Chapter 12 #3
And in the middle of the dooryard, on the open ground between the fence and where the porch had been, somebody had built something.
It was a cairn of river rock, about three feet high, neatly made, with flat stones laid in courses.
And driven into the top of it was a straight hickory haft about eighteen inches long, with a forged head on it, and the head was buried in the top rock so the handle stood straight up.
A tomahawk.
Tom lay in the wet snow and looked at it for a long time.
"That's a grave," Kindra whispered.
"That's not a grave."
"Tom, it's a cairn with."
"It's not a grave," Tom said. "There's no ground under it. It's built on top of the frozen dooryard. Nobody's under that."
"Then what is it?"
And Tom Thorn, lying in a wet hedge at the end of the worst winter of his life, started to smile in a way that frightened his wife considerably.
"It's a message," he said. "It's the eighth one. And it's the first one that isn't for us."
"Explain that," Kindra said.
"Not here. Not in the open."
They backed out of the hedge the way they had come in, on their bellies for the first forty feet, and got down into the cottonwoods and sat with their backs against a deadfall in the wet dusk.
"Explain it," Kindra said again.
"Who's it for?" Tom said. "That's the question I should have been asking for five months and I never once did."
"It's for us. They've all been for us."
"Have they?" Tom wiped rain off his face. "Think about the dog. He raked Shyla and let her run home with a rag on her collar. What did that actually accomplish?"
"It scared us to death."
"It scared us for one night. And then it told us, four days early, that somebody organized and patient was working on us, which is the single most useful thing we learned all autumn."
He shook his head. "Every one of those messages cost him something and bought us information. The note told us his schedule. The pot told us he'd found the noisemakers. The soap told us the Clubmans died and that somebody on the other side knew about us."
"You're saying he was helping us."
"I'm saying I don't know what he was doing and I've been assuming for five months, and this is the first one I can actually read, because look at it."
Tom pointed back through the trees. "A cairn in the open. Three feet high. Flat stones laid in courses, which takes an hour in February with bare hands. And a hatchet driven into the top of it."
"That's a marker."
"That's a signature," Tom said. "Nobody builds a monument for people who ran away. You build a monument where somebody can see it. And there's only two groups in this valley, and one of them is us and we were in a hole."
Kindra went very still.
"The orange beard," she said.
"Stan-Lar came onto this side of the mountain with twenty people and trucks after being told to stay off it."
Tom counted it out on his fingers. "Wingman walked over the saddle on the crust exactly when he said he would, arrived at ten in the morning in the open with his hands out like he always does, and found twenty men in his yard."
"Our yard."
"He thinks of it as his yard. That's the whole point. He's been managing this property since September like a man managing a field."
"So there was a fight."
"There was a fight and it lasted eleven minutes at ten o'clock and there was shooting up the draw at eight."
"And who won?"
"Somebody built a cairn," Tom said. "And left a weapon on top of it, out in the open, where it can't be missed, where the other side will come back and see it."
Kindra put her head back against the deadfall.
"Wingman won," she said.
"Somebody won and they wanted it known and they had an hour to spare afterward."
"But he left his hatchet."
"That's the part I can't read." Tom rubbed his eyes. "A man doesn't give up the thing he's named for. That's not a victory sign, that's."
He stopped.
"That's what?"
"I don't know."
They lay up in the cottonwoods that night and neither of them slept, and at first light on the twenty fourth of February they went back up and did the thing properly.
Tom had rules and he made Kindra repeat them.
"We circle first. Full circle, wide, downwind, before we set foot in that yard."
"Full circle."
"If there's a print in the mud that's less than four days old anywhere on that circle, we leave and we don't come back for a week."
"Agreed."
It took them three hours.
They found a great deal.
The snow had gone rotten and patchy in the rain and the ground was a mess of mud and slush and frozen ruts, and every single thing that had happened on the second of February was written into it and then half erased.
Truck ruts. Two vehicles, both of them heavy, both of them with chains on, coming up the river trail from downstream and stopping at the bottom of the bench where the grade beat them.
"They couldn't get up," Kindra said.
"They didn't need to. That's four hundred yards and they walked it."
There were boot prints everywhere, dozens of them, frozen into what had been slush on the fifth and was now ice. Tom tried to count sets and gave up at fourteen.
There was blood.
It was in three places and it had soaked into slush and refrozen and it had gone the color of rust under a lens of ice.
"That's a lot," Kindra said quietly.
"It's less than it looks."
"Tom, that's four feet across."
"Blood in snowmelt spreads eleven times what it would on dirt. That's a wound, not a body."
They found where a body had been, though.
Two places, and Tom identified them the same way both times: a depression in the ice with a clean rim and drag marks going away from it toward the truck ruts.
"They took their dead," he said.
"Both sides?"
"I only see two, and there were at least eleven minutes of shooting at close range with twenty people." He crouched and looked at the drag. "Two bodies moved and taken away in a truck. There should be more than two."
"Unless."
"Unless the other ones are still here somewhere," Tom said, "and I'd very much like to find them before one of the children does in April."
They found the dogs at the top of the draw.
Two of them, shot, and a third dead of something else, and they had been dead three weeks and the cold had kept them and the ravens had been at them.
None of them was Shyla.
Tom stood over the third one for a while. It was a small brown dog, a mongrel, and it had a collar made of a piece of belt.
"That one wasn't shot," he said.
"How can you tell?"
"No wound. And look at the position." He crouched. "It died running and its legs are out. That's a heart or it's the cold."
"It's a dog nobody ever conditioned, run nine miles over a saddle in twenty below by men who didn't know what they were doing," Kindra said. "That's what that is."
They buried none of them, because the ground was iron, and they dragged all three four hundred yards down into the gulch and left them where the scavengers already had a habit.
At eleven in the morning, Tom walked into his own dooryard for the first time in three weeks.
He had prepared himself for it and it did not matter.
The cabin was four courses of blackened log at the north corner and nothing else. The roof had come down into the middle and burned and what was left was a compressed black mat of ash and charcoal with the stove standing in it.
The loft was gone. The ladder was gone.
Sofie's bean cups were in the ash, four little rings of scorched tin, and Tom picked one up and it fell apart in his hand.
He put the pieces in his pocket.
Kindra went straight to the cellar.
"Tom."
He came.
The cellar door had been forced off its hinges and thrown aside, and the false crate wall had been pulled down and scattered, and the cellar was empty.
Completely empty. Not a crock, not a carrot, not a grain of sand.
"They found it," she said.
"They found it and they had trucks four hundred yards away and all day to carry."
"That's two hundred and twenty pounds."
"That's two hundred and twenty pounds," Tom agreed.
Kindra sat down on the cellar step and put her head in her hands for about ten seconds.
Then she stood up.
"Ash dump," she said.
They went around the back.
The ash dump was a gray mound four feet high at the base of the rockfall and it was exactly as it had been, and Tom dug into the side of it with his hands and hit the barrel in four minutes.
Wheat and beans. Sixty one pounds. Sealed and dry and perfect.
Kindra made a sound.
"Privy," Tom said.
The old filled privy was under four inches of slush and the boards were exactly as they had been laid, and under them, wrapped in birch bark, was sixty pounds of jerky.
"Chicken run," Kindra said.
The chicken run had been torn apart and every bird taken and the fencing pulled down and thrown in a heap, and the floor of it was churned to mud by dozens of boots.
Tom stood in the middle of it and dug.
He went down thirty inches and hit the flat rock lid and pulled it and underneath it, in the bark lined hole, was a hundred and four pounds of dried fish and elk and a crock of rendered fat sealed with tallow.
He sat back on his heels in the mud.
"Nobody digs in a chicken coop," he said.
Kindra laughed, and it turned into something else halfway, and she stood in the ruins of her home and laughed and cried at the same time for about a minute.
"Two hundred and twenty five pounds," Tom said.
"That's not four hundred."
"That's two hundred and twenty five plus the ninety at the sites plus four fish a day, and it's the twenty fourth of February, and green-up is nine weeks out." He stood. "Kindra, that's enough. That's actually enough."
"That's hungry enough."
"That's hungry and alive, and three weeks ago I'd have signed anything for hungry and alive."
They cached nothing that day. They took what they could carry, which was about ninety pounds between them, and they left the rest in the ground because the ground was the safest place in the valley and always had been.
At two in the afternoon Tom went to the cairn.
He had been avoiding it for three hours and he knew it and finally he walked out into the middle of the dooryard and stood in front of it.