Chapter 13 #3
Kindra went at two minutes and they were gone forty five and came back together and Nell's face was blotchy and she was very calm.
She sat down at the fire.
"I want to say something," she said.
"Go ahead."
"I don't want anybody to go get her."
Tom had not expected that.
"Say more."
"I know what everybody's thinking. I know you're all thinking about nine miles and nineteen people and four children."
Nell looked around the fire at each of them.
"And I want to say that I don't want it, because if somebody goes and gets killed because of a piece of bark with my friend's name on it, then I did that, and I can't."
"Nell."
"I already did one thing," she said. "I told him about the rocks."
"That's not."
"I know it's not. Kindra told me and I believe her most days." Nell's chin was steady. "But I'm not doing another one. So I'm saying it first, before anybody offers, so that nobody can say I asked."
Tom looked at his wife over the fire.
"That's the most grown up thing anybody's said around this fire all year," he said, "and I'm not going to insult you by arguing with it. But I'm going to say four things and then we're going to leave it for a week."
"Okay."
"One. Nobody's going anywhere in March. The pass is rotten, the river's up, and I wouldn't move this family nine miles for anything short of fire."
"Okay."
"Two. That bark is not a request and it doesn't say help. It says one word and the word is her name."
Nell frowned.
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know yet. It might mean I'm alive. It might mean I'm here. It might mean somebody put a child's name on a piece of bark to get us to walk east."
Tom held up a hand. "Three. Somebody is putting four pounds of food a week in a tree we haven't touched since January, and whoever it is, they're feeding us, and people who intend to kill you generally don't."
"Unless they're fattening you," McKenzie said.
"Unless they're fattening us, which is the fourth thing."
Tom looked around. "And four is this. We are not going to decide anything about this in the first hour, or the first day, or the first week. That's the rule that's kept us alive. Wingman's whole campaign was built on making us act fast, and we never once did,
and that's the entire reason we're sitting here."
"So what do we do?"
"We watch the tree," Tom said. "From very far away. And we do not empty it."
"We don't take the food?"
"We take half," Tom said, "and we leave half, and we put something of ours in beside it."
"Why half?"
"Because taking all of it says we're desperate, and taking none of it says we're not there, and taking half says we're here and we're careful."
"And what do we put in?"
Tom thought.
"Soap," he said.
They watched the tree for three weeks and it was the most disciplined thing the family ever did.
Tom built an observation point four hundred yards away and uphill on a rock rib, with a sight line through a gap in the timber that let you see the base of the dead fir and eleven feet of trunk and nothing else.
Nobody went closer than four hundred yards except on the resupply, and the resupply happened once a week, at a different hour each time, by one person, who circled first.
The first week, they took two pounds and left two and left a bar of soap wrapped in cloth.
The second week the soap was gone and there were six pounds of dried elk in the split and a second rawhide wrap.
And a second piece of bark.
Two words this time, printed unevenly.
SHE SAID YOU HAD SOAP
Tom stared at that one for a long time.
"That's not Birdy," he said, at the fire.
"Why not?"
"Because it's a complete sentence with a pronoun and a past tense verb, and because the letters are the same shape but the spacing's better, and because it answers something."
"Then who?"
"Somebody who's teaching an eleven year old to write," Tom said, "and who let her do the first one herself."
The third week they took three and left three and left a coil of McKenzie's cordage, forty feet, the fine grade.
The fourth week there was nothing in the tree at all.
Nobody said much that night.
The fifth week, the fourteenth of April, there were eleven pounds of dried elk, a gut skin of rendered fat, a handful of dried rose hips, and a folded square of birch bark with a great deal on it.
Tom brought it back and laid it on the rock and the whole family stood around it.
It was a drawing.
Not a child's drawing. A map, and it was well made, and it was the flats: three buildings and a barn, laid out in proportion, with the road coming in from the northeast and the creek along the south side.
And on it, drawn in the same careful hand, were four small hooked X's.
Tom sat down hard.
"That's his mark," he said.
"Whose?"
"That's the mark Nell drew on my Christmas present. The hatchet mark." He put his finger on it. "That's how she drew it in December because that's how she'd seen it drawn."
Nell leaned over the bark.
"That's not how I draw it," she said.
"I know it isn't."
"That's how he draws it."
Kindra said, "Tom, what are the X's marking?"
He looked at it a long time.
"On Nell's map," he said slowly, "the X's marked where he stands."
"And on this one?"
"On this one there's four of them and they're at the four corners of the property."
Nobody spoke.
"That's a watch rotation," McKenzie said.
"That's a watch rotation," Tom agreed.
"So somebody's telling us where the guards are."
"Somebody's telling us where the guards are on a place that has nineteen people in it, four of them children, and that we were told in February was empty."
Kindra sat down on the log.
"Say the whole thing," she said. "You've been building it for three weeks. Say it."
Tom stood up and walked four steps and turned around.
"Here's what I think and I want to be clear that it's a story and not a fact."
"Understood."
"In February, Wallace Wingman used our dooryard to destroy Stan-Lar's people, and then he went east and took the flats, because the flats had been emptied to come here."
He counted on his fingers. "He wrote four lines on a rock. One said the flats are empty, go there in April. One said nineteen at the ranch, four are children."
"And you thought that was an invitation to go do something about the ranch."
"I thought that was a man telling us where he wasn't and what was left behind." Tom shook his head. "And I've been wrong about that for seven weeks."
"How?"
"Because look at what's actually happened." He pointed at the bark. "Somebody at the ranch has been putting food in our tree every week since March. Somebody taught an eleven year old girl to write four letters. And now somebody has drawn us the guard positions at the flats."
"At the flats," Kindra said.
"At the flats. Not at the ranch."
"Which means whoever's doing this is at the ranch, telling us about the flats."
"Which means," Tom said, "that whoever is feeding us is not with him."
The fire popped.
"That's the whole thing," McKenzie said. "Isn't it. That's the thing that's been wrong."
"Say it."
"He said nineteen at the ranch, four are children. And then he went to the flats." She was working it out loud. "He didn't take them. He left them."
"He left nineteen people in a ranch with no fuel and no trucks and whatever food was in it on the second of February," Tom said, "and he took the men who could fight and he went east and set up on flat open ground with a well."
"He abandoned them."
"He sorted them," Tom said.
Kindra's face changed.
"Oh," she said.
"That's what a man who thinks in costs does. He'd been running nineteen people all winter on a calculation, and in February the calculation changed, and he took what he needed and left what he didn't."
"Then who's at the ranch?"
"Nineteen people minus whoever he took," Tom said. "Which is women, and children, and the old, and the sick, and June with the baby if the baby made it, and anybody who couldn't walk nine miles on crust in twenty below."
Nell said, "And Birdy."
"And Birdy."
"And somebody who can write," McKenzie said.
"And somebody who can write, and who can draw a map to scale, and who knows what a watch rotation looks like, and who has been putting eleven pounds of elk in a tree." Tom sat down. "And that's the part I can't get past, because nobody at that ranch should have eleven pounds of elk in April."
"Unless they're hunting."
"With what? He'd have taken the guns."
Nobody had an answer.
They argued about it for four days and it was the best argument the family ever had, because nobody got angry and everybody changed their mind at least once.
Kindra argued for going.