Chapter 4 #4
McKenzie sat up.
"Barrel or a hollowed log, doesn't matter, it needs to be about three feet tall. Layers from the bottom up. Clean cloth over a drain hole, then four inches of coarse gravel, then four inches of river sand washed until the wash water runs clear, then a foot of charcoal crushed to about pea size,
then more sand, then a cloth on top to spread the pour."
"Where do we get charcoal?"
"We make it. That's the part everybody gets wrong."
Tom leaned forward. "Charcoal is not the black chunks out of the stove. That's char and it's half ash and it's useless. Real charcoal is wood burned without air, and you make it by filling a metal can with dry hardwood sticks, punching two small holes in the lid,
and setting the whole can in a fire for three or four hours. The holes let the smoke and gas out. No oxygen gets in. What's left in the can is charcoal."
"How do you know when it's done?"
"When the jet of smoke coming out of the holes stops and you get a little clear flame. Then you pull it, seal the holes with mud, and let it cool sealed. You open it hot and it'll flash on you."
McKenzie was already looking at the two lard cans on the shelf.
"That one," Tom said. "And the small one for the second batch."
"What does the charcoal actually do?" Oliver asked.
"It takes out taste and smell and a lot of chemistry. What it does not do is kill anything living, and that's why the filter is step two and not step three."
He drew the third line, hard.
"Step three. Boil. Not warm. Not steaming. A rolling boil, big bubbles breaking the whole surface, and then one full minute at that boil."
"How long is a minute?" Sofie said.
"Good question. Nobody's got a watch that runs."
Tom looked at her. "Sixty seconds is about as long as it takes to say the alphabet twice, slow. You're going to be the timer, bug. That's your job. Every pot that gets boiled in this house, you stand there and you say it twice and you don't let anybody take that pot off the stove until you're done."
Sofie sat up very straight.
"Twice," she said.
"Twice. And if somebody tries to take it early?"
"I say no."
"You say no to anybody. Including me."
"Including you," Sofie repeated, delighted.
"There's a fourth thing," Kindra said.
"Say it."
"Fuel." She had her arms folded. "We just lost eleven cords, and boiling every drop of water for six people costs wood. That's not free."
Tom sat back.
"That's the real cost," he said. "That's the whole trick of the coyote. He didn't just take our water. He put our water on the wood pile, and the wood pile's on fire."
Nobody said anything.
"How much?" McKenzie asked.
"Six people need about three gallons a day for drinking and cooking. Boiling three gallons from cold in the big pot, with the stove already going for cooking, costs maybe a quarter of what we'd burn anyway." Tom did it in his head. "It's not nothing. Call it fifteen percent more wood."
"We've got two and a quarter cords."
"We've got two and a quarter cords and we're going to be pulling deadfall every single day from here to March, in the snow, with one bow saw."
He looked around the table. "That's just the life now. There's no more filling a shed in September and resting. Every day we get wood, every day we get water, every day we get food. Forever."
"That's what Chip did," McKenzie said quietly. "That's what he said. He said he couldn't winter alone in a wickiup again because he didn't have another one in him."
The table went quiet.
"Yeah," Tom said. "That's what he meant."
They built the settling barrel that evening in the rain because water would not wait.
Tom pulled the rain barrel from the east corner, dumped it, scrubbed it out with sand and rinsed it three times. Oliver hauled from the river with two buckets, sixteen trips, and did not complain once about his hands.
They filled it, covered it with a bark lid, and left it to sit.
Then Kindra put the big pot on the stove with six quarts in it and Sofie stood at the stove with her hands behind her back and her lips moving and Tom watched his six year old say the alphabet twice and then nod once, gravely, like a judge.
"Now," she said.
They drank tea made from water that tasted like a river and nobody complained about that either.
That night, in the dark, Kindra said, "We need to talk about you."
"Me?"
"You." She rolled over to face him. "Today in that tub, before I got the soap on you, you smelled like a dead thing."
"Kindra."
"I'm not being cruel, I'm being clinical. Five days of felling timber in wool with no wash. You had pitch in your beard, sawdust in your armpits, and your feet were the color of a bruise."
Tom said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
"Here's the thing people forget," she said. "Everybody thinks hygiene is about being nice. It isn't. Not out here. Out here it's a survival system and it's the one nobody takes seriously until it kills them."
"I know that."
"Then let me hear you say how."
He turned onto his back.
"Skin breaks down," he said. "Under wool, dirty, sweating and freezing every day, the skin at your waist and your groin and between your toes goes soft and then it splits."
"And?"
"And a split is a door. There's no antibiotics in this valley. There's no clinic. A cracked heel that goes septic in November kills me by Christmas and there's nothing anybody in this house can do about it."
"That's right." Kindra propped up on an elbow. "And it's not just you. Every one of those kids is working ten hours a day now. Oliver's hands are already open. Kenz has got a raw place on her shoulder from the pack straps. Sofie's carrying wood and her palms are going."
"So what's the plan?"
"The plan is a rule, and I'm making it, and it's not up for discussion because I have watched you skip it for three weeks."
She ticked it off. "Every single night, before bed, everybody washes hands, face, feet, armpits and groin. Hot water, cloth, and now soap. It takes four minutes. Nobody gets out of it."
"Every night."
"Every night. Feet are the big one. Feet get dried, and every person changes socks, and the wet pair goes over the stove. Wet socks in a boot for ten hours is how you get trench foot, and trench foot took more men out of the First World War than bullets did in some units."
"That's true."
"I know it's true, I read the same books you did." She poked him in the chest. "And then a full bath, in the tub, hot water, soap, once a week."
"Water costs wood now."
"I know exactly what it costs. I did the figuring while you were carrying that yoke." Kindra did not budge an inch. "Six people, one tub, same water, hottest first and dirtiest last. Twelve gallons. That's one extra armload of wood a week, Tom. One armload, against one of us losing a foot."
"That's a good trade."
"It's the best trade in the house and it isn't close."
"All right."
"And," she said, "I'm supervising yours."
Tom turned his head.
"Supervising."
"Supervising. Because you will skip it. You will absolutely skip it, you'll say there's wood to cut and there'll be wood to cut and you'll go three weeks again."
She lay back down. "So once a week you're in that tub and I'm doing it, and I'm checking your feet and your hands and every place you can't see, because that's how a person catches a thing at day two instead of day nine."
"Once a week."
"Once a week."
"Hot water. Soap. You supervising."
"Yes."
"Kindra," Tom said, "that sounds great to me."
She laughed into the blanket.
"I thought it might."
"I want to be clear that I'm agreeing entirely on medical grounds."
"Of course you are."
"Purely clinical."
"Go to sleep, Tom."
The next four days were the new life, and it was harder than the old one in every way and they got good at it anyway.
They ran the water system and it worked.
McKenzie made charcoal in the lard can on the second try, having flashed the first batch by opening it hot and losing her eyebrows, which she reported to the table with such flat fury that Oliver laughed until he fell off the bench.
The filter came together in a hollowed cottonwood section three feet long. Gravel, sand, charcoal, sand, cloth.
The first water through it ran black and they threw it out.
The fourth ran clear, and Tom held the cup up to the window and turned it and could see light through it.
"That's better than the spring ever looked," Kindra said.
"Don't tell Sofie. She'll stop timing."
"I heard that," Sofie said from under the table.
They rebuilt the weir in two and a half days.
Tom did it different this time, and better, because Charter's voice was in his head the whole way.
He set it downstream of the log jam like before, but instead of one V he built a double funnel, a long outer wing of woven willow that ran sixty feet along the bank and steered fish out into a narrowing throat, and then a second smaller V inside the first.
"Why two?" Oliver asked, waist deep, blue to the elbows.
"Because a fish that gets out of the first one is still inside the second one and doesn't know it. Same as your trip lines."
"So he relaxes."
"So he relaxes."
They staked it with green alder driven three feet into the gravel with a maul, and Tom weighted the base with river rock the size of his head, and where the bank met the wing he built a wall of stone eleven courses high so nobody could wade around the end without going into the fast water.
And forty feet upstream of the whole thing, on both banks, Oliver set four noisemakers.
"Why up there?" McKenzie asked.
"Because a man who wants to pull the weir has to walk to it," Oliver said. "And he's going to walk on the bank, because the water's cold."
Tom did not say anything. He just put his hand on the boy's head for a second.
The first morning after it was finished they took eleven whitefish and two cutthroat.