Chapter 13 #4
"Nine people, most of them women and children, eleven miles east, with no men and no guns and no fuel, in April," she said. "Tom, do you know what happens to that in June?"
"I know exactly what happens to that in June."
"Somebody comes and takes it. Somebody always comes and takes it. That's the only law left in this valley."
"I know."
"And they know it too, which is why somebody's been putting food in a tree for six weeks, because that is the only currency they've got and they are spending it on us."
McKenzie argued against.
"It's the perfect trap and I want to say why, and then I'll stop."
"Go ahead."
"Everything he's ever done has been designed to make us come out," she said. "Every single message. And the one thing that never worked was fear. So he stopped."
"And?"
"And now the messages are a child's name and a map of where the guards are." Her face was flat. "Dad, if fear didn't move us, what would?"
Nobody said anything.
"That's a very good argument," Tom said quietly.
"I don't want it to be."
Oliver argued for a third thing.
"Why is it only two choices?" he said, on the second day.
"Say more."
"Everybody's saying go or don't go. But we never do that with anything else." He had gone red but he kept talking. "We don't go get the elk. We put a spear in a gap and make the elk come to us."
Tom put his cup down.
"Oliver."
"I'm just saying. Everything we've ever done that worked, we didn't go to it. We made it come to us."
Tom looked at his son for a long moment.
"You've done it again," he said.
"Done what?"
"Third time," Tom said. "The bucket. The thirty two days. And now this."
They built it over the next nine days and it was, in Tom's opinion afterward, the smartest single thing the family ever did.
They did not go east.
They turned the dead fir into a gate.
"It's a funnel," Tom said, drawing it. "Same as everything. We're not going to them and we're not waiting for them to come to us blind. We build a place they can come to, and we make it easy, and we make it one way, and we watch it from four hundred yards."
They cleared a route.
Not a trail exactly. A route: from the dead fir, four hundred yards west, down a rock rib, to a flat place under an overhang where Tom built a second lean-to, stocked with four days of food and fuel and a fire kit and two hides.
And at the dead fir they left a piece of bark with a drawing on it.
Tom drew it himself and it took him four attempts.
It showed the dead fir. And from the dead fir, a dotted line going west along the rock rib, with four marks on it, and at the end of the line a small shelter with a fire in front of it.
And beside the shelter, four small figures and a dog.
"Why four?" Sofie said. "There's six of us."
"Because I'm not telling anybody how many of us there are," Tom said.
"And the dog?"
Tom looked at the drawing for a second.
"Because whoever's reading it has seen the dog," he said, "and because I want them to know we're the same people."
They put the drawing in the tree on the twentieth of April with four pounds of dried fish and two bars of soap.
And then they did the hardest thing in the world, which was nothing.
They watched from the rock rib in shifts, four hundred yards out, two hours on and four off, from first light to full dark, for six days.
Nobody came.
On the twenty first the food sat in the tree.
On the twenty second it sat.
On the twenty third it rained and it sat.
On the twenty fourth, Tom came down off the rib at noon and said, "We're stopping the day watch."
"Why?"
"Because six days of staring at a tree is doing something to all of us and because if somebody's coming, they're coming at night, and because standing on a rock rib all day is the kind of routine that gets a family killed."
They cut it to dawn and dusk.
And on the twenty seventh of April, at 5:50 in the morning, McKenzie was on the rib in the gray light and she did not come down and she did not signal.
She sat absolutely still for forty minutes and then she came down the back of the rib without hurrying and walked into camp and said, in the most controlled voice Tom had ever heard out of a twelve year old:
"There's somebody at the tree."
Everybody stood up.
"How many?"
"Two," McKenzie said. "One big and one small. The small one's on the big one's back."
"Carried?"
"Carried. And the big one's carrying a pack too, and she went up the tree with both of them still on her."
"She?"
"It's a woman," McKenzie said. "She's got the small one in a sling on her front and a pack on her back and she climbed eleven feet of dead fir with both."
Tom's hands had gone numb.
"Did she take the food?"
"She took the food, and she took the soap, and she looked at your drawing for about four minutes." McKenzie swallowed. "And then she sat down at the bottom of the tree and put her head on her knees for a while."
"And then?"
"And then she got up and she started west along the rock rib," McKenzie said. "On the route. Following the line."
Nobody moved.
"Kenz," Kindra said. "The small one. How small?"
"Small enough to be in a sling on her front."
"How small."
McKenzie looked at her mother.
"It's a baby," she said.