Chapter 7
Tom did not go out to the stake that night.
Every part of him wanted to and he sat in the rocks two hundred yards up the draw with his family and made himself not do it, because a thing placed in the open center of a field is placed there for exactly one reason and that reason is to make a man walk to it.
They spent the night in the stand.
It was the first full night in it and it taught them eleven things they had not known, most of them bad.
The wall was chest high and that was wonderful for shooting and terrible for sleeping, because chest high at a kneel is knee high at a lie-down and the wind came over the top of it all night in a thin freezing river that found every gap in every blanket.
"We need a roof," McKenzie said, at midnight, through her teeth.
"We need a wind wall," Tom said. "Not a roof. A roof traps smoke and blocks sight. We need three feet of brush laid along the top of the stone to break the wind, and we can pull that off and see over it in four seconds."
"Write it down."
"I'll remember it."
"Dad, write it down."
He wrote it in the ash of the little fire they were not supposed to have and did not light.
The second thing was that Sofie could not sleep on rock.
None of them could, really, but a grown person can lie on granite for a night and get up angry, and a six year old on granite gets up sick. By two in the morning she was shivering in a way that was not about temperature.
Kindra got her inside her own coat, body to body, skin to skin at the chest, and held her there for four hours and did not sleep at all.
"Fir boughs," she said, at dawn, hoarse. "Eight inches of them, butt ends down, shingled like a roof so the needles all lie the same way. And we cut them today and we leave them up here permanently."
"That's a day of work."
"It's two hours and it's the difference between this being a place we can hold for a night and a place we can hold for a week."
"You're right."
"I know I'm right, I'm just too cold to enjoy it."
The third thing was the water.
They had two quarts in the stand and six people, and by four in the morning it was gone and there was snow everywhere and Oliver, reasonably, picked up a handful and put it in his mouth.
"No," Tom said.
"It's water."
"It's water at thirty one degrees and your body's at ninety eight."
Tom took his wrist. "Every mouthful of snow you eat, your body has to burn calories to warm it, and it costs more than it gives back. Eat enough snow and you'll get colder and thirstier at the same time, and men have died doing exactly that with water all around them."
"So what do we do?"
"You melt it first. In a container, against your body, or over a fire if there is one. And you never fill a pot with snow and set it straight on heat, either, because the bottom scorches dry before the top melts and you'll burn a hole in the only pot you've got."
"Then how?"
"Start with a cup of water in the bottom. Always. Then add the snow a handful at a time." Tom shook his head. "That's four things I should have taught you in July."
"You're teaching it now."
"I'm teaching it at four in the morning on a rock with my daughter turning blue. That's not teaching, that's paying for something."
At first light they looked at the meadow.
The stake stood two hundred yards out in the middle of unbroken white, and the bar of soap swung slowly from its bootlace, and the sheet of birch bark was nailed flat beneath it.
And there were no tracks.
That was the thing that took the top of Tom's head off.
Not fewer tracks. Not covered tracks. No tracks at all, anywhere in two hundred yards of fresh snow, in any direction, all the way to the treeline.
"That's not possible," Kindra said.
"It's possible."
"Tom, nobody flies."
"He came in before the snow stopped." Tom lay behind the wall with his chin on his forearms. "It quit at about four yesterday afternoon. He came in during the last hour of it, drove the stake, and walked out backward in his own prints, and the last of the fall filled everything in."
"That's an hour window."
"It's a forty minute window and he was in it."
"How would he even know?"
"Because he's been sitting on that ridge for three weeks watching weather come down this valley, same as we do, and he knew the snow was quitting at four the same way you know it by your knee."
Kindra was silent.
"That's the message," Tom said. "The soap isn't the message. The Clubmans aren't the message. The message is I can put an object in the middle of your field and leave no mark."
"And we can't."
"And we can't. Every time we move now, we write it down for him."
They came down at eight in the morning, and Tom went out to the stake, and he did it correctly.
He did not walk straight to it.
He went out along the hedge line to the west end of the meadow, in cover, and then came at the stake from the downwind side in a wide arc, stopping every twenty yards, with the .22 up and Kindra behind the north rick with the Beretta covering three hundred yards of treeline.
It took him twenty five minutes to cover two hundred yards.
There was nothing under the snow around the stake. No pit, no line, no second stake.
The soap was two thirds of a bar, and it was the bar Kindra had cut on Thursday morning, and he knew it because there was a chip out of the corner where the bread knife had caught.
The birch bark was his own.
HARDWOOD ASH ONLY. RAIN WATER. EGG FLOATS A QUARTER.
And underneath, scratched in with a nail in the square capitals he had come to know better than his own handwriting, was one new line.
THEY SAID YOU WERE BURNED OUT.
Tom stood in the snow in the middle of his own meadow and read it four times.
Then he pulled the stake, and took the soap and the bark, and walked back the way he had come.
He put them on the table and the family stood around it.
"They went east," Kindra said.
"They went east over the saddle."
"That's the opposite direction from Wingman."
"It is."
"So somebody else got them."
"Somebody else got them," Tom said. "Somebody on the far side, in the flats or the wash country, and that somebody took a bar of soap off them, and then that bar of soap traveled back over that mountain and arrived in my meadow."
"How?" Oliver said.
"Either whoever killed them brought it, or they traded it to somebody who did."
"Which one?"
"That's the question that matters, and I don't know the answer." Tom sat down. "But here's what I do know. Tyler told them something. That line, they said you were burned out, that's a quote. Somebody said it to whoever wrote this."
Kindra closed her eyes.
"He lied for us," she said.
"He lied for us. With four people dead in front of him, or his family standing there, or worse, he told somebody there was nothing on this side of that saddle." Tom's voice went thin. "And whoever it was didn't believe him, because a burned out valley doesn't make soap."
McKenzie said, "So did it work or not?"
"It half worked. It bought a delay. Somebody spent a week and a half deciding whether he was lying."
"And now?"
"And now there's a second crew that knows we're here, and they know we've got fat and ash and time, which means food, and they came to say so."
Sofie said, "Are Mate and Quentin dead?"
The room stopped.
Kindra crouched in front of her.
"We think so, bug."
"Both of them?"
"We think so."
Sofie thought about it.
"Quentin said a bad word to Daddy," she said.
"He did."
"I don't care anymore."
"No," Kindra said. "Neither do I."
Tom went outside and split wood for forty minutes and did not say anything to anybody, and everybody let him.
That afternoon they did the fir boughs, and the wind wall, and the water cache in the stand: two sealed crocks buried in the scree behind the wall below the frost line, checked weekly, plus a small pot and a fire kit permanently wedged in a crack in the granite.
They did the bough beds shingled butt down, eight inches deep, and when it was finished Oliver lay on it and said "oh" in a voice that made everybody laugh.
They cut a second route out of the draw, west this time, over a rock shelf that took no prints.
They put a cord on the woodshed gap that ran into the cabin and rang a can, so that anybody leaving the house at night woke everybody up on purpose.
And at four in the afternoon, Kindra said, "Everybody in. I'm making the stew."
Tom looked up.
"The stew?"
"The stew."
"Kindra, we've got four days of grouse and."
"I'm making the stew," she said, "because we have buried our neighbors, and we are going to eat something on purpose, and if I have to argue about it I'll cry, so don't."
"Yes ma'am."
She started at four and it took until nine and every single person in the family had a job.
"First thing," Kindra said, "is that a real stew is four separate cooking projects that meet at the end. Everybody thinks you throw things in a pot. You throw things in a pot and you get gray water with objects in it."
She set out four vessels: the big iron pot, the small pot, the deep pan, and a crock.
"Bones first. Kenz."
McKenzie brought the deer bones from the morning butcher, cracked at the ends.
"Roast them."
"Roast bones?"
"In the dry pan on the hot plate of the stove, turning, until they're brown and they smell like something. Not black. Brown."
Kindra pushed the pan at her. "Raw bones make a flat, thin broth. Roasted bones make something with a floor under it. That's the single biggest difference between good stew and bad stew and it costs twenty minutes and no ingredients at all."
McKenzie roasted them for twenty five minutes, turning with a stick, and the smell came up and filled the cabin and Shyla sat up off the hides and stared at the stove with her ears forward.
"Now the big pot. Cold water on those bones. Cold, not hot."
"Why?"
"Because cold water pulls the flavor and the gelatin out slowly as it heats. Hot water seizes the outside and locks it in."
Kindra filled it from the settled and filtered barrel.