Chapter 8
Nobody slept after the whistle, and this time Tom did not pretend they should.
He got the family into the stand by three in the morning and he did it the way they had practiced, which meant it took four minutes instead of ninety seconds, because there is a difference between a drill and a night when you have to carry a sleeping six year old up two hundred yards of snow.
"That's the thing we never accounted for," Kindra said, when they were behind the wall. "Every drill we've run, everybody was awake and standing up."
"I know."
"Sofie can't wake up. She physically can't. She goes from asleep to crying and there's no version where she's useful for the first two minutes."
"Then somebody carries her, every time, and that person carries nothing else." Tom was already changing it in his head. "That's Kenz. Kenz has the smallest load anyway and she's strong enough."
"Then who has the rifle?"
"Oliver."
"He's ten."
"He's ten and he can carry a four pound rifle up a hill, and Kenz can carry a forty pound child, and those are the two jobs, and we just found that out for free instead of finding it out in daylight with men in the yard."
They lay behind the stone with the fir boughs under them and the wind wall breaking the worst of it, and Tom was surprised, and a little ashamed, at how much better it was than the first night.
The water crocks were where they were supposed to be. The fire kit was in the crack. The boughs held them off the rock.
Three weeks of small improvements, and the difference was the difference between misery and merely being cold.
"This is the thing nobody tells you," he said, into the dark.
"What is?"
"That it's never one big decision. It's forty small ones, and you only find out which ones mattered about four months later."
Nothing came up the draw. Nothing came across the meadow.
At first light Tom took the .22 and went down alone and walked the whole property and found exactly nothing: no tracks in the meadow, no tracks on the gravel bar, no marks on the weir, nothing on the stake line, nothing at the woodshed gap.
The only thing he found was on the north ridge, and he found it by climbing up there at nine in the morning after an argument with Kindra that he won on the grounds that not knowing was worse.
One fire ring. Small, maybe eighteen inches across, made of four stones, with snow thrown over it.
He put his hand in it. Stone cold.
Beside it, two bed depressions in the snow. One large, one small.
Tom crouched and looked at the small one for a long time.
It was four feet long.
He read the ground going out, and the tracks went east along the ridge, and there were two sets, and one set was a man's boot with a chunk out of the right heel, and the other set was not a man's at all.
It was a child's, or a very small woman's, and it was not wearing boots.
It was wearing something wrapped, and the wrapping had come loose on the left foot, and there were four places in two hundred yards where a bare toe had printed in the snow.
Tom followed it a half mile east along the spine and then turned around and came home, because the tracks kept going east toward the saddle and nine miles of nothing, and because he had promised Kindra the top of the ridge and nothing beyond it.
He came in at noon and told them.
"A child," Kindra said.
"Or a small woman. I'd say a child. The stride's short and the weight's low."
"With the heel-chunk man."
"With the heel-chunk man, who has now been on this property four times."
"Walking east. Away."
"Walking east, away, at some point between two thirty this morning and first light, in fourteen degrees, with one foot coming unwrapped."
Nobody said anything.
"That's not a scout," McKenzie said.
"No."
"Scouts don't bring kids."
"No, they don't." Tom sat down heavily. "And a man who sits on a ridge with one small fire and lets it be seen for four hours is not hiding, and a man who kills a fire the second he's spotted and then whistles a signal he has to know we recognize is doing something I cannot read at all."
"Maybe he's leaving," Oliver said. "Maybe the whistle meant we're going."
"Maybe."
"You don't think so."
"I think a man who wanted to leave wouldn't have climbed nine hundred feet to sit above us first," Tom said. "I think he came up there to look at something."
The next eleven days were the best eleven days the family had since the lights went out, and every single one of them knew it at the time, which was the strange part.
Nothing came.
No notes, no rags, no stakes, no whistles. The heel-chunk boot did not reappear. The north ridge stayed dark every night and McKenzie checked it four times a night from the window and reported nothing every time.
And they worked, and it all went right.
The weather turned and held: eleven degrees at night, twenty eight in the afternoon, no new snow after the first week. Hard cold and dry, which is the best weather in the world for preserving meat and the worst for staying warm, and they took the trade gladly.
The elk went onto the racks in four days of eighteen hour smoking, and it came off hard and dark and cracking, and Kindra weighed it on McKenzie's stick balance and got a hundred and ninety one pounds of finished dried meat off three hundred and eleven pounds of fresh.
"That's sixty one percent," she said. "That's better than anything we did in September."
"Why better?"
"Because it's twelve degrees and dry. In September it was fifty and damp and we were fighting the air the whole time. Cold dry air pulls water out of meat faster than heat does and it doesn't spoil while it works."
"So winter's good for something."
"Winter is good for exactly one thing and this is it."
They cached forty percent of it immediately, on the Wednesday, in two new sites neither of which was within four hundred yards of the other three, and Tom drew the map of all six caches on a piece of birch bark and then burned it,
and made every member of the family memorize the six locations instead.
"Why burn it?" Oliver asked.
"Because a map is a thing a man can take off your body."
They ran the trapline and it produced.
Eleven rabbits in nine days, four grouse, one marten that Tom did not eat but skinned carefully because a marten hide is worth something to somebody someday.
They reset the snares three times as the snow deepened, raising every loop so it sat four fingers above the new surface, because a snare set for eight inches of snow is a useless loop lying on the ground under fourteen.
"That's the mistake that gets people," Tom told McKenzie, kneeling in the willows. "Not setting snares. Forgetting to reset them. A trapline is not a thing you build, it's a thing you maintain, and the day you stop maintaining it is the day it stops feeding you and you don't find out for a week."
The weir kept working right up until the eighth of November, when the river iced at the edges and the whitefish run finished, and they pulled the basket and the wings out onto the bank and stacked them under bark to protect the willow from the weight of snow.
"Rebuild in April," Tom said.
"We'll be here in April," Oliver said.
"We'll be here in April."
They cut wood every single day. Every day, without exception, two hours minimum even when there was other work, because Tom had done the figures four times and kept getting the same answer.
Two and a half cords was not enough. Not with boiling every drop of water. Not with the stove being the only heat in a cabin at fourteen below.
They needed four.
By the eleventh of November they had three and a third, stacked in five ricks along the north wall, and every stick of it was standing dead lodgepole that had been dry on the stump for six years and would burn hot and clean the day it went in the stove.
Kindra made soap twice more and taught McKenzie the whole process start to finish, including the egg, and McKenzie ran a batch entirely alone and it came out slightly soft and Kindra told her it was because she had gone light on the boil and to add an hour next time.
"That's it? That's the whole correction?"
"That's the whole correction. Most things in this life are an hour more boiling."
They tanned the elk hide and the doe hide both, and that took six days and was the hardest, filthiest, most miserable work of the entire autumn.
Fleshing first, over a beam, scraping every scrap of fat and membrane off the flesh side with the drawknife held at exactly the wrong angle to cut, because the right angle to cut is the angle that ruins the hide.
Then the brain. One animal, one brain, mashed with hot water into a slurry the color and texture of thin oatmeal, and worked in by hand for forty minutes on both sides until the hide was saturated.
Then two days rolled up and damp in the cold.
Then the wringing, which broke a peg and nearly broke Tom's thumb.
Then the softening, and the softening is the part that nobody survives the first time, because a brained hide must be worked constantly while it dries, pulled and stretched and rubbed over a rope, every ten minutes, for six to eight hours,
and the moment you stop for forty minutes it stiffens into rawhide and everything you did is gone.
They worked in shifts. Tom, Kindra, McKenzie, Oliver, back to the rope, back to the rope, all day and into the night.
Sofie's job was to shout every ten minutes.
"TEN," she would announce, and whoever was closest would go to the rope.
At two in the morning on the sixth day Kindra pulled it off the rope and held it up and it hung soft and white and supple as cloth.
Nobody said anything for a second.
"That's a coat," McKenzie said.
"That's Sofie's coat," Kindra said. "She's grown two inches since August and she's going to freeze in January in what she's got."
"And the deer hide?"
"That's four pairs of moccasins and a pair of mittens."
"Then we smoke them," Tom said.
"Tomorrow."
"Today. Now. Tonight."
"Tom, it's two in the morning."