Chapter 7 #3
Tom had seen that dog do a great many things in eleven years and he had never once seen her go from hackles to sitting in eleven seconds.
"That's not a man," he said.
"What?"
"She sat down. She doesn't sit down for a man."
Kindra came up beside him. "Then what?"
"Something she knows."
They waited four more minutes. Nothing came.
At twenty to midnight Tom put on his coat, and Kindra said, "Absolutely not," and Tom said, "I'm not going up there. I'm going eleven feet outside the door and standing still, and if I don't do that I'll be awake until morning."
He went out into twelve degrees and stood in the snow with the .22 and listened to a winter night in the Montana mountains.
Nothing.
And then, very far off and very high, somewhere up past the stand, a cow elk barked.
Tom stood there in the cold and started laughing, quietly, with his breath going up in a column.
He came back in and hung the coat.
"Elk," he said. "There's a herd moving down out of the high country. That's what she heard."
"You're sure?"
"I heard a cow bark twice."
Kindra sat down on the bed and put her face in her hands.
"I aged four years," she said.
"Me too."
"Tom, we can't do this. Not for five months."
"I know."
"We cannot spend every night going from a stew to a heart attack because a dog heard something." She looked up. "We're going to wear out. Not dramatically. Just wear out, like a rope, and then one day something real happens and there's nothing left to spend."
Tom sat down beside her.
"Then we change how we do the nights," he said.
"How?"
"Watches. Real ones, on a schedule, so that five people are asleep and one is awake, instead of six people half asleep and all of them listening."
"The kids?"
"Kenz can take an hour. Oliver can take an hour."
"They're twelve and ten."
"And they're going to be thirteen and eleven in a valley with two gangs in it." He rubbed his eyes. "Kindra, the thing that kills us isn't a raid. It's exhaustion. You just said it. So we treat sleep like we treat firewood. It's a resource, we ration it, and we stop letting it get stolen."
She was quiet for a while.
"Two hour shifts," she said. "Nine to eleven, me. Eleven to one, you. One to three, Kenz, in the cabin only, by the window, with the dog, and she wakes you for anything at all and there's no penalty for waking you and being wrong."
"That's important."
"That's the most important part. No penalty for being wrong. She'll stop waking us otherwise."
"Three to five?"
"You. Five to seven, Oliver, at first light when it's least likely and he can feel important about it."
"That's a good schedule."
"It's a terrible schedule," Kindra said. "It's just less terrible than nobody sleeping."
They started it that night and it changed everything within four days.
Tom had not understood how badly they were all running until people started getting five straight hours. McKenzie stopped snapping. Oliver stopped dropping things. Kindra laughed twice on Sunday.
Tom himself woke up on the Monday and realized he had not thought about Chip Charter's hands in three days, and stood in the door with his coffee that was not coffee and let himself have one clean minute of grief on purpose instead of fourteen dirty ones by ambush.
The elk came down on the Tuesday.
They came down the way they come down every year, when the snow up high gets deep enough that pawing through it costs more than moving does, and they came in a long ragged string out of the north timber at first light and crossed the top of the meadow.
Oliver had the five to seven watch and he did exactly the right thing, which was nothing at all.
He did not shout. He did not run out. He went up the ladder and shook Tom's shoulder and said, in a voice like a held breath, "Dad. There's about forty elk in the meadow."
Tom was at the window in four seconds.
Thirty one animals. He counted twice. Cows and calves and two spikes and one raghorn bull hanging back at the timber edge.
"Kenz."
"I'm up."
"Get the rifle."
"The .22?"
"The .22."
McKenzie stopped halfway to the wall.
"Dad."
"I know."
"That's an elk."
"I know exactly what it is."
Kindra was awake now and sitting up. "Tom, you cannot take an elk with a .22."
"I know I can't."
"Then what are you doing?"
"I'm looking at four hundred pounds of meat standing three hundred yards from my house and thinking very hard," Tom said, "and I want the rifle in my hands while I do it."
He stood at the window for eleven minutes and watched.
Then he came away and sat down at the table and put his head in his hands.
"No," he said.
"No?"
"No. Here's the thinking and I'll say it out loud so nobody thinks I gave up easy."
Tom held up his fingers. "One. A .22 kills an elk only with a brain shot, and a brain shot on an elk needs to be inside sixty yards and perfectly still and broadside to the head, and if I'm off by three inches I've got a wounded animal running four miles into the timber."
"And then it dies anyway and we get nothing," McKenzie said.
"And then it dies anyway and we get nothing, and worse, we've got four hundred pounds of meat lying in a draw calling in every predator and every man in this valley. There is nothing on earth that advertises like a dead elk you can't get to."
"Two?"
"Two. The GP100. .357, one hundred and fifty eight grains, out of a four inch barrel. At forty yards, on an elk, that is a pistol round and an elk is nine hundred pounds of animal that does not know it's been shot for about twenty seconds."
"And the twenty seconds is the problem."
"Twenty seconds at thirty miles an hour is a quarter mile. Same outcome."
"So we let them walk," Kindra said.
"No," Tom said. "We let them walk today. And then we spend a week getting ready, because they're going to keep coming down that same line every morning until the snow's too deep, and elk go where they went yesterday."
"Ready how?"
Tom pulled the ash toward him.
"I've been in this valley eleven years," he said, "and I have been hunting elk with rifles for eleven years, and I have never once hunted them the way people hunted them here for four thousand years before a rifle existed."
"Which is?"
"You don't shoot them," he said. "You put them somewhere."
They worked on it for six days and it was the most interesting six days of Tom's life.
"An elk that's moving is going seven feet a second and there is nothing you can do about it," he said, on the first morning, at the top of the meadow, walking the line the herd had cut in the snow. "But an elk that's moving is also lazy. Look."
"They're walking single file," McKenzie said.
"They're walking in each other's tracks because breaking trail in eighteen inches of snow is work, and animals don't do work they don't have to. That's the first thing. They're already funneling themselves. All I have to do is make the easy way easier."
"And the hard way harder," Oliver said.
"And the hard way harder. That's the whole job."
They spent two days making the hard way harder.
Not walls. Nothing that looked like anything. Tom dropped four small dead firs across the natural line on the east side, limbs on, and nothing more, and he did it two hundred yards out from where he actually wanted them.
"Why so far out?"
"Because an animal that meets an obstacle two hundred yards from a place makes a decision calmly and forgets about it. An animal that meets one twenty feet from a place gets suspicious and looks around."
He shoveled snow in three places, piling it into soft chest deep drifts across a side trail.
"They'll go around that. It's not a wall, it's just annoying. That's all you ever want. Annoying."
"Where are we putting them?"
"There."
He pointed at the bench below the beaver pond, where the ground narrowed between the pond ice on one side and a forty foot cut bank on the other, to a gap about eleven yards wide.
"That's the throat," he said. "That's a natural weir and it's been sitting there for eleven years and I never once looked at it."
"And when they're in the throat?"
"Then I'm eighteen yards away behind that rock," Tom said. "And it's still not a rifle."
"Then what is it?"
Tom said, "It's a spear."
Kindra looked up from the table that night. "Absolutely not."
"Hear me out."
"You're going to stand in a gap and spear an elk."
"No. I'm going to set spears in the ground and let an elk run onto them, and there's a four thousand year history of people eating very well doing exactly that, and none of them had a GP100 as a backup."
He laid it out.
Four shafts, cut from green serviceberry and seasoned four days over the stove, an inch and a quarter thick, six feet long.
The heads were the part that took the longest.
Tom had no steel to spare and would not cut up a knife, so they made them out of the deer's own leg bone: split the cannon bone lengthwise with a wedge and a maul, take the two thickest walls, grind them on wet sandstone for four hours each into a leaf shape eight inches long with a tang.
"Bone," Kindra said, skeptically.
"Bone that's been dried is harder than most people think. It's not going through a shoulder blade. It doesn't have to. It has to go between two ribs and eleven inches into a lung, and a lung is not armored."
They hafted the heads into split shaft ends and lashed them with wet sinew from the doe's backstrap, wrapped hot and tight so it shrank as it dried, and then glued the whole joint with the hoof glue that had been boiling for four days and had reduced to something the color and consistency of dark
honey.
"How strong is that?"
"Watch."
Tom took a finished shaft and put the point against the wall log and leaned his entire weight on it, and the shaft bowed like a drawn bow and the joint did not move.
"That's the glue," he said. "Hoof and hide glue is as strong as anything anybody had for nine thousand years, and the only reason nobody uses it is it fails when it gets wet, and it's fourteen degrees outside."
"Where do they go?"