Chapter 12
Tom did not answer for a long time.
"Nell, are you certain?"
"No."
"Then say what you are."
"I'm certain it was one dog and not four, and I'm certain it wasn't barking, and I'm certain it sounded like her." Nell's voice was flat and careful. "The Warden's dogs bark. All four of them bark at everything. That dog wasn't barking. It was hunting."
McKenzie said, "She wasn't with us."
Nobody had said it out loud in four days.
"She wasn't with us," Tom agreed.
"She was in the cabin. I saw her at the window and then I had the rifle and I went out the door and she." McKenzie stopped. "I don't know. I don't know where she went."
"She went with your mother or she stayed," Tom said. "Those are the only two things."
"Or somebody's got her."
"Or somebody's got her."
They lay in the dark and nobody said anything for a while.
"Here's what we do about it," Tom said finally. "Nothing."
"Dad."
"Kenz, I know."
"She's our dog."
"She is our dog, and she is a ninety pound animal who survived a garden rake, and she is the single best early warning system on this mountain, and I would give a very great deal to have her lying in this tunnel right now."
Tom put his hand on his daughter's arm. "And there are four days left of nine, and there is nothing in this world that would make me spend them walking around out there looking for a dog."
"Even if she's out there hunting for us."
"Especially then, because if she's out there hunting for us she is the most dangerous thing in this valley to us right now."
McKenzie's head came up.
"What?"
"Think it through."
She thought it through, and Tom watched her get there, and watched her hate it.
"She'd find us," McKenzie said.
"She'd find us in about four hours. She's not a trained tracker but she doesn't have to be, she's been smelling us her whole life and she wants us."
Tom kept his voice level. "And if there's a man forty feet behind her with a rifle, then our dog walks straight up to a drift at the base of a rock and starts digging and whining, and that's the end of everything."
Nell said, "That's what he'd do."
"That's exactly what he'd do, and it's cheap, and it's clever, and it uses a thing we love against us, which is the whole pattern from the first night."
"So what do we do if she finds us?"
Tom did not answer.
"Dad."
"I don't know," he said. "I have been lying here for an hour trying to build an answer to that and I don't have one, and I'm not going to invent one to make anybody feel better."
They stayed the fifth day and the sixth.
They were the worst two days of the whole winter, and it was not the cold or the food. It was that there was nothing to do.
Tom had not understood, until then, how much of surviving had been work. Every crisis since September had come with a task. Cut wood. Haul water. Build a wall. Move a cache. There had always been something to put your hands on.
In a snow shelter seven feet across, there was nothing.
"This is how people go wrong," he said, on the sixth day. "Right here. This is the part that breaks people, and I want to name it while it's happening so we can see it."
"What is it?"
"Stillness." He lay on his back looking at the glazed ceiling. "A person can take almost anything if they're moving. Put a person in a hole with nothing to do and their own head starts on them."
"So what's the fix?"
"Same fix as everything. You make a job."
So they made jobs.
McKenzie recounted and reorganized the entire food store by hand in the dark, by touch, and then did it again the next day in a different order.
Nell learned her letters.
That was McKenzie's doing and it started as a way to pass an hour and turned into the thing that got all three of them through.
"You know the sounds," McKenzie said. "Sofie taught you the alphabet at the stove. You just don't know what they look like."
"I know what some look like."
"Which ones?"
"N. That's mine." Nell drew it on the packed snow of the platform with her finger. "And O, because it's a circle, and S because it's a snake."
"That's three. There's twenty six and by the time we get out of here you're going to have all of them."
They wrote in the snow. There was no light, so they did it by feel, and it turned out that was better, because a letter you have learned with your finger in the dark is a letter you cannot forget.
By the second day Nell had eleven.
By the third she had nineteen and could write her own name and, at her own request, four other words: MOUSE, FIRE, NORTH, and WALLACE.
"Why that last one?" Tom asked.
"Because I wanted to see what it looks like," Nell said. "It's shorter than I thought."
Tom's job was the accounting, and he did it out loud, every day, as a discipline.
"Ninth day is the tenth of February," he said. "Log jam at noon. It's a mile and a quarter and the route's the ice shelf to the split rock and then the rock rib, and we leave at nine to give ourselves three hours for a fifty minute walk."
"Why three hours?"
"Because we're going to do it the way we should have done everything all year, which is slow, and stopping, and looking."
On the eighth day, the ninth of February, Nell's toe came off.
It happened in the night. She woke Tom at about two in the morning and said, in a voice of total calm, "I think it's off."
Tom lit the candle stub.
The black toe had separated at the line and was lying loose in the dressing, and underneath it was a small clean stump with new pink skin over the end, dry, no smell, no red streaking.
"Oh," Tom said.
"Is that right?"
"Nell, that's perfect. That's the best possible outcome and your mother, and Kindra, called it in December."
"So I'm done?"
"You're done. That's it. That's a six week thing finishing exactly the way it should."
Nell picked up the toe and looked at it in the candlelight.
"Can I keep it?"
McKenzie made a noise.
"Absolutely not," Tom said.
"Why?"
"Because it will rot, and because we're in a seven foot room, and because I am putting my foot down about exactly one thing this entire winter and this is it."
"That's a bad joke," McKenzie said.
"I know it was. I'm very tired."
Nell laughed, which was the third time she had done it since December, and she let Tom take it, and he buried it in the snow outside the tunnel at three in the morning, which was the only time he went outside in six days.
They left at nine on the tenth of February.
Tom went first and made them wait four minutes at the tunnel mouth while he lay in the entrance and looked at everything he could see.
The world had changed.
There had been no new snow in eight days, and the crust had set up hard and glassy, and the entire drainage was a sheet of white with old tracks frozen into it like fossils.
He could see, from the outcrop, four hundred yards of meadow edge and the top corner of where the cabin was.
Where the cabin had been.
There was no roofline.
Tom looked at that for a long moment and did not say anything, and then he crawled back down the tunnel.
"The cabin's gone," he said.
McKenzie did not react.
"I figured," she said.
"Burned. I can see the corner of the yard and there's no roof and there's black."
"Okay."
"Kenz."
"It's a box," she said, and her voice only wobbled on the second word. "That's what you said. It's a box with the stove and the food, and it's worth what's inside it and not one ounce more."
Tom looked at his twelve year old.
"That's right," he said. "And it's also all right to be wrecked about it."
"Not right now."
"No. Not right now."
They went west on the ice shelf and it took them an hour and fifty minutes to go a mile and a quarter, because Tom stopped every eleven steps.
Twice they went flat and lay on the ice for six or seven minutes, once because a raven went up out of the cottonwoods wrong and once because Tom thought he heard something and was not sure and did not care to be sure.
At 11:20 they came up the rock rib.
At 11:40 they were within four hundred yards of the log jam, and Tom put McKenzie and Nell into a fold of rock and told them to stay.
"You're going in alone," McKenzie said.
"I'm going in alone and I'm going to circle it first."
"Dad."
"Kenz, there is exactly one scenario that gets all of us killed today, and it's that somebody found the log jam on the third of February and has been sitting in it for a week waiting for the rest of us to walk in at noon on the ninth day."
"You think that."
"No. I think there's a ninety percent chance your mother's in there. I'm going to spend forty minutes buying the other ten."
He circled it wide, downwind, on rock and ice, and it took him thirty five minutes.
He read the ground at eleven places and found four sets of tracks, all of them frozen hard, all of them a week old.
Two adult sets, one small, one very small.
No boot with a chunk out of the right heel.
At 12:15 he came in from the river side and stopped forty feet out and said, in a normal voice, "Hello the jam."
There was a sound inside like something being dropped.
And then Kindra Thorn came out of a hole in a pile of trees and crossed forty feet of ice and hit him so hard they both went down.
They stayed at the log jam eleven days, and it was the closest thing to peace that any of them had for a year.
That first night all six of them were in it, plus the heat of one small fire venting up through forty feet of packed timber, and the temperature inside got to forty four degrees, and Sofie took her mittens off.
Kindra told it in pieces over that first day and Tom made her tell all of it, including the parts she did not want to.
They had made the log jam at 5:40 on the morning of the second.
At 7:52 they had heard the first shots and they had heard them clearly, because sound runs down a frozen river.
At ten they had heard the long exchange.
At about half past ten they had smelled diesel and Kindra had climbed the outside of the jam to the top of the willow and looked back upriver and seen the column.
"You went up on top of it," Tom said.
"I went up on top of it."
"Kindra."
"I know."
"That's a mile and a quarter and there were twenty armed men."