Chapter 8 #2
"An unsmoked brain tan turns back to rawhide the first time it gets wet, and it's going to snow on Thursday, and I am not doing six days of that work again." He was already pulling his coat on. "Smoking's four hours. I'll do it alone and you all sleep."
He did not do it alone, because nobody let him, and at six thirty in the morning they pulled two hides out of a smoke tent made of the old fish rack and three blankets, and both of them had gone a deep even gold, and both of them were permanently waterproof in the only way that existed anymore.
They slept until noon that day and Tom called it a holiday.
Sofie's coat took Kindra four days to cut and sew, using sinew thread and an awl made from a deer's leg bone, and when it was done it fit the child perfectly and came to her knees and had the fur turned in at the cuffs.
Sofie wore it to bed for three nights.
"It's too warm to sleep in," Kindra said.
"I know."
"Then why are you wearing it?"
"Because it's mine," Sofie said, with the exact tone of a woman explaining something obvious to a slow person.
On the twelfth of November they had the first hard conversation about Christmas.
It came up because Oliver asked, out of nowhere, over breakfast, how many days there were until it, and McKenzie said forty three without looking up, because McKenzie had been counting since the first of the month and had told nobody.
Kindra put her cup down.
"We're doing it," she said.
"Doing what?"
"Christmas. We are doing Christmas and I want everybody to know now, so you've got forty three days to make something."
"Make something?"
"That's the rule. Everybody makes a gift for everybody else, out of what's here, and nobody's allowed to say it's stupid or that it doesn't matter, because I will genuinely lose my temper."
"That's twenty gifts," McKenzie said, doing it instantly.
"That's twenty gifts and you have forty three days and you cannot use anything from the cellar."
"What can we use?"
"Wood, bone, antler, sinew, hide scraps, stone, and whatever you can find," Kindra said. "And nobody is allowed to ask anybody else what they're making, and nobody is allowed to go in the woodshed after dinner, because that's where I'll be."
Tom watched his son's face do something he had not seen since March, which was to look forward to a date.
"That's the best idea anybody's had in six months," he said.
"I know it is."
"It's better than the stand."
"It's better than the stand," Kindra agreed, "because the stand is for one bad day and this is for the other forty two."
On the fourteenth of November, Tom taught the fire lesson, and he taught it because Oliver had gotten cocky.
The boy had lit the stove every morning for three weeks without a failure and had started doing it fast, one strike, done, and had started being audibly pleased about it.
So Tom took him and McKenzie four hundred yards down the gulch in a snowstorm with nothing but a knife and a striker and told them to build a fire.
It took them fifty minutes and it nearly did not happen.
"Everything's wet," Oliver said, furious, on his knees, at minute thirty.
"Yes."
"You can't light wet wood."
"No."
"Then this is stupid."
"Then find dry wood."
"There isn't any!"
"Oliver." Tom crouched next to him. "There is dry wood within eleven feet of you right now and there has been the entire time, and you haven't looked at it once, because you're looking on the ground."
The boy's head came up.
He looked at the dead standing fir four feet away, with the dry dead branches at the base of the trunk, the ones that had died in shade and never fallen and had never once touched the ground.
"Squaw wood," Tom said. "Every dead conifer in this valley has a skirt of it. Pencil thin, snaps clean, and it's dry in a rainstorm because the tree above it is an umbrella and it's never been in contact with wet ground."
"How do you know it's dry?"
"It snaps. That's the whole test. Dry wood snaps and wet wood bends, and you can tell in the dark with mittens on."
They gathered four handfuls.
"Now the next thing, and this is where people die," Tom said. "You do not gather tinder, light it, and then go look for kindling. You gather everything first. All of it. Sorted in four piles by thickness, from thread to thumb, before you ever strike a spark."
"Why?"
"Because a fire lives about ninety seconds in its first stage and if you spend that ninety seconds walking around looking for the next size up, it dies, and now you're colder and wetter and your hands are worse and you've got one less match's worth of patience in you."
Tom laid the four piles out. "Hypothermia kills people who had everything they needed, in the wrong order."
The tinder was the last lesson.
"What burns?"
"Birch bark," McKenzie said.
"Best in the world, and it burns wet, because the oil in it is flammable. What else?"
"Pitch wood."
"Fatwood, from a dead pine stump or the knot where a branch came off. Shave it with the knife into curls. It'll light in a wind." Tom was shaving as he talked. "And the third one is the one you'll actually use in January, and you've walked past it four hundred times."
He reached up and pulled a grapefruit sized ball of pale hanging lichen off a fir branch.
"Old man's beard," he said. "Takes a spark like gasoline. It's on every third tree on this mountain."
They lit it on the fourth strike and fed it in order, thread to thumb, and had a fire the size of a hat in ninety seconds, and Oliver sat back on his heels in the snow with his face completely changed.
"I didn't know any of that," he said.
"You knew how to light a stove in a warm room with dry wood somebody else split."
"That's not the same thing at all."
"It is not remotely the same thing," Tom said, "and now you know that, and that's worth more than knowing the rest of it."
That night, at the table, Tom said, "I want to say something and I want to say it while things are going well, because that's the only time anybody can hear it."
Everyone looked up.
"We've had eleven good days," he said. "Three hundred pounds of elk, three and a third cords, two hides, the caches doubled. That's the best stretch we've had since April."
"But," Kindra said.
"But nothing's changed out there."
He let that sit.
"Nobody's come in eleven days and that doesn't mean they're gone. It means something happened to their schedule, and I don't know what, and not knowing why you're safe is not the same as being safe."
He looked around the table. "I don't want anybody thinking it's over. Not because I want anybody scared. Because I want everybody to keep doing the watches."
"We're doing the watches," McKenzie said.
"I know you are. I'm asking you to keep doing them in December when nothing's happened for six weeks and it's twenty below and your bed is warm."
"That's the hard part," Kindra said.
"That's the only hard part left."
On the seventeenth of November the weather broke.
It came up warm and gray in the afternoon, thirty eight degrees, and the snow went soft and heavy and started sliding off the cabin roof in slabs, and by evening it was raining.
Rain in November in the Montana mountains is the single worst weather there is. It soaks everything, it strips the snow to bare ground in patches, and then it freezes at midnight and turns the whole world into glass.
Tom spent the afternoon moving the wood ricks' bark covers and checking the caches, and at four o'clock he was at the number four site up the draw, three hundred yards from the cabin, standing under the lightning-killed fir with the split trunk.
Oliver's cache.
And he saw, on the wet ground at the base of the tree, a track.
It was not a boot.
It was a bare human foot, small, maybe seven inches, pressed into the mud where the snow had melted out, and it was fresh enough that the water had not yet filled it in.
Tom went absolutely still.
He looked up.
Eleven feet above him, in the split of the trunk, the rawhide wrap was pulled half out of the crack and hanging.
He climbed.
It took him four minutes with wet bark sloughing under his boots and he got a hand into the split and felt.
Forty pounds of dried elk had been in there on Tuesday.
There were thirty one pounds in there now.
Somebody had climbed a dead fir in the rain, opened a rawhide bundle, taken nine pounds, and re-wrapped the rest.
Re-wrapped it.
Tom hung there eleven feet up a tree in the rain with his hand in the crack and understood, all at once, that he was not dealing with a thief.
A thief takes forty pounds.
He came down and crouched in the mud and read the ground properly, and it took him twenty minutes in bad light, and what he got at the end of it was this:
One person. Small. Barefoot on the left, wrapped on the right, and the wrapping was coming apart.
The tracks came from the east, down the draw from the direction of the saddle.
They went back east.
And forty feet from the tree, tucked into the crotch of a root where the rain would not reach it, laid flat under a piece of bark with a stone on top to hold it, was something left behind.
Tom lifted the bark.
It was a pocket knife. Small, two blades, bone handled, the kind a man gets for his twelfth birthday, with the brass worn through to white at the bolster.
He turned it over.
There were three letters scratched into the handle with a nail, old and deep and worn smooth at the edges, and they were not initials Tom recognized.
They were: C. C.
Tom sat down in the mud under the tree with the knife in his hand and the rain coming through the branches and did not move for eleven minutes.
C. C.
He opened the big blade. It had been sharpened so many times that the spine had gone concave and the blade was half the width it had started at, which meant forty years of use and a man who never threw anything away.
The small blade was broken off an inch from the tip and the break had been reground into a working point, badly, by somebody who did not have a stone and had used a river rock.