Chapter 6
Thursday had eleven hours of daylight left in it and Tom spent every one of them.
"Read it again," Kindra said.
"It says Friday."
"Read the other part."
"Bring it out to the fence or we come in and get it."
She stood at the table with both hands flat on the wood.
"That's not a threat," she said. "That's an offer."
"It's the same thing."
"It is not the same thing, and this is the first useful piece of information we've had in three weeks, so slow down and look at it."
She turned the pot. "Every single thing he's done has been designed to avoid a fight. The dog instead of a shot. The note instead of a conversation. The wood instead of the cellar. Your traps pulled and stacked instead of tripped."
"Because he doesn't want to lose men."
"He's got twenty three men and we've got two adults and a .22. He is not worried about losing men."
Kindra shook her head. "He's worried about losing time. Look at the pattern. Everything he's done costs him one night of sneaking and costs us a month of work. He's the most efficient man I've ever heard of."
"So what?"
"So Friday's not the day he takes the cellar. Friday's the day he finds out whether he has to."
She looked up. "If we carry it out to the fence, he doesn't have to come in. If we don't, he has to plan an assault on a defended cabin with a cleared field of fire, and that costs him men and daylight and it might cost him the winter."
Tom stood very still.
"You're saying the note's a question."
"I'm saying every single thing he's done for three weeks has been a question, and every time we've answered it by getting quieter and smaller and better hidden, and he's read that as the answer of people who are going to fold."
"And we're not folding."
"We are absolutely not folding," Kindra said, "but he doesn't know that yet, and I'd like tomorrow to be the day he finds out at maximum inconvenience to himself."
Tom looked at his wife for a long moment.
"Get the kids," he said. "All of them. We're going to do this properly and we're going to do it out loud."
They sat at the table at noon with the ash on the hearth stone and Tom drew the property.
"Here's the situation and nobody gets a soft version," he said. "Tomorrow morning, probably between nine and eleven, six men come up that river trail. Maybe more. They're going to stop at the fence and they're going to want the cellar."
"What's in the cellar?" Sofie asked.
"Everything," McKenzie said.
"That's right." Tom did not soften it. "Four hundred pounds of dried meat and fish. Ninety pounds of beans and wheat. Two hundred and some pounds of roots and squash in sand. That's this family from now until green-up in May."
"So we can't give it to them."
"We cannot give it to them, and here's the part that matters."
He set the pencil down. "We also can't fight six men in an open yard. If it comes to shooting in that dooryard tomorrow, we lose. I want everybody to hear me say that out loud. Two pistols and a .22 against six men who have done this eleven times before is not a fight, it's an execution,
and it's ours."
Oliver's face went tight.
"Then what do we do?"
"We make tomorrow expensive without anybody firing a shot."
"How?"
Tom drew three marks in the ash.
"Three things," he said. "Depth. Doubt. And the door."
He tapped the first.
"Depth. Right now everything we own is in one hole in the ground thirty feet from this house. That is the single stupidest arrangement possible and it's my fault, and we're fixing it today."
"We can't move four hundred pounds in a day," Kindra said.
"We're not moving four hundred pounds. We're moving a hundred and sixty."
He looked around the table.
"Forty percent. That's the number. Forty percent goes out of that cellar today into four separate places, none of them within three hundred yards of each other, none of them requiring a trail, and every one of them dug by somebody who then tells nobody but me and your mother."
"Why forty?" McKenzie asked.
"Because sixty percent left in the cellar still looks like a full cellar to a man with a lantern, and because forty percent is what this family can live on from January to May if we're cold and careful and lucky."
Tom's jaw set. "Sixty percent is what we can afford to lose in one afternoon and still be alive in June. Forty percent is the family. Sixty percent is the bribe."
Kindra closed her eyes briefly.
"That's the whole plan," she said. "Isn't it."
"That's the whole plan."
"You're going to let him take the cellar."
"I'm going to let him take a cellar," Tom said. "And I'm going to make sure it's a good enough cellar that he doesn't look for a second one."
Nobody said anything.
"That's the doubt part," Tom said. "Second mark. A man who finds three hundred pounds of food goes home happy and comes back in April. A man who finds forty pounds knows there's more somewhere and he tears the ground up looking for it, and then he starts on the people,
and we have all heard what that means."
"So we have to give him enough," McKenzie said slowly.
"We have to give him enough that his arms are full."
They worked from one in the afternoon until four in the morning.
Tom picked the four sites himself and he picked them the way Charter would have, which meant he picked them by asking where would a man never dig.
Site one: under the chicken run.
He pulled up eleven square feet of the run floor, dug down thirty inches, lined the hole with flat rock and bark, set in two hides' worth of dried fish in rawhide wraps and a crock of rendered fat sealed with tallow, covered it, packed it,
and then put six inches of chicken filth and straw back on top and let the nine surviving birds walk on it for an hour.
"Nobody digs in a chicken coop," he said. "It's the worst smelling ground on any property and every man alive assumes there's nothing under it but what came out of a chicken."
Site two: the ash dump.
Behind the cabin, at the base of a rockfall, was eleven years of wood ash from the stove, a gray mound four feet high that nobody had ever thought about twice.
Kindra dug into the side of it horizontally, into the slope behind, and set a sealed barrel of wheat and beans in the cavity, and then let the ash slump back over the mouth.
"Ash is the best thing there is," she said. "It's dry, it kills bugs, it keeps mice off, and it looks like the one place on a property that is definitely nothing."
Site three was McKenzie's and she chose it herself.
"The old privy hole," she said.
Tom looked at her.
"The one from before you dug the new one," she said. "It's been filled in four years. It's composted down to dirt. Nobody's ever going to put a shovel in a filled privy, and if they do they'll stop after eight inches."
"Kenz, that's genuinely nasty."
"Is it wrong?"
"It's not wrong at all."
She lined it with birch bark and set in sixty pounds of jerky in wrapped bundles and covered it and laid the old boards back over.
Site four was Oliver's.
He took Tom three hundred yards up the draw to a lightning-killed fir with a split in the trunk, eleven feet up.
"There," he said.
"In the tree?"
"Bears can't climb a dead fir, the bark sloughs. Squirrels can't get into a rawhide wrap. And nobody looks up."
He was already tying the rope. "And if there's a foot of snow in January, I can still get to it, because it's above the snow. Everything else we buried is under a foot of frozen dirt by Christmas."
Tom stood there in the cold with his mouth open.
"Say that last part again," he said.
"Everything we buried today freezes solid in six weeks."
"Oliver."
"What?"
"That's the thing I got wrong," Tom said. "That's the thing I have been getting wrong all afternoon and you just caught it."
They spent two hours of the night they did not have re-doing sites one and three with a layer of loose straw and a cut of bark laid as a lid, so that in February a person with a hatchet could get down to them without a pick.
They finished at four in the morning.
A hundred and sixty three pounds out of the cellar and into four places, and the cellar still looked full, and Tom walked into it with the lamp and stood there and tried to see it as a stranger would.
Shelves of squash. Carrots and beets in damp sand. Cabbage hanging by the stem. Racks of dried fish. Bins.
It looked like the richest room in Montana.
"Good," he said.
Then he went out and he and Kindra did the third thing, the door, and that took until six.
Eleven miles east and four thousand feet up, on the north slope of the saddle, the Clubman family had made a poor camp.
Tyler had wanted to push over the top. Christina had stopped him at five in the afternoon, when the wind came up and Quentin started shivering in a way that did not stop between shivers.
They found the rock overhang Tom had drawn on the birch bark. They found it, and that was the thing Christina thought about afterward, in the last four minutes she had for thinking: the map was right. Every single thing that man told them was right.
They built the fire too big.
Tyler did it. He did it because his son was blue to the lips and because a small fire takes an hour to warm a boy and a big fire takes ten minutes, and it was the correct decision for the ten minutes and the wrong one for the night.
They ate dried fish and slept under two elk hides in a pile like animals, which was warm, and Christina did his compress at eight and at midnight and at four, hot as he could stand it, and the abscess had begun to drain on the second day and the hard edge had gone soft.
He was getting better. That was the other thing.
At first light Christina put out the fire with dirt and they came over the saddle at eight in the morning and started down the north side of Bear Gulch, and the Tolliver flats were visible eleven miles out, brown and open, with three roofs on them.
"There," Tyler said.
"I see it."
"Chris, there's roofs."
"I see them."
He laughed. It was the first time in eleven days.