Chapter 12 #2
"I know exactly what it was and I'd do it again," Kindra said. "Because I had two children in a hole and I did not know whether the third one and my husband were alive, and I needed to see something with my own eyes, and I'm not going to apologize for being a person."
"What did you see?"
"Black smoke where the house is. And nothing else. It's too far."
She had come down and not gone up again.
They had lit the noon signal on the second and it had not taken, because the willow was frozen and her hands were shaking and she wasted four minutes and then made herself stop.
At four o'clock she had gotten it going and let it run exactly four minutes and killed it.
"I watched for yours," she said.
"We didn't light."
"I know. I saw nothing at noon on the second and nothing at four and nothing on the third."
"Kindra."
"I sat in there for three days and I did not go looking," she said, and her voice finally went. "And I want you to know exactly what that cost me, and I want it said out loud once and then never again, because I want the children to understand what that rule actually is."
"Say it."
"On the fourth of February at about two in the afternoon I was eleven feet up that tunnel with my pack on and Oliver had hold of my coat." She was not crying. She was worse than crying. "He said, Mom, the rule. And I said I know what the rule is. And he said, you made me say it back."
Everybody looked at Oliver.
The boy had gone dark red and was looking at his hands.
"That's the second time," Tom said.
"Second time what?"
"Second time it's been you." Tom reached across and put a hand on the back of his son's neck. "The bucket and the baffle and thirty two days. And now this."
"I just said the rule."
"You enforced the rule on an adult who outranked you, in the middle of the worst afternoon of her life, at ten years old." Tom's voice was thick. "Oliver, that's the whole thing. That's the entire thing. Rules that only work when they're easy aren't rules."
Kindra said, "I lit the fire at four that day instead."
"And we saw it."
"Did you?"
"Kenz saw it on the second at four and she cried and she's been fine ever since."
McKenzie said, "I have not been fine."
"No. Neither have I."
They spent eleven days in the log jam and the first three of them were entirely about food, because six people in a hole eat the same as six people in a house and the log jam had been stocked for three.
"Fourteen days at three people," Kindra said. "That's seven at six. And we've already used eight days of a nine day stock."
"So we've got four days."
"We've got four days if nobody moves, and we're going to have to move."
"Then we fish," McKenzie said.
Everybody looked at her.
"Under the ice," she said. "The river's twenty feet away."
Tom sat up.
"Kenz, I have never once ice fished in my life."
"I have," Nell said.
The whole shelter turned.
"At the first place," she said. "In January, on the reservoir. They made us do it because kids are lighter on the ice. There was a man who knew how."
"Nell," Tom said. "Teach us."
And so an eight year old girl with nine toes taught a family how to ice fish in a log jam on the Montana river, and Tom Thorn afterward considered it one of the four or five most important afternoons of his life.
"First you have to find where," she said. "You don't just chop a hole."
"Where do you chop?"
"Not in the fast part and not in the middle." She was drawing on the packed silt floor with a stick. "He said fish in the winter go where it's slow and deep and there's something over them. Under a bank. By a log. In a hole below a fast bit."
"Why?"
"Because they're cold and they don't want to work. Everything in the winter goes where it doesn't have to work."
Tom laughed out loud.
"That's the whole rule of the whole world," he said.
The outside of the log jam, it turned out, was the single best winter fishing spot in four miles, and it had been there for eight years and nobody had ever fished it.
They cut the hole with the hatchet and it took forty minutes through fourteen inches of ice, and they cut it small, ten inches, because Nell said a big hole lets in light and light pushes the fish out.
"And you have to keep it clean," she said. "You skim it every time, or it freezes over and then you've got to chop again and the chopping scares everything for an hour."
They skimmed it with a scrap of tin punched full of holes.
For line they used McKenzie's cordage, the finest of the three thicknesses, and Tom split it down further and re-twisted it two strand until it was thin enough to be almost invisible.
For hooks they had four steel ones in the fire kit and Tom would not use them.
"Why not?" Oliver said.
"Because there are four of them and there will never be a fifth. Those are for a day when nothing else works."
So they made gorges.
Not hooks. A gorge is a sliver of bone or hardwood, an inch and a half long, sharpened at both ends, with the line tied at the middle, and it lies flat inside the bait.
"The fish swallows it flat," Tom explained, whittling. "Then you pull, and it turns sideways in the throat, and it can't come back out. That is the oldest fishing technology on earth and it predates hooks by about twenty thousand years."
"Does it work as well?"
"It works worse and it's free and it can be made from a rabbit bone in four minutes."
They baited with elk fat and with the guts of the first fish they caught.
The first fish took ninety minutes and it was Sofie who got it, sitting on a hide over the ice with the line looped around her mitten, and she screamed so loud that Tom nearly had a heart attack and then had to explain to a six year old why she could not ever do that again.
It was a whitefish, eleven inches.
They took forty one fish in eleven days.
The technique was Nell's and it was the thing that made it work.
"You have to move it," she said. "Not a lot. Up four inches, wait, down. Up, wait, down. All day."
"Why?"
"Because a fish that's cold won't chase anything. But it'll look at something that moves a little bit right in front of its face." She demonstrated with her wrist. "The man said, make it look tired."
"Make it look tired."
"Like it's dying and it's easy."
Tom sat on the ice and jigged a bone gorge four inches up and down in a hole in a frozen river and thought about how everything, every single thing he had learned since September, came back to the same idea.
Make the other thing's easy choice into the thing you want.
The weir. The elk throat. The noisemakers. The trail maze.
Make it tired. Make it easy.
On the fifth day in the log jam they had the conversation about the cabin.
"I'm going to go look," Tom said.
"No," Kindra said.
"Kindra."
"I said no and I want you to actually hear me instead of waiting for me to finish so you can explain something."
Tom shut his mouth.
"There is nothing there," Kindra said. "There is a burned building and there is a cellar that they either found or didn't, and there is an ash pile with a barrel in it, and there is a chicken run."
"That's exactly what's there."
"And there's four caches they don't know about, and one of them is under the chicken run, and one is in the ash dump, and one is in a filled privy, and all three of those are within eighty feet of a burned house that twenty armed men now know the location of."
"Which is why I have to know whether they're still there."
"Which is why you have to wait." Kindra leaned forward.
"Tom, there is not one single thing we need this week that's in that ground. We've got four days of food and a hole in the ice that's producing four fish a day. We are not hungry. We do not need it. The only reason to go is to know,
and knowing is the most expensive thing anybody in this valley has ever bought."
Tom sat with it.
"You're right," he said.
"I'd like that written down."
"You're right and I hate it and I want to say the thing I'm actually afraid of."
"Say it."
"It's the eleventh of February," Tom said. "We have got until about the twentieth of April before anything grows. That's about ten weeks, and after that it's another eight before anything's ready to eat. Eighteen weeks."
"I've done the same arithmetic."
"Then say the number."
"Four hundred pounds," Kindra said. "That's what six people need for eighteen weeks and that's being hungry the whole way."
"And what have we got?"
"Between the two sites, about ninety pounds, plus four fish a day as long as the hole produces."
"And in the ground at the house?"
"About two hundred and twenty," Kindra said. "If it's still there."
"So it's not curiosity."
"No," she said. "It isn't, and I know it isn't, and I'm not saying never. I'm saying not this week, and I'm saying not you alone."
On the thirteenth day, the twenty first of February, it warmed to thirty four degrees and began to rain.
Tom stood outside the log jam in the rain and felt the crust going soft under his boots and understood, with enormous relief, that the window had closed.
Nobody was walking nine miles over a saddle on this.
"That's it," he said, coming in. "That's the season. It's rotten out there now and it stays rotten till it's gone."
"So we're safe?"
"We're safer. Nobody's moving a group over that country until May."
And so on the twenty third of February, Tom Thorn and his wife went to look at their house, and they left the four children in a log jam with McKenzie in command and the .22 and a rule that they did not move for three days no matter what.
They went up the ice shelf and they took six hours to cover a mile and a quarter and they came up onto the bench at four in the afternoon on the downwind side with the light already going.
And they lay in the hedge line, in the wet snow, and looked at what was left of eleven years.
The cabin was a rectangle of black on white, four courses of log still standing at the north corner, the stove sitting in the middle of it like a monument.
The wood ricks were gone, all four of them, burned or taken.
The chicken run was torn apart and every bird was gone.
The cellar door was open and hanging.