Chapter 6 #4
He butchered it on the gravel bar with McKenzie doing the second knife, and he narrated the whole thing because that was the deal now, every job out loud, every time, in case someday there was nobody left to narrate it.
"Skin comes off before anything else and it comes off with a fist, not a blade."
"Why a fist?"
"Because a blade nicks the hide and a nicked hide is a hide with a hole in the exact place you wanted to make a sleeve."
He worked his knuckles between the skin and the membrane and rolled it back.
"You cut the connective tissue, not the skin. You're separating two things that already want to separate."
"Gut?"
"Gut last on a cold day. In August you gut in four minutes or you lose the meat, but it's thirty eight degrees and this animal's going to cool slow and even if I leave the cavity closed for an hour."
"Charter said gut first."
"Charter trapped in August," Tom said. "Everybody's rules come from the season they learned in."
They took everything.
The hide went to the frame. The brain went into a jar for tanning it, because every animal has exactly enough brain to tan its own hide, which Tom had told the children four times and they had never believed until they saw it work.
The leg bones got cracked and the marrow scraped out into the fat crock.
The backstrap and tenderloins came out whole and went straight to the racks.
The sinew along the spine got stripped and hung to dry in a bundle, and that bundle was worth more than the meat in the long run, because sinew was thread and thread was clothing and there was no other thread coming.
The hooves went in the big pot with the hide scrapings for four days of boiling, because that made glue, and glue was arrows and repairs and waterproofing.
The stomach got turned out and washed and became a bag.
"What's left?" Tom asked, at the end.
"The guts," Oliver said.
"Where do they go?"
"Garden trench."
"Why not the river?"
"Because the river takes it away and the garden keeps it."
"Good."
Sunday they cut wood and got another third of a cord.
Monday it snowed four inches and stayed, and Tom stood in the door at dawn and looked at a white world and knew that everything had just changed again, because snow holds tracks, and tracks cut both ways.
Monday night he took McKenzie and they cut the north approach.
Not a trail. The opposite. They went up the game trail from the ridge and Tom stopped every forty yards and did something small and stupid.
He laid a dead limb across the trail at shin height, half buried.
He shoveled snow onto a patch of sloping rock so it looked like flat ground.
He built two false trip lines out of frayed cord with nothing attached to them at all.
"Why nothing?" McKenzie said.
"Because the third time a man finds a cord that isn't attached to anything, he stops checking cords."
"And then?"
"And then the fourth one's Oliver's."
Tuesday they hauled deadfall.
Wednesday the weir took nine fish and Kindra rendered four pounds of fat and started a second batch of soap in the big pot because the first bar was two thirds gone and because she had decided, out loud, at the table, that soap was not a luxury and was going into the rotation permanently.
"Every week," she said. "Bath. All six of us. I don't care what's happening."
"There's five of us," Sofie said.
The table went quiet for a second.
"There's five of us," Kindra agreed.
Thursday morning Tom went down to the weir at first light and found something in it that was not a fish.
It was a strip of red cloth, tied to the upstream stake, sodden and stiff with cold.
He stood in the river with his hands going numb and looked at it for a long time.
Then he untied it and put it in his pocket and finished checking the trap, because there were seven whitefish in it and seven whitefish is four days of breakfast, and he was not going to leave four days of breakfast in a basket because a man had tied a rag on a stick.
He came up the hill and put the fish on the table and the rag beside them.
"Where," Kindra said.
"Upstream stake."
"When?"
"Sometime last night."
"There's snow on the ground, Tom."
"I know there is."
"Then there are tracks."
"There are tracks," he said. "That's what I want to talk about."
He sat them down.
"There's four sets," he said. "Down the gravel bar, up to the weir, back down the gravel bar. Four men, and they walked in each other's prints on the way out, which is a thing you do when you don't want counted."
"Then how do you know it's four?"
"Because they were sloppy on the way in. And because one of them's got a boot with a chunk out of the right heel, and I've now got that print four separate times in eleven days."
"So he's been here before."
"He's been here every time."
Kindra picked up the red rag and turned it over.
"It's the fourth one," she said. "Dog. Note. Pot. Now this."
"Yeah."
"Tom, what does this one say? The others all said something. What does a rag on a fish trap say?"
Tom had been chewing on that for an hour and he did not like the answer.
"It says he knows the weir's rebuilt," he said. "Which means he came down, looked at the thing he destroyed three weeks ago, saw it standing again, and instead of tearing it out he left a marker."
"Why wouldn't he tear it out?"
"Because tearing it out makes me build a third one." Tom laid both hands flat on the table. "Kindra, he's not trying to stop us anymore. He's counting."
"Counting what?"
"Everything." Tom's voice was very quiet. "Everything we rebuild. Every system we get back on its feet. The weir's up, the water's running, the racks are full, there's two and a half cords against the north wall. That's what a man checks when he's deciding a delivery date."
McKenzie said, "Or it's a countdown."
Everybody looked at her.
"What?"
"Four things," she said. "Dog, note, pot, rag. What if it's not a list of messages? What if it's a number?"
The cabin got very cold.
"Kenz," Kindra said. "That's a hell of a thought."
"I'm just saying it's four, and he does everything in fours and sixes, and Chip said Prine's number was six."
Tom stood up and went to the window and looked out at the meadow, white and unbroken all the way to the black wall of timber.
"Then we've got two," he said.
"Tom."
"If she's right, we've got two."
He turned around.
"Everybody in this house is in the stand at first light every single morning from now on, and we work in pairs, and nobody goes anywhere alone, and Sofie does not leave her mother's sight for any reason. Not one."
"For how long?" Oliver said.
"Until it happens."
Nobody ate much.
At four in the afternoon, with the light already going blue, Shyla stood up off the hides by the stove.
She had not done that in three weeks. Not once, not since the night of the rake.
She crossed to the door and put her nose at the crack at the bottom and her hackles came up in a ridge from her shoulders to her tail, and she did not make a single sound.
Tom had the .22 in his hands before he was fully out of the chair.
"Stand," he said. "Go. Now."
Kindra had Sofie. McKenzie had Oliver by the sleeve. They went out the back through the woodshed gap in forty one seconds, up the draw, into the rocks.
Tom stayed nine seconds longer, which was eight seconds longer than he should have, and eased the shutter open one inch and put his eye to the gap.
The meadow was white and empty.
The tree line was black.
And out on the snow, two hundred yards off, at the exact center of the open ground where nothing had been at noon, somebody had driven a stake.
There was a shape hanging from it.
Tom got the field of it and made himself look and his stomach went over, because it was a bar of soap, amber and translucent at the edges, tied on with a bootlace, and beside it, nailed flat to the stake, was a sheet of birch bark with writing scratched into it.
He could not read the writing at two hundred yards.
He did not need to.
He had scratched it himself, with a nail, on Thursday morning, and put it in Christina Clubman's hands.