list then I can guess what's on the rest of it, and I can get there first."
"Guess it, then."
"Food's last. Food he wants intact, because food is the whole point." Tom counted it off on his fingers. "Warmth he did. Water he just did. Warning he did first, with the dog."
"What's left?"
"Shelter. And mobility."
Kindra frowned. "Mobility?"
"Anything that lets us leave and come back. The cache was that, and he's already got it." Tom's jaw set. "And the weir."
They went down to the river at a run.
The weir was gone.
Not smashed. Pulled, which was worse, because smashed leaves the stakes and you rebuild on them.
The wings had been hauled up onto the bar and the willow woven mat cut apart with a knife, and the stakes had been pulled and thrown in the current, and the basket trap was forty yards downstream, wedged in the log jam, torn open along one side.
Tom waded out into water that took his breath and dragged it back.
It was repairable. Two days of work. Maybe three.
"That's the last of the fall run," Kindra said from the bank.
"I know."
"Whitefish are moving right now. That's eleven days of fish gone."
"I know."
He stood in the river with the ruined basket in his arms and he was so angry that his vision went narrow at the edges.
Then he made himself set it down on the gravel and take a breath.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay, here's what we know now, and it's more than we knew this morning." He came up out of the water. "Nobody did that today. Look at the cut ends on the willow, they're weathered gray. That was cut two days ago, probably Tuesday morning, same visit as the woodshed."
"So they did it on the way out."
"They did it on the way out, which means the whole trip was the list. Burn the wood, poison the water, pull the weir, and touch nothing in the cellar."
"Why does that matter?"
"Because it means he's got a schedule." Tom picked up the basket. "A man working off a list isn't improvising. He's got a date in his head for when he comes and takes the cellar, and everything before that date is preparation. He's softening us for a delivery date."
"When?"
"When we're desperate enough to hand it over. And he gets to decide when that is."
They came back up to the cabin soaked and shaking, and Tom stood in the doorway dripping and looked at his family and made himself say it straight.
"We lost the spring and we lost the weir," he said. "The weir I can rebuild. The spring's gone for good."
Oliver's face went. "Gone?"
"Gone."
"Then what do we drink?"
"The river," Tom said. "And that's a different way of living and we start tonight."
He put them at the table and got the ash and drew it on the hearth stone.
"River water is not spring water," he said. "The spring came out of the ground filtered, cold, and clean, and we could dip it and drink it and we did that for eleven years. River water has got everything in it that lives upstream of us, and there are twenty three men living upstream of us."
"Giardia," McKenzie said.
"Giardia, cryptosporidium, and whatever's in a camp with no latrine." Tom scratched three lines in the ash. "So from tonight, every drop that goes in a mouth in this family goes through three steps, in order, no exceptions, and if I catch anybody skipping a step I will lose my mind."
"What are the steps?" Oliver said.
"Settle. Filter. Boil."
He drew as he talked.
"Step one. We build a settling barrel. We pull river water, we let it sit six hours minimum, and all the silt and sand drops out the bottom. You never dip from the bottom. You dip from the top third with a cup, gently, and you don't stir it."
"Why does that matter if we're boiling anyway?"
"Because silt protects bugs. A cyst riding inside a grain of sediment can survive a boil that'd kill it naked. And because silt clogs the filter, and the filter's the part we can't replace."
He drew the second line.
"Step two. Charcoal and sand filter. Kenz, that's yours."