Chapter 7 #4
"In the throat. Butt end in a socket dug into the frozen ground at forty degrees, angled up and toward the direction they'll come from, so an animal's own momentum does all the work."
He set one against the table leg to show the angle.
"You never push a spear into an elk. You hold one still and let the elk push itself onto it."
"And what pushes the elk?"
"That's the other half."
The other half was noise, and it was the children's job, and Tom made them practice it twice.
McKenzie and Oliver, positioned four hundred yards up the north timber at first light, on opposite sides of the herd's line, with nothing but two pieces of dry birch and their own voices.
"Not a charge," Tom said. "Never a charge. If you run at them they scatter four directions and we get nothing and they never come down this meadow again all winter."
"So what do we do?"
"You stand up. That's all. You stand up where they can see you and you walk slowly toward them at an angle, and you make a low steady noise, and you keep doing it."
"Why slow?"
"Because a slow threat makes an animal walk away from it. A fast threat makes it panic, and a panicked elk goes uphill, and uphill is the wrong way for us."
Tom held their eyes. "You are not chasing them. You are making one direction slightly less comfortable than the other direction, forever, until they've walked where we want."
"That's the funnel again," Oliver said.
"That's always the funnel. Everything out here is the funnel. It's the only idea I've got and it works on fish and men and elk."
They set the spears on the Sunday night.
Four of them, in the throat, in a staggered line so that an animal shying from the first one turned into the second, and every one of them driven into a socket chopped in frozen ground with a rock tamped behind the butt.
Tom lay awake most of that night and was up at four.
They came at twenty past six, in the gray.
Twenty two of them, which was nine fewer than the first morning, coming out of the north timber in a line with a cow in front who had done this every October of her life.
Tom was behind the rock eighteen yards from the throat with the GP100 in his hand, because Kindra had insisted and had been right.
Kindra was forty yards to his left at the cut bank, on her belly, with the Beretta.
Sofie was in the cabin with the door barred and Shyla and a pot of water to boil and instructions to stay there under any circumstances whatsoever.
At half past six the sound started up in the north timber.
It was not a shout. It was a low, flat, continuous ah-ah-ah, two children four hundred yards apart, walking slow.
The herd stopped.
The lead cow put her head up and looked north for a long eleven seconds, and Tom stopped breathing.
Then she turned and walked southwest, unhurried, exactly along the line of least annoyance, and twenty one animals followed her because they always followed her.
They came down past the drifts. They came around the dropped firs. They came onto the bench below the beaver pond.
And they entered the throat.
The lead cow went through it clean, because she was in front and she was looking where she was going, and Tom let her go and never regretted it.
The fourth animal in the line was a spike bull, two years old, three hundred and fifty pounds, and he was watching the cow in front of him and not the ground, and when the pace bunched at the narrow place he stepped sideways to go around her.
He went onto the second spear at a walk.
It took him just behind the point of the shoulder, low, angling up, and it went in the whole eight inches of the head and four inches of shaft behind it, and the shaft bowed, and the socket held, and the glue held, and the elk's own four hundred pounds of forward weight finished the job.
He did not fall.
He made a sound like a door being forced and went four lunging strides out of the throat with the shaft snapped off in him, and then he stopped, and stood, and Tom came out from behind the rock at a dead run with the revolver.
"Don't," Kindra shouted. "Tom, don't run at it."
He stopped.
She was right. She was completely right, and he stood there eleven yards from a wounded elk with his heart coming out of his chest and made himself stand still.
The animal stood for twenty two seconds.
Then his back end went, and then the rest of him, and he was down in the snow, and the rest of the herd was four hundred yards away and gone into the timber and had not even run very hard.
It was over at 6:41 in the morning.
Nobody had fired a shot.
Tom knelt in the snow beside the animal and put his hand flat on the shoulder and did not say anything for a moment.
Then McKenzie and Oliver came down through the meadow at a dead sprint, screaming, and hit him from both sides, and all three of them went over into the snow.
"IT WORKED."
"I know."
"DAD, IT WORKED, WE DIDN'T EVEN SHOOT."
"I know."
"THAT'S FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS."
"That's three fifty," Tom said, laughing, with a twelve year old's elbow in his throat, "and it's the best three fifty in the state of Montana, and get off me, we've got four hours of work before that meat starts to sour."
They worked until three in the afternoon.
They did not move the animal. You do not move four hundred pounds; you butcher where it lies and you move it in forty pound pieces.
Tom did the gutting on the spot and did it fast, because a body cavity holds heat like an oven and the meat closest to the guts goes first.
Heart and liver and kidneys came out first and went straight in a clean cloth and up to the cabin with Sofie, who was allowed out under escort for exactly this reason and who carried an elk heart four hundred yards with the gravity of a girl carrying a crown.
"That goes in the pan tonight," Kindra said. "Organ meat doesn't keep and it's the most nutritious part of the animal and nobody in this family is getting scurvy or going blind. Liver's got more vitamin A than anything that grows."
They quartered it in the snow.
Front shoulders off first, because they are not attached by a joint at all, only muscle, and come away with a knife and a hand. Hindquarters at the ball joint, which took Tom eleven minutes each and a certain amount of swearing that he apologized for.
Backstraps out whole down the spine, two long dark ropes of the best meat on any animal.
Tenderloins out of the inside of the cavity, which Tom got to before the ravens did by four minutes.
Neck meat, rib meat, and every scrap off the bone got taken with the flat of the knife, because there are eleven pounds of usable meat on an elk carcass that most people leave for the coyotes.
The hide came off in one piece. That was McKenzie's and it took her two hours and she did it with a fist and a knife and lost only one small hole, at the flank, which Tom told her was better than his first four.
They took the sinew. They took the leg bones. They took the brain.
The hooves went in a sack for glue. The stomach and the intestines went down the slope into the gulch where the ravens and the coyotes could have them four hundred yards from the house instead of forty, which was a decision Tom made deliberately and out loud.
"Feed the scavengers away from your door," he said. "Every time. That's how you avoid a bear in February."
By dark there were three hundred and eleven pounds of elk hanging in the cold under the eave in cloth, and the racks were going over the buried smoke trench, and the big pot was on with the neck bones, and the liver was in the pan with wild onion.
They ate at eight and it was the second best thing any of them had ever eaten, and Tom said so, and Kindra said "second?" and Tom said "the stew," and that was apparently the correct answer.
"We're going to make it," Oliver said, out of nowhere, halfway through.
The table went quiet.
"Say that again," Tom said.
"We're going to make it to spring." The boy looked around. "Aren't we? Two and a half cords and three hundred pounds of elk and the weir and the caches. That's enough. That's actually enough."
Tom looked at Kindra.
"It's enough for the winter," he said carefully.
"That's what I said."
"It's enough for the winter if nothing takes it."
Nobody said anything after that, and Tom was sorry he had said it, and also knew he had to.
At ten o'clock Kindra took the first watch and Tom went up the ladder and lay down next to Sofie and slept for four hours without moving, which he had not done since September.
At two in the morning McKenzie woke him.
She did it the right way, which was a hand on the shoulder and nothing else.
"Dad."
"What."
"I don't know if it's anything."
"That's fine. That's what I said. Tell me."
"There's a light."
Tom was at the east window in six seconds.
"Where?"
"Not the draw. Look north."
He looked north, across the meadow, past the treeline, up to the shoulder of the north ridge where he had counted six fires on the twenty first of September.
There was a fire up there.
One fire, small, wavering orange, exactly where the first one had been.
"That's one," he said.
"That's what I thought. That's why I wasn't sure it was anything."
"It's something."
He watched it for eleven minutes and it did not multiply and it did not move.
"One fire on a bare ridge in fourteen degrees," he said, mostly to himself. "That's not a crew. A crew builds three fires and spreads out."
"So it's a person."
"It's one or two people, and they're cold, and they're not hiding it."
Kindra had come up beside him with a blanket around her shoulders.
"Or it's bait," she said.
"Or it's bait."
They stood there in the dark and watched a single fire burn on a ridge nine hundred feet above their house.
At half past two it went out.
Not banked. Out, all at once, the way a fire goes out when somebody throws snow on it.
And four seconds later, from the direction of the river, a long way downstream but unmistakable in the frozen air, somebody whistled.
Two notes.
Rising.