Chapter 8 #5
"I'm going up," he said. "Not to it. To the granite bench with the three boulders. That's four hundred and fifty yards from the rimrock and it's got a clean sight line and I can be there in the dark and be gone before full light."
"Alone?"
"Alone. Two people make twice the sound."
"Tom."
"Kindra, somebody has burned a fire on this mountain for four hours in twenty below and hasn't hidden it, twice, and the second time it's a mile and a half from my house." He was pulling his boots on. "Either they want to be seen or they're past caring, and both of those are things I need to know."
He went out at five and it took him seventy minutes to make four hundred and fifty yards of climbing in the dark, and he wedged into the boulders at twenty past six and waited for light.
It came at 7:20.
The fire was on the flat below the rimrock, in the open, forty feet from a wall of stone that Tom had built with his own bare hands on the tenth of October.
There was one figure sitting beside it.
Small. Wrapped in something that was not a coat. Sitting with its knees up and its arms around them, rocking very slightly, the way a person does when the cold has gotten into the center.
Tom watched for eleven minutes.
Nothing else moved. No second figure. No second track line coming in. No shelter, no pack, no bedroll, nothing but a person and a fire made of about four sticks at a time, being fed one stick at a time, which is what somebody does when they are too cold to go get more wood.
At 7:31 the figure got up.
It was a child. There was no question at all once it stood, because the head was wrong for the body in the way only a child's is.
She walked eleven feet to the stone wall Tom had built over Chip Charter's body.
She put both hands flat on it.
And she stood there with her head down for a long time, and then she went back to the fire and sat down.
Tom Thorn lay in the granite four hundred and fifty yards away with the .22 beside him and his face in his sleeve and did not make a sound.
He watched until eight.
She did not leave. She had nowhere to go, that was what her body said, and no plan for the day, and the fire was going to be out in two hours and she did not have wood.
At 8:11 Tom came down out of the boulders.
He did not go to her. He got to within two hundred yards, downwind, using the rock, and then he stopped, because everything Chip Charter had ever taught him arrived at once and said: you do not know who else is within a mile, and this is exactly the shape of a thing that has been arranged.
So he did the other thing.
He built a fire.
He built it two hundred yards from hers, in the open, on a bare flat where she could not miss it, and he built it big and he fed it green fir so it smoked white and heavy and went straight up in the still cold air.
And beside it he left, in plain sight on a flat rock:
Four pounds of dried elk in an open wrap.
A fist of pemmican fat.
A fire kit in a birch bark tube, flint and striker and char cloth and tinder.
A pair of hide foot wrappers.
And a folded piece of birch bark with a drawing on it: two mountains, a line between them, and on this side of the line, one shape, and a fire, and beside the fire five small figures and a dog.
Then he walked away, uphill, in the open, slowly, so she could see him leave and see that he was leaving, and he did not look back until he had made four hundred yards.
When he did look back, she was standing.
She had come thirty feet from her own fire and stopped, and she was looking at his, and at the smoke, and she did not move for a long time.
Tom went home.
He told them all of it at the table, every word, and nobody interrupted him once.
"So what happens now," Oliver said.
"Now she either comes or she doesn't," Tom said. "And we don't go get her, and we don't watch for her, and we keep the watches and the drills exactly the same, because nothing I saw up there changes what a man with a hatchet can do."
"And if she comes?" Kindra said.
"Then she stops at the fence," Tom said, "and we do it exactly the way Chip did it, hands out, nothing hidden, and we find out who she is at forty feet."
"And if she's got somebody behind her?"
"Then we're in the stand in ninety seconds and they can have the box."
That night there was no fire up the draw.
The next night there was none either.
On the eleventh of December it snowed fourteen inches and the temperature came up to eight degrees, and the whole world went white and silent and soft, and nothing moved anywhere.
On the twelfth, at four in the afternoon, with the light already dying, Shyla stood up off the hides by the stove.
She did not growl.
Her tail moved once, uncertainly, and she trotted to the door and stood looking at it with her ears forward and her weight on her front feet.
The exact thing she had done on the tenth of October, when Chip Charter came up the river.
Tom had the .22 in his hands.
"Stand," he said. "Kenz, go."
"Dad."
"Go."
And then, from the yard, from about forty feet out, past the garden fence, a voice came through the snow.
It was very small, and it was ragged, and it cracked in the middle, and what it said was:
"Hello the house."