Chapter 13
March came in gray and wet and it nearly killed them, and not one person in the family had seen it coming.
"This is the worst month," Tom said, on the fourth, standing in the mouth of the log jam looking at rain. "I've lived here eleven years and I have never once had to survive March. I've only ever had to be annoyed by it."
The problem was the river.
The rain came and went for nine days and the temperature sat between thirty and forty and the snow up high did not melt but the snow down low did, and the river started to move under the ice.
On the seventh, Nell's fishing hole flooded.
She came up the tunnel at six in the morning with her feet wet and said, in a completely calm voice, "The water's at the bottom log."
Tom went out and looked and his stomach dropped.
The river had come up eleven inches overnight and it was pushing broken ice, and the bottom course of the log jam, which had been four feet above the ice for two months, was in the water.
"How high does this go?" Kindra said.
"I don't know. I've never watched it from inside a log jam."
"Tom."
"In 2018 it came up nine feet and moved this entire pile forty yards downstream," he said. "That's what built the place we're living in."
The family got out that morning.
It took six hours and four trips and it was miserable, cold wet work in freezing rain, and by two in the afternoon everything they owned was on the rock rib above the flood line and the log jam was creaking in a way that Tom did not like at all.
"So where do we go?" Oliver said.
"The quinzhee's rotten," McKenzie said. "It's got to be. It's been thirty eight degrees for four days."
"It is," Tom said. "I looked at it on the twenty fifth. The roof's sagged four inches and it'll be a puddle by the fifteenth."
"So we've got nothing."
"We've got everything except a roof," Tom said, "and we've got nine hours of daylight, and there are six of us, and I want everybody to understand that this is the easiest problem we've had since September."
"It doesn't feel easy."
"That's because it's wet and everybody's cold, and being wet and cold makes every problem feel like the last problem."
Tom got them in a circle under a spruce.
"But look at it. Nobody's hurt. Nobody's hungry. Nobody's being hunted today. We've got two hundred and twenty five pounds in the ground four hundred yards from a burned house and ninety more split between two sites, and we need a dry place to sleep."
"That's still a problem."
"That's a problem people solved for two hundred thousand years with an axe and a knife," Tom said, "and we've got both."
They built the debris hut that afternoon and Tom taught it while they built it, because that was how everything got taught now.
"Rule one," he said, dragging in a ridgepole. "Small. Everybody's instinct is to build a shelter you can stand up in. That instinct will kill you."
"Why?"
"Because you heat it with your body and nothing else. A space you can stand in has eleven times the air volume of a space you can lie down in, and you cannot warm it."
He laid the ridgepole into the crotch of a stump, one end up, one end on the ground.
"Interior should be just big enough to lie in and roll over. If it feels like a coffin, it's the right size."
"That's for one person," McKenzie said.
"Then we build a long one and lay six people in a row, and the six people warm each other, which is the entire reason it works."
The ridgepole went fourteen feet.
"Rule two. Ribs, close together, every six inches, both sides, forty five degrees."
They cut ribs from dead fir and lodgepole and laid them in until the frame looked like the skeleton of something.
"Rule three, and this is where everybody fails."
He stood back.
"You need three feet of debris on that frame. Three feet. Everybody builds four inches and wonders why they froze."
"Three feet?" Oliver said. "Of what?"
"Of anything. Leaves, needles, duff, moss, dead grass, fir boughs, whatever's on the ground, and it has to be loose and fluffed and piled deep, because the insulation is the air trapped in it and not the material."
"There's snow on everything."
"There's snow on top of everything and there's eleven inches of dry needle duff under every big fir on this bench, and it's been dry under there since October."
That turned out to be true and it saved them.
They went from tree to tree, six people with hides used as hauling tarps, and scraped out the dry duff from under the big firs where the branches had kept the snow off, and they hauled load after load after load.
It took four hours and it was the most tedious work Tom had ever done.
"How do we know when it's three feet?" Sofie said.
"You put your arm in it up to the shoulder," Tom said. "If you can feel a rib, it's not deep enough."
They put a lattice of light sticks over the top at the end.
"Why?"
"Because rain and wind will strip debris off in a night and then you're sleeping under sticks."
Then the inside.
"Same rule as the stand," Kindra said, taking over. "Whatever's under you matters more than what's over you. You lose heat to the ground about twenty times faster than you lose it to the air."
They filled the inside with a foot and a half of dry fir boughs and duff, packed, so that lying down you sank into it.
And they made the door plug, which Tom had forgotten entirely and which Nell reminded him of.
"You have to have a thing for the hole," she said.
"Say more."
"The hole's where all the warm goes out. At the reservoir there was a man who built one and he left the hole open and he said it was fine and it wasn't."
They made a plug: a bundle of debris tied in a hide the size of a bushel basket, that could be pulled in behind the last person.
They slept in it that night, six people in a row like cordwood, and Tom lay awake for a while in the dark listening to five other people breathe eight inches away from him.
It was forty one degrees inside and thirty outside and raining.
"Kindra."
"Mm."
"How long did this take us?"
"Five and a half hours."
"Five and a half hours and no tools but an axe and a knife, and no nails, and no rope but Kenz's cordage."
"Mm."
"I want to say something and then I'll shut up."
"Say it."
"We could do that again anywhere," Tom said. "Anywhere in this country with trees on it. In a day. That's the thing I didn't understand in September."
"What is?"
"I thought we were defending a place." He put his hands behind his head in the dark. "And we're not. We never were. The place burned and we're warm and dry eleven miles from it with everything we need, and the reason is not the cabin. It never was the cabin."
"Go to sleep, Tom."
"The cabin was a warehouse."
"Go to sleep."
They lived in the debris hut for sixteen days and it was the least dangerous stretch of the entire year, and the family did the strangest thing: they got bored.
"I never thought I'd be bored again," McKenzie said, on the eleventh of March, sitting on a log in the rain.
"That's the best sentence anybody's said this year," Kindra said.
"It's awful."
"It's wonderful. Bored means nobody's shooting at us and there's food. Bored is the goal. Bored is what every human being who ever lived was trying to achieve."
So they used it, and the family did four things in those sixteen days that mattered more than anything they had done since January.
The first was school.
Nell had nineteen letters from the quinzhee and McKenzie taught her the other seven in four days and then kept going, and within two weeks the girl could read a simple sentence aloud if it was written large in the mud and she was given time.
Then Kindra took it over and made it a system.
"An hour a day. Everybody. Including adults."
"I can read," Oliver said.
"You can read. Can you do long division?"
"Sort of."
"Then you'll be doing it for an hour a day until you can do it in the dirt with a stick, because there are no calculators and there never will be again, and the person in this valley who can figure a load and a ration and a distance in their head is going to be worth four people who can't."
She taught in the mud with a stick. Fractions, division, area.
Tom taught the other half, which he thought of as what he knew, and it was the first time he had ever laid it out as a subject instead of a series of emergencies.
"There's four things and everything else is detail," he told them, on the fourteenth. "Shelter, water, fire, food. In that order, and the order is the lesson."
"Why's shelter first? Food's first."
"Because you can live three weeks without food and three days without water and three hours without shelter in the wrong weather." He drew it in the mud. "That's the whole rule. Three hours, three days, three weeks. Everybody say it."
They said it.
"And that's why on the second of February I left two hundred and twenty five pounds of food in the ground and ran."
The second thing was the sinew and the cordage.
McKenzie ran that. She had forty one hours of practice from December and she made everybody learn it, including Tom, who was terrible at it and said so.
"Your hands are too big and you're impatient," she told him.
"I'm the father."
"You're impatient. Watch. You reverse wrap. You twist each strand away from you and then you cross them toward you, and you keep the tension the entire time, and if you let go you lose it."
They made four hundred more feet in sixteen days.
"Why so much?" Oliver said.
"Because there's no rope," McKenzie said, "and every single thing we build for the rest of our lives needs it, and I would rather have a thousand feet and never use it than need four feet in a river in August."
The third thing was the seeds.
Kindra brought it up on the twelfth and it went off like a bomb.
"The garden," she said, at the fire.
"What about it?"
"Where are the seeds?"
The whole family went silent.
"They're in the cellar," Tom said slowly. "In the tin. On the second shelf."
"The cellar's empty."
"The cellar's completely empty."
Kindra put her face in her hands.
"That's the end of us," she said.
"Kindra."