Chapter 4 #5
Kindra cleaned all of them on the gravel bar in twenty minutes with a knife she kept sharper than any other object on the property, and the guts went into the garden trench, and the frames went in the pot, and eleven fish went onto a rack over the buried smoke trench.
Salt was the problem.
They had two pounds and eleven ounces left. Tom weighed it on the balance beam McKenzie had made out of a stick, a string, and two identical river stones, and he weighed it twice because he did not believe it the first time.
"That's nothing," Kindra said.
"That's nothing."
"Charter's salt."
"Charter's salt got us through October." Tom set it down. "And I'd trade all of it to have him back and I'd say so to his face."
"What do we do?"
"We stop salting and we start drying."
"Cold smoke without salt is a good way to poison this family."
"Not if we go all the way dry." Tom cut a strip of elk and held it up.
"Salt cure is for thick cuts, and thick cuts hold moisture in the middle. If we cut everything quarter inch or thinner, with the grain, and we dry it hard over the trench until it cracks instead of bends, there's not enough water left in it for anything to live in."
"That's jerky."
"That's jerky, and jerky doesn't need salt. Salt's for flavor and for speed. What it actually needs is thin, and air, and patience."
"How thin is thin?"
Tom held up his hand and pinched a gap you could see daylight through.
"If you can't almost see through it before it goes on the rack, it's too thick."
So the work changed again.
Cutting took four times longer. The rack held half as much by weight and twice as much by area, so they built a second rack, and then a third, and the smoke trench ran eighteen hours a day with somebody always feeding it green alder in the gulch where the walls ate the smoke.
Oliver ran the trench. McKenzie ran the water. Kindra ran the knife. Tom ran the weir and the trapline and the wood.
Sofie timed every pot and walked Shyla out and back twice a day, and the dog was up to a slow walk on all four legs now with the fur growing in gray and wrong over three straight scars.
On the eighth of October it froze hard in the night and did not thaw all day.
On the ninth it snowed two inches and melted by noon.
On the tenth, at a quarter past four in the afternoon, the upstream clapper went off.
Tom was at the woodpile. He was moving before the sound finished, across the yard, and Kindra came out the door with the Beretta and put her back against the corner log, and McKenzie already had Sofie by the wrist and was going for the woodshed gap with Oliver two steps behind.
Ninety seconds. They had drilled it to ninety seconds.
They were gone in fifty five.
Tom went flat behind the rick of split lodgepole with the .22 and looked down the river trail through the gap under the bottom log.
"Hello the house."
It was not a man's voice.
It was a woman's, and it cracked in the middle of the second word.
"Hello the house! We're not, we don't want anything, we've got children, we've got four people and two of them are children."
Tom did not answer.
Kindra's eyes came across the yard to his. He shook his head once.
A minute went by.
"I know you're there," the woman called. "There's a woodpile and it's dry and it's stacked and somebody stacked it this week."
Tom closed his eyes briefly.
"Come up to the fence," he called. "All four of you together. Hands out from your sides. Anybody drifts left or right and this ends badly."
"We're coming. We're coming, don't shoot, we're coming."
They came out of the cottonwoods.
The man was in front, tall and stooped, maybe forty, in a canvas jacket that had been a good one and was now held together at the shoulder with what looked like electrical tape. He had a hunting rifle slung muzzle down across his back and he had both hands raised well clear of it.
The woman behind him was small, dark haired, in a wool coat four sizes too big, and she was carrying a backpack that was obviously empty by the way it rode.
And behind her came two boys.
They were identical, and they were about eleven, and they were the filthiest human beings Tom had seen since the world ended.
"That's far enough," Tom called.
They stopped at the fence.
"Tyler Clubman," the man said. His voice shook. "This is my wife Christina. These are our boys, Mate and Quentin."
"Where are you from?"
"Missoula, originally. We've been at a place up the Blackfoot since May and we couldn't hold it."
"Couldn't hold it how?"
Tyler Clubman's mouth worked.
"There were men," he said.
One of the twins, the one on the left, looked around the yard at the woodpile and the smoke trench and the racks under the eave, and said, loudly and with complete sincerity, "Holy shit, Dad, these people have got food."
"Mate," Christina said.
"Well, they do."
"Mate."
"I'm just saying what everybody's looking at," the boy said.
And the other one, Quentin, was not looking at the food at all.
He was looking sideways along the hedge line, down the length of it, with his head tilted, at exactly the place where Oliver had set the second row of noisemakers.