Chapter 11 #3
"That's why I waited four days." She pulled a handful of grass out of her pocket. "I've thrown this at eight in the morning, ten in the morning, noon and four, on two clear days and one cloudy one. It goes downriver every single time and it never once goes toward the meadow."
Tom stood in a cave made of trees and looked at his twelve year old daughter.
"Kenz," he said.
"Is it good?"
"It's better than anything I found in eleven days."
Kindra said, "There's water twenty feet away."
"There's water twenty feet away under ice you can break with a heel, and there's dead willow for fuel all around it, and a fire in here vents up through forty feet of logjam and comes out in eleven places and doesn't make a column."
"Kenz, how long have you been thinking about this?"
"Since Christmas night," McKenzie said. "Since you said sixteen men can't surround three."
They stocked both sites over the next nine days, hauling at night on the crust, and it was brutal work and nobody complained.
Food from three caches, split between the two sites. Fuel, split and stacked. Water crocks, fire kits, hides, a pot at each.
And at each site they put a cache of a different kind, and this one was Tom's, and it took him a day and a half of thinking to commit to.
"Boots," he said. "A change of wool. Mittens. A hide wrapper for a foot."
"Why?"
"Because if somebody arrives at one of those sites in February, they will have arrived fast and they may have arrived wet, and dry socks four hundred yards from where you need them is the same as no socks at all."
On the twentieth of January, they ran the first full drill.
Three groups, three routes, no snowshoes on the last quarter mile of any of them, everyone moving in the dark at four in the morning.
Tom and Sofie to the quinzhee. Kindra and Oliver to the log jam. McKenzie and Nell to the stand, which they were keeping as a decoy and a third option.
It was a disaster.
Sofie could not keep up and Tom carried her the last six hundred yards and arrived at the quinzhee at 5:40 with his shirt soaked through, which in February would have killed him by seven.
Kindra took the wrong rock rib in the dark and had to backtrack four hundred yards on snow, printing the whole way.
And McKenzie and Nell arrived at the stand in eleven minutes because Nell could not be carried up a hill by a twelve year old, so McKenzie had put her on a hide and dragged her, and the drag mark was four hundred yards of a road sign that could be seen from the meadow.
They regrouped at the cabin at seven and Tom sat down at the table and put his head in his hands.
"Well," he said. "That's the best thing that's happened this month."
"That was a catastrophe," Kindra said.
"That was a catastrophe on the twentieth of January instead of a catastrophe on the fourth of February," Tom said, "and every single problem we found has a fix, and we have got fourteen days."
They fixed them.
Sofie went to the log jam instead, which was downhill and flat, and Oliver went to the quinzhee, and the pairings got redone by fitness instead of by affection, which nobody liked and everybody accepted.
Kindra's rock rib got marked, four small notches cut in trees at eye height on the uphill side only, invisible unless you were on the route going the right direction.
And Nell got the thing she had been refusing for six weeks, which was that she would not be dragged and she would not be carried.
"Then what?" Kindra said.
"Then I need a crutch," Nell said, "and I need six days to practice on it, and I need somebody to stop telling me to keep the foot up."
The toe had gone entirely black to a hard clean line and had begun to separate at the edge, and there was pink skin under it, and it did not smell.
Kindra looked at it on the twenty second and said, "It's ready."
"Ready for what?"
"It's ready to come off on its own and it's going to take another two weeks, and we don't have two weeks."
"So what do we do?"
"We do nothing," Kindra said. "That's the answer and I want to be very clear about it, because everybody's instinct is to help. Nobody cuts anything. Nobody pulls anything. The body's built a wall and the wall is doing the work,
and if I go at that with a knife I open the door I've been keeping shut for six weeks."
"Then how does she walk?"
"She walks on a crutch and a wide moccasin with the toe box stuffed, and she does it starting today, and it'll hurt."
"Okay," Nell said.
"It's going to hurt a lot."
"Okay," Nell said.
She practiced for six days and by the twenty eighth she could do a mile and a quarter on the crust with a birch crutch under her left arm, and she did it four times, and the fourth time she did it in fifty one minutes.
On the twenty ninth of January it went to nineteen below and stayed clear.
On the thirtieth it went to twenty four below, clear.
On the thirty first it went to twenty two below, clear, and the snow in the meadow went hard enough that Tom walked out across it at noon in boots without breaking through once.
He came back in and stood in the door.
"Crust," he said.
Nobody said anything.
"Kindra, your knee."
"My knee says four more days of this and then a front."
"So the window's now."
"The window's now."
That night, at eleven o'clock, McKenzie had the watch at the east window and said, in a voice that was completely level, "Dad. Everybody. Right now."
Tom was up.
"Fires?"
"No."
"What?"
"Listen," McKenzie said.
And Tom stood in the middle of his cabin at eleven at night on the thirty first of January and heard, very faint, carried up nine miles of frozen valley on a windless night, a sound that had not been heard in that country in ten months.
An engine.
Tom opened the door and stepped out into twenty two below and stood absolutely still.
The sound was so faint that for four seconds he thought McKenzie had imagined it, and then a fold of the valley opened and it came up clear.
Diesel. Old diesel, no muffler to speak of, working hard.
"That's downriver," he said.
Kindra came out behind him in a blanket. "How far?"
"In this air? Could be nine miles. Could be four."
The engine note changed. It dropped, labored, and then caught again, and then dropped again, and then there was nothing for about forty seconds, and then it came back.
"He's stopping and starting," Tom said.
"Stuck?"
"No. Listen to it. He runs for a minute, stops, runs for a minute." Tom stood with his head cocked. "That's not driving. That's working."
"Working at what?"
"That's the question."
They listened for an hour and a quarter.
At half past midnight it stopped and did not come back.
Nobody slept. They did not go to the sites, because Tom made the call at one in the morning and made it out loud so everybody could argue with it.
"He's nine miles away and he's in a vehicle and it's twenty two below," he said. "Nothing comes up this river tonight. And if we run three groups out into the dark right now on no sleep we'll do exactly what we did on the twentieth and somebody will get wet and somebody will get hurt."
"And if you're wrong?" McKenzie said.
"Then I'm wrong and we have ninety seconds and three routes we've run eleven times."
Tom rubbed his face. "Kenz, I could be wrong. I want you to understand that I'm making a judgment and not a prediction. The judgment is that the cost of going out tonight is certain and the cost of staying is possible."
"That's fair."
"If you disagree, say so, and I'll listen."
McKenzie thought about it.
"I agree," she said. "But I want the watch and I want it doubled."
"Done."
At first light Tom went down to the river and walked west on the ice shelf for two miles with the .22 and got nothing at all: no tracks, no sound, no smoke.
At noon he went up the north ridge, which took two hours and which he told Kindra about beforehand, and from the shoulder he looked nine miles down the valley toward the slide and the dead road.
He could see nothing. Nine miles is nine miles.
But at three in the afternoon, coming down, he stopped on a rock rib where the whole lower valley opened up, and he saw smoke.
Not a camp. Not twelve fires.
One column, thick and gray, rising out of the timber four miles downriver, in a place where Tom knew for a fact there was nothing but cottonwood bottom and the old Keegan place.
He watched it for twenty minutes and it did not move and did not grow.
Then he went home and told them.
"The Keegan place," Kindra said.
"That's the direction and that's the distance."
"That's eleven miles from the ranch. Why would he go there?"
"He wouldn't," Tom said, and then he sat down.
Nell said, "It might not be him."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
"The orange beard," Kindra said.
"The orange beard has trucks," Tom said. "He killed the Clubmans with eleven people and lost seven and that was in October. Nell, when Stan-Lar came to the ranch in November, how did he get there?"
"He walked."
"How many with him?"
"Four."
"And he wanted Wingman to go in with him on us."
"He said it would take twenty people."
"And Wingman said no."
"Wallace said stay off his side of the mountain," Nell said.
Tom sat with that for a long time.
"So there's two of them," Kindra said. "There's always been two of them. And one of them is nine miles east over a saddle waiting for crust, and the other one is four miles downriver in a truck, tonight, with a fire going."
"And neither one knows the other one's coming," McKenzie said.
The cabin went quiet.
"Say that again," Tom said.
"He said stay off my side of the mountain. So if Stan-Lar's on this side of the mountain right now, he's breaking a deal." McKenzie's face was doing the flat thing, which Tom had learned meant she was thinking at full speed. "Which means he's not telling Wingman."
"Or Wingman told him to come."
"Why would he? Nell said he doesn't lose men. Bringing in twenty strangers who kill everybody and take everything is exactly losing."
Tom stood up and walked to the window and stood there with his hand on the latch.
"Kenz," he said. "You may have just found the only thing we've got."
"What?"