Chapter 8 #4
"Then we make room, because if we lose the barrel we're melting snow for six people every day and that's four extra armloads of wood a day and we don't have it."
They moved it. The settling barrel came in under the ladder and the filter column stood in the corner by the stove and the cabin got noticeably smaller and nobody complained.
The third thing was Shyla's feet.
She came in from the yard on the second morning limping and Sofie caught it before anybody else did, and Tom held her down while Kindra picked eleven ice balls out from between her toes with the point of a spoon.
"Every time she goes out," Kindra said. "Every time, from now to March, she gets her feet checked and dried. That's a real job and it belongs to Sofie."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the only one she'll hold still for."
The fourth thing was the one that mattered, and Tom found it on the third morning, and it was in the meat.
He went to the eave racks to bring in four days' worth and one of the hanging bundles felt wrong in his hand. Light.
He took it down and opened it and the rawhide had been chewed through at the bottom corner, a neat oval, and half the contents were gone and the rest was full of droppings.
"Mice," he said.
"How many pounds?"
"Eleven, maybe twelve."
Kindra put her head back and said something quietly.
"That's the whole eave rack," Tom said. "They've been running the log wall and getting up under the overhang and I have been walking past it for two weeks."
They spent the whole day on it and it was one of the most valuable days of the entire winter.
Every hanging bundle came down and got inspected and four of them were breached. Total loss, thirty one pounds of dried elk and fish, which was nine days of food for six people gone into the walls of a cabin.
"That's worse than anything Wingman's taken," Kindra said, staring at it.
"It's exactly the same as what Wingman's taken. He's just not sneaking."
Tom rebuilt the entire storage system that day.
Everything came off the eave and went into two arrangements. Bulk went into the cellar in sealed crocks with tallow poured over the lid seam. Working stock went into a hanging cage.
"What's the cage?"
"Watch."
He drove a peg into a ceiling joist and ran eleven feet of wire down from it, and eight inches above the bundle he threaded a tin can lid, flat, punched in the center, so it sat on the wire like an upside down plate.
"Baffle," he said. "A mouse can run down a wire. A mouse cannot get around a plate."
"You've had that wire since when?"
"Since 2017. It was for a clothesline."
They did four of them, and every hanging bundle in the cabin went on a baffled wire, and not one more ounce was lost to a rodent all winter.
Then they went to war on the mice themselves, because Charter's rule was that you never accept a tax.
McKenzie built eleven deadfalls out of flat stone and figure four triggers whittled from birch, and she set them along the interior walls, and she caught nine mice in four days.
Then Oliver improved it, and it was the single most ruthless thing anybody in the family invented all year.
He took the empty five gallon bucket, put four inches of water in the bottom, and laid a stick from the floor to the rim as a ramp. Then he ran a wire across the top of the bucket and threaded an empty tin can on it so it spun freely, and he smeared a fingerprint of rendered fat on the can.
"They walk the ramp, they step on the can, the can spins, they go in," he said.
"And they can't get out because the sides are slick," McKenzie said.
"And it resets itself. Forever. It catches all night while we're asleep."
It caught fourteen mice the first night.
Tom stood over that bucket at six in the morning and had to sit down on the bench.
"What?" Oliver said, worried.
"Nothing. Nothing." Tom put his hand over his mouth. "It's just, I read about that in a book about Depression-era farmsteads about nine years ago and I never built one, because I had a hardware store."
"Is it wrong?"
"It's perfect. It's completely perfect and you got there by yourself and I had to be told by a book."
"So it's good?"
"Oliver, it's going to save us forty pounds of food this winter."
The mice went to the chickens, who ate them with an enthusiasm that disturbed everyone.
"That's protein going back into eggs," Kindra said. "Nothing is wasted. That's the whole religion."
On the ninth of December, McKenzie came down from the loft at two in the morning and woke Tom.
"Light," she said.
"North ridge?"
"No. East. Up the draw."
Tom went to the east window.
There was a fire up the draw, high, maybe a mile and a half, up near the rimrock where the cache had been.
It was small.
"One fire," he said.
"Like last time."
"Like last time."
They watched it for an hour and it burned steadily and did not go out and nobody whistled.
At four it was still burning.
At six, with the sky going gray, Tom made a decision that he told Kindra about and did not ask permission for, which she was angry about for two days and then agreed had been correct.