Chapter 10
"Everybody get away from the windows," Tom said.
Nobody moved.
"Now. All of you. Kenz, get off that sill."
They moved.
Tom stayed, with the shutter cracked a quarter inch, and made himself count again, left to right, slow, and got the same number.
Twelve.
"Talk to me, Nell."
"He's back."
"I heard that. Tell me what twelve fires means."
The girl hopped to the bench and sat down on it hard, favoring the foot.
"It means he's showing you," she said.
"Showing me what?"
"How many he's got now." Her voice had gone thin for the first time since she arrived. "He does that. He did it at the ranch when he took it. He didn't sneak up. He put people on the road with lights so the first ones could count them all night and then he came in the morning."
"Why?"
"Because if they can count you they have all night to think about it," Nell said, "and by morning half of them don't want to fight."
Kindra said, "That's exactly what it is."
"Kindra."
"No, listen to her. Twelve fires on three sides that we can all see, with a whole night ahead of us to sit here and multiply." She had her arms crossed hard. "That's a psychological operation and it started four minutes ago and it's working on me right now."
"It's working on everybody," Tom said. "That's the point. Which means the correct response is to refuse to spend the night doing exactly what he wants."
"Which is?"
"Counting and multiplying."
He pulled the shutter closed and latched it and turned around.
"Everybody at the table," he said.
They came. Five children, one wife, one dog.
"First," Tom said. "Nobody sleeps in this cabin tonight. Not because there's an attack coming in the next hour, but because we're not going to be asleep in a box on the night somebody decides to show us how big he is."
"The stand," McKenzie said.
"The stand. Full kit. And Nell, you're carried, and you're not going to like it, and you're going to be carried anyway."
"I can hop."
"Two hundred yards uphill in fourteen inches of snow?"
Nell shut her mouth.
"Second," Tom said. "We are going to sit up there tonight and do a job, and the job is not being afraid. The job is counting."
"You just said not to count."
"I said not to multiply." He put both hands on the table. "Counting is arithmetic. Multiplying is what your head does at three in the morning. I want real numbers and I want them written in the snow with a stick, because a real number is the only thing that ever makes a scary thing smaller."
They were in the stand in eleven minutes, which was the fastest full evacuation they had ever done, and it was fast because they had done it thirty times in three months and because there was nobody chasing them.
Tom put everyone behind the wall with the boughs and the hides and the wind wall, and then he put Kindra at the east slot and himself at the west slot, and they watched.
At ten o'clock he said, "Nine on the north ridge. Count them with me."
"Nine."
"Two downriver."
"Two."
"One up the draw near the rimrock."
"One."
"Twelve," Tom said. "That's the real number and it's the same real number it was an hour ago and it is not going to grow."
"What does twelve fires mean in people?" Oliver asked.
"That's the question." Tom lay on his back on the boughs and looked at the stars, which were the one thing this world still had in abundance. "Nell. On the ridge in September there were six fires and twenty three men. What's the ratio at the ranch? When he moves people, how many to a fire?"
"Four," Nell said. "Always four. Wallace says four men can share one fire and still have somebody's back."
"So twelve fires is forty eight men."
"No," Nell said.
Everyone looked at her.
"There's nineteen people at the ranch and four of them are kids and two of them are women who won't fight and one of them's June with the baby," she said. "Even if he got ten more from the Warden, that's not forty eight. That's not even close to forty eight."
Tom sat up.
"Say that again."
"He can't have forty eight people. There's nowhere for forty eight people to sleep on the far side of that saddle and there's nothing to feed them."
"Then what are twelve fires?"
Nell looked at the ground.
"Sticks," she said.
Nobody spoke.
"You build the fire and you put a pile of wood by it and you go to the next one," she said. "One person can keep four fires going if they're not far apart. He did it on the road at the ranch. There was six fires and there was nine people."
Tom lay back down on the boughs and put both hands over his face and started laughing.
"Tom," Kindra said.
"Twelve fires," he said, through his hands. "Twelve fires and probably eight men, and I have been lying here for two hours doing exactly what he built it for."
"We were both doing it."
"I know we were."
He sat up.
"All right. New number. Write it down, Kenz, in the snow, with the stick."
"I'm writing."
"Maximum sixteen. That's nineteen at the ranch minus four children minus June, plus whatever the Warden gave him, and I will be generous and say six, and then minus the people who have to stay home and feed a fire and watch four kids."
"Sixteen," McKenzie said.
"Probably twelve. Possibly eight."
"That's still a lot."
"It's a lot," Tom agreed, "and it is not forty eight, and the difference between those two numbers is the difference between a fight and a surrender."
They spent the rest of the night working.
That was Kindra's idea and it was the best one anybody had all winter.
"If we're up here," she said, at eleven, "and we're awake anyway, then we're going to do something with our hands, because idle hands on a rock in December is how people lose their nerve."
"Do what? It's dark."
"Christmas," Kindra said.
So the Thorn family sat behind a stone wall on a Montana mountainside with twelve enemy fires burning on three sides of them and worked on gifts in the dark by feel.
Oliver had a piece of antler and a flat stone and was grinding something and would not let anybody look at it.
McKenzie was braiding. She had four strands of sinew and she worked by touch and did not need light.
Kindra had a hide scrap and an awl and was punching holes.
Tom whittled.
And Sofie taught Nell a hand clapping game, very quietly, and Nell got it wrong nine times and then got it right, and the sound of two children patting hands together in the dark behind a rock wall did more for Tom's morale than anything in his entire life.
At two in the morning Nell said, "Can I ask something?"
"Go ahead."
"What's the gift thing?"
"Christmas," Sofie said. "Everybody makes everybody a present out of stuff."
"Everybody?"
"That's twenty gifts," McKenzie said, "except now it's thirty, because there's six of us."
The stand went quiet.
Nell did not say anything for a long moment.
"Thirty," she said.
"Well, twenty five for you," Kindra said easily, "because you're starting late and you've got a bad foot, and also because I'll bet you five you've never made a present in your life."
"I made one for my mom once. It was macaroni."
"Then you're ahead of Tom, who made me a coupon book in 2015 and never honored a single coupon."
"That is slander."
"Coupon two. One free back rub. Never redeemed."
"You never presented it!"
"I presented it four times."
Nell laughed.
It was a small, rusty, startled sound, like a hinge that had not moved in a year, and every single person behind that wall heard it and had the sense not to react.
At dawn, eleven of the twelve fires were out.
The twelfth, on the north ridge, was still burning at seven, and Tom watched it through the slot for an hour and never saw anybody near it.
"He left one going on purpose," Kindra said.
"To make us watch it."
"To make us watch it."
"Then we don't," Tom said, and he got up off the boughs. "Everybody down. Breakfast, water, and we cut wood today like it's an ordinary Thursday."
"It's Saturday," McKenzie said.
"Then like it's an ordinary Saturday."
They cut wood. They hauled water. They checked the trapline and found two rabbits and reset four snares that the new snow had buried.
And that night they slept in the cabin, on watches, because Tom made a calculation out loud at the table and let everybody hear it.
"If we go to the stand every night twelve fires get lit, then he lights twelve fires every night for a month, and we never sleep and he spends nothing," he said. "So we go up when there's a reason. Fires aren't a reason. Movement's a reason. The dog's a reason."
"And if we're wrong?" Oliver said.
"Then we're wrong at ninety seconds' notice with the drill we've run thirty times."
"That's not very comforting."
"It isn't," Tom said. "But it's true, and I'd rather give you true than comforting."
The next eleven days were an odd kind of siege, because nothing happened and everything did.
The fires came back on the twenty first, eight of them, and on the twenty third, four, and on Christmas Eve, eleven.
Tom counted them every time and said the number out loud and then closed the shutter, and by the third night the children had stopped going to the window at all, which was the entire objective.
On the twenty second, McKenzie found a boot print on the gravel bar, heel-chunk, walking upstream and then back down.
On the twenty fourth, the drop cache in the dead fir was emptied entirely, forty pounds, and the rawhide wrap was cut and left hanging.
"That's not her," Tom said, standing under the tree. "That's a man saying I know about this too."
"Or it's a man who's hungry," Kindra said.
"Nobody with eight men is hungry on the twenty fourth of December. They killed a beef in November." He looked up at the shredded wrap. "That's the fourth message. Dog, note, pot, soap, rag, and now this. He's telling us the food we leave out for strays belongs to him."
"So we stop leaving it."
"No," Tom said. "We keep leaving it, and we put four pounds up there every week for the rest of the winter, and I'll tell you exactly why."
"Why?"
"Because Nell came out of that place. Which means there's a chance somebody else does too."