Chapter 10 #4
At seven Tom cleared the table and swept the ash smooth on the hearth stone.
"Here's the situation," he said. "Nobody sugar it and nobody panic it."
He drew the meadow.
"Sometime in the last week of January, probably on a morning after four or five nights of hard freeze, a group of men, somewhere between eight and sixteen, walks nine miles over a saddle on crust and arrives here in daylight."
"Daylight?" McKenzie said.
"Nell said he comes in daylight. Ten in the morning."
"He says night is for scaring people and day is for taking things," Nell said.
"Right. So say ten in the morning, four to six weeks from now, on a day we can probably predict within about three days from the weather."
"We can predict it?"
"Kindra's knee and four nights of clear cold," Tom said. "Yes. Roughly."
He put four marks on the drawing.
"And here's the thing I've been getting wrong since September." He looked around the table. "I have spent four months building this family to survive an attack on this property. And that's the wrong problem."
"What's the right problem?"
"He doesn't want the property," Tom said. "He said it himself, and Nell heard him say it. The house isn't worth four men. He's not coming to take a cabin."
"Then what's he coming for?"
"He's coming to make us come out." Tom tapped the ash. "That's been the entire campaign. The dog, the note, the wood, the spring, the weir, the pot, the soap, the fires. Every single thing he's done has been designed to produce one event."
"Us in the open," Kindra said.
"Us in the open, on ground he picked, at a time he picked."
"So we don't go in the open."
"That's what I've been doing for four months and it's worked, and he knows it's worked, which is why in January he's going to change the arithmetic." Tom's jaw set. "He's going to come with enough men to do something we cannot sit up in the rocks and watch."
The cabin went cold.
"Like what?" Oliver said.
Nobody answered.
"Like what?"
"Like burning the house," McKenzie said.
"That's one," Tom said. "That's the small one."
"What's the big one?"
Tom did not answer for a moment.
"The big one," he said, "is that he brings sixteen men and he splits them, and eight of them start working on this cabin in plain sight and the other eight are already sitting above the stand in the rocks at four in the morning waiting for us to come to them."
Kindra's hand went to her mouth.
"He knows where we go," Tom said. "He's known since November. He hasn't come at it because uphill at stone costs him four men. But it doesn't cost him anything if he's there first."
"Then the stand's dead," McKenzie said.
"The stand as a place to run to is dead. It's been dead since November and we've been running drills to it for six weeks."
"So what do we do?"
Tom Thorn looked around the table at his wife and four children and one child who had arrived thirteen days ago with a frozen foot.
"We do what he can't model," he said. "That's the whole answer and it's the only answer. Nell, he's been asking you for four months what a smart scared person would do, and you told him honestly, and he's built his entire plan on it."
"So?"
"So we stop being a smart scared person."
"How?"
"We stop being one thing at all," Tom said. "Sixteen men can surround one family. Sixteen men cannot surround three."
The room was absolutely silent.
"You want to split up," Kindra said.
"I want to be in three places on the morning he arrives, and I want two of them to be places he has never seen and cannot find, and I want the third to be this cabin, with a fire in the stove and smoke coming out of the pipe and nobody in it."
"Tom, that's."
"That's thirty two days of work. Two new sites, dug in, stocked, with water and fuel and fire and sight lines, a mile apart, on opposite sides of the drainage."
He was drawing fast now. "And every one of them stocked from the caches he doesn't know about. And no trail to either of them, ever, not once, and every load carried at night on the crust so it doesn't print."
"We'd be separated," McKenzie said. "In February. In the mountains."
"Yes."
"If something goes wrong we couldn't get to each other."
"Yes."
"Dad, that's."
"That's the worst idea I have ever had in my life," Tom said, "and I've been turning it over since about four o'clock this afternoon and I cannot find a better one, and I want everybody at this table to try, right now, out loud, because I would be delighted to be wrong."
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Then Nell said, "He's got dogs now."
Every head turned.
"What?"
"The Warden's got dogs," Nell said. "Four of them. That's the other thing Wallace went down for."
Tom sat down very slowly.
"Nell," he said. "How sure are you?"
"He talked about it in November. He said the Warden's got four dogs that he keeps fed and that's the most expensive thing anybody in this valley owns, and that he'd trade fuel for two of them if he could."
"For what purpose?"
Nell looked at him with her flat, patient, eight year old eyes.
"For finding people in the snow," she said.