Chapter 11
Tom did not sleep on Christmas night and by four in the morning he had rebuilt the entire plan in his head twice and thrown it away both times.
Dogs changed everything.
Not the fighting. Dogs do not fight. Dogs solve the one problem that Wallace Wingman had never been able to solve, which was that the Thorn family kept disappearing into two thousand acres of timber and rock and he had no way to search it faster than they could move through it.
Two dogs and a man who knew how to run them turned two thousand acres into a room.
At five Tom got up and lit the lamp and sat down at the table, and Kindra came out four minutes later with a blanket around her shoulders and sat down across from him without saying anything.
At half past five McKenzie came down the ladder.
At six Nell came down backward on one foot, and Oliver behind her.
By seven the whole family was at the table in the dark and nobody had called a meeting.
"All right," Tom said. "Nobody slept. Let's use it."
He swept the ash smooth.
"Problem," he said. "We have thirty two days and an enemy with dogs. Everything I built this autumn assumed he couldn't find us if we moved. That's over."
"Can we kill the dogs?" Oliver asked.
"Say more."
"I don't want to. I'm asking if it's the answer."
"It's an answer and it's the wrong one, and I want to walk through why, because the reasoning matters more than the conclusion."
Tom held up a hand. "One. Shooting a dog costs a round we can't replace and tells sixteen men exactly where we are. Two. It makes him angry, and an angry Wingman is worse than a calculating one. Three, and this is the real one: there's four dogs. If we kill two we've made the problem smaller,
not solved it."
"So we beat them instead," McKenzie said.
"We beat them instead. Which means the next thirty two days are going to be about one question and I want everybody to learn to think in it." He wrote it in the ash. "What does a dog actually follow?"
"Smell," Sofie said.
"Smell of what?"
"Us."
"Not exactly, and this is the thing that's going to save our lives." Tom leaned forward. "A tracking dog doesn't smell you. You're not leaving a cloud of Tom behind you. What a dog follows is disturbance."
"What's disturbance?"
"Every step you take, you crush things. You break bacteria in the soil, you bruise plants, you press earth together, you crack ice crystals, you shed forty thousand skin cells."
He counted them off. "All of that decays, and decay has a smell, and the dog is smelling the difference between ground that's been walked on and ground that hasn't."
"So it's not us at all," Oliver said. "It's damage."
"It's damage. Which means the question isn't how do we stop smelling. It's how do we stop damaging, or how do we damage everything, or how do we make the damage lie about where it went."
Kindra said, "That's three different strategies."
"That's three different strategies and we're going to use all of them, and I want names for each one because we're going to be saying them a lot for a month."
He wrote three lines.
"Hard ground. Confusion. Water."
They spent the twenty sixth on hard ground and it was the least dramatic and most important day of the winter.
Tom took McKenzie and Oliver out at first light and they walked the entire property, and at every step he made them answer the same question.
"What does this hold?"
"Snow holds everything," McKenzie said.
"Snow holds everything and there's fourteen inches of it and there will be more, so snow is the enemy for the next two months and we have to accept that. What else?"
"Ice."
"Ice holds nothing. Bare ice on the pond, on the river edge, on a rock face where the wind's scoured it. A dog gets nothing off bare ice because there's nothing alive in it to crush." He pointed up the draw. "What else?"
"Rock."
"Rock holds some, not much, and it holds it for hours instead of days. Wind scoured granite is the second best surface in this country."
"What's the first?"
"Running water," Tom said. "And we'll get to it."
They mapped it that day, the whole drainage, and it took nine hours.
Every stretch of wind scoured rock. Every ice shelf along the river. Every place where a rock face shed snow and left bare stone. Every slab of the beaver pond that blew clear.
And then Tom did the thing that made it useful, which was to connect them.
"Here's the principle," he said, at three in the afternoon, sitting on a rock with the two oldest children.
"A route is only as good as its worst forty feet. If you run a mile on bare rock and then cross one snowfield, the dog picks you up at the snowfield and everything else you did was decoration."
"So there can't be any snow."
"There can't be any snow anywhere on the route, from the door to the destination. Not one crossing."
"That's impossible."
"It's nearly impossible," Tom agreed. "Which is why we're going to spend the next two weeks making it possible."
They made it possible with four things, and the fourth one was Nell's.
The first was bridges.
Not over water. Over snow.
Tom cut poles, four inch lodgepole, twelve to eighteen feet long, and laid them across the gaps between one rock shelf and the next, two poles side by side, lashed with McKenzie's cordage, with cross sticks every two feet.
A pole bridge fourteen feet long, six inches above the snow, crossing a gap that would otherwise print six footfalls.
"Does that actually work?" Kindra asked, looking at the first one.
"Get up on it."
She got up on it and walked it and stepped off onto the rock at the far end.
"Now look behind you."
The snow under the bridge was untouched.
"It'll hold scent," Tom said. "The pole will. But it holds it in a line six inches off the ground on a smooth surface in the wind, and it doesn't hold it for long, and a dog running a nose-down ground track goes right under it and loses the line. It's not invisible. It's expensive."
"Expensive?"
"Everything's expensive," Tom said. "That's the only weapon we've ever had. We cannot make ourselves invisible. We can only make finding us cost more than it's worth."
They built eleven bridges in five days.
The second thing was the snowshoe problem, and it took Tom two days to see it and it nearly ruined everything.
They had four pairs of snowshoes: two store bought from before, and two that Tom had made in November out of bent green willow and rawhide lacing.
And on the twenty eighth, standing on a rock shelf looking back at a quarter mile of trail, Tom said, out loud, "Oh, no."
"What?"
"The snowshoes."
"What about them?"
"Look at that." He pointed. "You can see it from here. A snowshoe trail in fourteen inches of snow is a packed highway eleven inches wide. A man can walk it without shoes at all."
"So?"
"So every route we've built for two days has a snowshoe trail leading to the start of it."
Kindra swore.
"We can't get anywhere without them," she said. "Nobody's walking a mile in fourteen inches of powder."
"I know."
"So what's the answer?"
Tom stood on the rock for a long time.
"The answer," he said slowly, "is that we stop trying to have no trail, and we start having forty of them."
That was the third thing and it became the biggest single project of January.
They called it the maze, and Oliver named it, and the name stuck for three generations.
"The principle is this," Tom said, at the table that night. "One trail is a road sign. Forty trails is a problem."
"Forty?"
"Forty, going everywhere, crossing each other, doubling back, most of them going nowhere at all." He drew it. "A dog can only run one line at a time. A handler has to choose. And every time he chooses wrong, it costs him twenty minutes, and every twenty minutes in February is a man getting cold."
"How do we make forty trails?"
"We walk them. Every day. All of us."
And that became the work.
Every single day, for three weeks, every member of the Thorn family who could walk put on snowshoes and laid trail.
Not randomly. Tom laid it out on the ash every morning like a shift rotation.
"Kenz, you've got northeast today. Four legs, out to the big deadfall, hook south, cross Oliver's from Tuesday, come back on the rock shelf."
"Why cross Oliver's?"
"Because an intersection is the most expensive thing on the map. Two trails crossing at an angle costs a handler more time than a mile of straight line."
They laid trails to nothing.
That was the part the children loved. Tom sent them out to walk four hundred yards to a stump and stand there for two minutes and walk back a different way, and after a week the whole drainage was webbed with trails that led to a rock, a tree, a dip in the ground, nothing at all.
"He's going to know they're fake," McKenzie said.
"He'll know most of them are fake. He won't know which ones. And here's the beautiful part."
Tom grinned for the first time in a week.
"Every fake trail we lay also makes us safer walking on the real ones, because after three weeks there's a trail everywhere and walking on one isn't evidence of anything."
"We're hiding a trail in trails."
"We're hiding a trail in trails. Same as hiding forty pounds of meat in a chicken run."
The fourth thing was Nell's and she said it on the thirtieth of December at breakfast in a small voice, having clearly been working up to it for two days.
"Can I say a thing about the dogs?"
"Always."
"They're not tracking dogs."
Tom put his cup down.
"Say more."
"I saw them once, in September, when the Warden's men came up to the ranch." She was drawing on the table with a finger. "They're not hounds. They're just dogs. One's a shepherd and one's some kind of big yellow one and two are small."
"Nell, that's enormously important. Why?"
"Because nobody trained them," she said. "The Warden just has dogs. He feeds them because he says dogs are worth feeding. But they're not, they don't, nobody teaches them anything."
Tom sat back slowly.
"An untrained dog," he said.
"They bark at everything," Nell said. "That's what they do. They bark at the truck and they bark at people they know."
Kindra put her hand flat on the table.