Chapter 11 #5
"The pairings are wrong and I'm changing them because Nell can't do thirty eight minutes tonight and the quinzhee is twenty two." He pulled the door bar. "Kindra. Nine days."
"Nine days."
"Log jam at noon."
"Log jam at noon."
They went out into twenty six below in four separate seconds and Tom was last, and as he pulled the door shut behind him he stopped for exactly one heartbeat and looked back into the room.
The stove ticking. The water barrel. The bean cups on the shelf. Eleven years.
He shut the door.
They made the split rock in nine minutes on the ice shelf, moving fast, no snowshoes, no prints.
And there Kindra took Oliver and Sofie west and Tom took McKenzie and Nell south and neither group said goodbye, because Tom had told them a week ago that there would be no goodbyes and had explained why.
They made the quinzhee at 5:26.
Twenty two minutes with a child on a crutch, and Tom had carried her the last four hundred yards despite everything, and his shirt was soaked through, and he got out of it inside the shelter and into the dry wool from the cache with his hands shaking.
That cache. That one decision, made on a January afternoon out of an abstract worry about somebody arriving wet.
"That's the whole thing," he said, pulling the dry shirt on. "That's it. That one bag right there is why I'm alive tonight."
McKenzie glazed the entrance behind them with three handfuls of snow, packed, so that from outside the tunnel mouth looked like a drift at the base of a rock.
Then the three of them lay in the dark on the sleeping platform four hundred yards from the cabin and waited for it to get light.
It got light at 7:40.
At 7:52 they heard the first shot.
It came from up the draw, one, flat and hard, a rifle, and then four more in a string.
Nell made a sound.
"That's not at us," Tom whispered. "That's uphill. That's the draw."
More. Eleven, twelve, a ragged burst, and then a long silence.
At 8:20, an engine, close, down by the river.
At 8:41 they heard men shouting, and the words did not carry but the tone did, and then more shooting.
And then, at 9:05, a dog started barking, and then two, and then all four.
McKenzie's hand found Tom's wrist in the dark.
At ten o'clock exactly, the shooting started in earnest and went on for eleven minutes.
Tom lay in a hole made of snow beside two children with his hand over his mouth and listened to Wallace Wingman walk into the open ground in front of a cabin at ten in the morning, in daylight, with his hands out, exactly the way he always did.
At 10:14 it stopped.
At 10:20 Tom smelled smoke.
Not woodsmoke. Diesel smoke, black and greasy, and it came down through the eddy at the outcrop in torn pieces and filled the little snow room with it.
Nell started to shake.
"Don't look," Tom said, uselessly, because there was nothing to look at.
They lay there for two more hours.
At half past noon McKenzie said, very quietly, "Dad. The smoke signal."
Tom had forgotten entirely.
He crawled to the vent hole and punched it clear with the stick and lay there looking up through three inches of ice tube at a square of gray sky.
"We can't," he said. "Not today."
"Mom's going to look."
"Your mother's going to look at noon and see nothing and she's going to remember the rule, and the rule is that no smoke means nothing."
"But she'll worry."
"She'll worry and she'll stay put." Tom put his head down on the platform. "That's what the rule is for. That's exactly what the rule is for."
At four in the afternoon, McKenzie looked anyway.
She crawled up the tunnel and put one eye at the glazed entrance and looked east, toward the log jam, a mile and a quarter downriver.
And she started crying, silently, with her hand over her mouth, and she came back down the tunnel and grabbed her father's arm.
"There's smoke," she said. "Four minutes. It went out."
Tom put both hands over his face.
"Three of them," he said. "Three of them are alive."
"Or somebody's alive."
"Three of them are alive and they lit a fire at four o'clock exactly like we said."
They stayed in the quinzhee for four days.
They had food and water and fuel and they used almost none of it, because they lay still and still people burn nothing.
On the second day, the third of February, they heard trucks twice.
On the third day, nothing.
On the fourth day, the fifth of February, Tom heard a sound at three in the afternoon that made him come up off the platform.
It was a dog.
Not four dogs. One, and it was not barking. It was casting, moving, whuffing at the snow the way a dog does when it has something and has lost it and wants it back.
It came within forty feet of the outcrop.
Tom put his hand on McKenzie's shoulder and pressed, which meant nothing, do nothing, and the three of them lay in a shelter made of snow and listened to a dog work a rock pile in an eddy where scent went to die.
It stayed eleven minutes.
Then a man's voice, a long way off, called something, and the dog left.
At sundown Nell said, in a very small voice, "That was Shyla."
Tom turned his head.
"What?"
"I know her sound." Nell was staring at the ceiling. "That was Shyla."