Chapter 8 #3
There was pitch in the hinge. There was a notch cut in the bone handle at the butt end, and beside it three more notches, and then eleven more in a row, smaller, the way a man marks something he's counting and then gets tired of the ceremony.
Tom closed it and put it in his chest pocket and buttoned the flap.
Then he took nine pounds of dried elk out of his own cache, wrapped it in the loose end of the rawhide, climbed the tree, and left it hanging where the wrap had been pulled out.
He came down and walked home in the rain.
"You look like a drowned man," Kindra said, and then she looked at his face. "What."
He put the knife on the table.
Everybody came.
"What is it?"
"It's Chip Charter's knife."
Kindra picked it up. She turned it over and found the letters and went absolutely still.
"Tom."
"I know."
"How do you know it's his?"
"I don't. Not for certain." He sat down and pushed his wet hair back.
"But he had a small knife on his belt in a sheath he'd made himself and I never once looked at it closely, because who looks at an old man's pocket knife. And the initials are right. And it's a forty year old knife owned by somebody who reground a broken blade on a rock."
"Where was it?"
"Forty feet from cache four. Under bark, with a stone on it, tucked in a root so the rain wouldn't get it."
"Placed," McKenzie said.
"Placed carefully. Deliberately. By somebody who wanted it to survive the weather until we found it."
"And the cache?"
"Nine pounds gone out of forty. And re-wrapped."
Nobody said anything.
"Explain the re-wrapping," Kindra said. "Because that's the part I can't get past."
"Neither can I. A thief doesn't re-wrap. A thief doesn't take nine out of forty. Nine pounds is about what one small person can carry comfortably in a shirt."
"Or what one small person thinks she can take without it being noticed," McKenzie said.
Tom looked at his daughter.
"Say more."
"If you take everything, they know. If you take a little and put it back the way it was, maybe they don't notice for weeks." McKenzie's face was doing the flat thing. "That's not a thief. That's somebody planning to come back."
"That's exactly right."
"So it's a kid," Oliver said.
"It's a small person barefoot on one foot in a November rain, and yes, I think it's a kid."
Sofie said, "Is she cold?"
The whole table turned.
"She?" Kindra said.
"I don't know," Sofie said. "I just said she."
"Bug, we don't know who it is."
"But is she cold?"
Tom rubbed his face with both hands.
"Yes," he said. "Whoever it is, they are extremely cold, and they've got no boots, and they're walking east up a draw in the rain in November."
They argued about it for two hours and it was the worst argument they had ever had, because nobody was wrong.
"We go find them," Kindra said.
"We don't."
"Tom."
"Kindra, listen to the whole thing before you answer, because I've been chewing on it since four o'clock and I've come at it from every direction."
He put both hands flat. "Fact one. That child is walking with the heel-chunk man. The bare foot and the boot were on that ridge together on the second of November, side by side, one big bed and one small bed."
"You don't know that's the same child."
"How many barefoot children are there in this valley?"
Kindra closed her mouth.
"Fact two," Tom said. "Heel-chunk has been on this property four times, and he pulled Oliver's noisemakers without tripping one, and he put a stake in the middle of my meadow in a forty minute snow window. That is the most competent woodsman I have ever encountered in my life,
including Chip Charter."
"And?"
"And he's got a barefoot child with him."
The room went quiet.
"So either she's his," Tom said, "or she isn't."
"That's the whole thing, isn't it," McKenzie said.
"That's the whole thing."
Kindra sat down slowly.
"Say the version where she's his," she said.
"Then the knife on the ground is bait, and it's the best bait anybody's ever put down, because it's Chip's, and because it's aimed at exactly the part of me that will get my family killed."
Tom's voice was flat. "Send a child to a cache. Let us find her tracks. Let us find the knife. And then we spend the next month looking for a little girl in the timber instead of looking at the treeline, and one night we're all out in the draw with lamps and the yard's empty."
"And the other version?"
"The other version is that a child walked nine miles with a man who killed Chip Charter, stole nine pounds of food out of a tree, left his knife under a rock where we'd find it, and re-wrapped the cache so the man wouldn't know she'd been there."
"Which one do you think it is?"
"I think the second one," Tom said, "and I think thinking that is the most dangerous thing in my head, and that is precisely why I won't act on it."
"That's cowardice," Kindra said.
"Maybe."
"That's not a maybe, that's."
"Kindra." He looked up. "There are four children in this valley that I know about and three of them are mine. I've already sent four people over a saddle to die because I had a rule about a word. I am not going to spend Sofie to maybe save somebody I've never seen."
Kindra's jaw worked.
"Then what do we do?" she said. "Nothing? We just know there's a barefoot child eating out of our tree and we do nothing?"
"No," Tom said. "We don't do nothing. We do the only thing that costs us nothing."
"Which is?"
"We leave food out and we never go near it."
They set it up the next morning and Tom made it a system, because a system is a thing you can maintain and a gesture is a thing you get killed doing twice.
Cache four became the drop.
They pulled everything else out of that tree, all thirty one pounds, and moved it a quarter mile west to a new site under a rockfall, and in the split of the dead fir they left four pounds of dried elk and a fist sized cake of pemmican fat, rewrapped exactly as it had been.
"We never watch it," Tom said. "That's the rule and it's the whole rule. We don't sit on it, we don't set a line on it, we don't walk past it to check. Once a week, in daylight, one person goes up, looks, refills it if it's down, and comes straight back."
"Why never watch it?"
"Because if it's a trap, watching it is how we walk into it. And if it's a child, watching it is how we scare her off forever."
Tom laid a second rawhide bundle out. "And there's a third reason, which is that if heel-chunk finds out we know, he changes what he's doing, and right now he's doing something I don't understand, and I would rather have a mystery I'm feeding than a plan I've interrupted."
"That's cold," Kindra said.
"It's the coldest thing I've ever said."
"I didn't say you were wrong."
They added one thing to it, over Tom's objection, and it was McKenzie's idea and it won on the argument that it cost nothing.
She took a strip of the elk hide, soft and gold and smoked, and cut it into a foot shape, two of them, and punched holes around the edges and ran a lace through.
Not moccasins. Wrappers. The kind you pull up around a foot and cinch, sized generously, because she did not know the size.
"If she's real, she gets feet," McKenzie said. "If it's a trap, then a man gets two pieces of hide and learns nothing about us he didn't already know."
"That's true," Tom admitted.
"And if he laughs at it, I don't care."
They put them in the tree on the nineteenth of November with the food.
On the twenty sixth, Tom went up and looked.
The food was gone, all four pounds and the fat cake. The hide foot wrappers were gone.
And in the crack, pushed in deep where the rain could not reach, was a piece of birch bark with something scratched into it.
Not writing.
A drawing. Crude, done with a nail or a stone point, in four or five strokes.
Two mountains. A line between them, which was the saddle. On the far side of the line, four small shapes in a row.
And below the four shapes, a mark that was either a very bad letter or a shape Tom did not recognize, repeated three times.
He brought it home and put it on the table and the family looked at it for an hour.
"Four things on the other side of the saddle," Oliver said.
"Four people," McKenzie said.
"Or four buildings. That's the Tolliver ranch. Three houses and a barn is four buildings."
"That's four," Kindra said slowly.
Tom put his finger on the repeated mark.
"What's this?"
"It's an X."
"It's not an X, look at it. It's got a hook at the bottom."
McKenzie turned the bark ninety degrees.
"It's a hatchet," she said.
The cabin got very cold.
"She's telling us where they are," McKenzie said. "Four buildings on the far side of the saddle, and there's men with hatchets in them."
"Or he's telling us where they are," Tom said.
"Why would he?"
"To move us. To get us over that saddle looking for something. Kenz, it's the same problem as the knife and I don't have a solution to it."
"Then why is she doing the drawing at all?" Oliver said. "If she can write a picture she could write a word. Why not just write help?"
Nobody had an answer, and then Sofie, from under the table, said, "Maybe she can't."
Everybody looked down.
"Maybe she never learned," Sofie said. "I can't write words. I can draw a horse."
Tom sat back in his chair.
"How old are you, bug?"
"Six."
"And what year did everything stop?"
Kindra's hand went to her mouth.
"March," she said. "She'd have been in school until March. If she's six or seven, she got four months of kindergarten and then the world ended."
"So she draws."
"So she draws."
November went out cold and December came in colder, and on the second of the month it hit twenty two below at dawn and the family learned four new things in one morning.
The first was that at twenty two below, the door froze shut, and Tom had to break it open with his shoulder and then spend an hour fitting a strip of hide gasket so it would not weld itself again.
The second was that at twenty two below, the settling barrel froze solid, six inches down and then all the way, and cracked a stave.
"We move the whole water system inside," Kindra said. "Tonight."
"There's no room."