Chapter 14
Tom did not run down to the rock rib and he made nobody else run either, and afterward he considered that the hardest forty minutes of his life.
"Positions," he said. "Exactly like we drilled and nobody deviates."
"Tom, it's a woman with a baby."
"It's a shape at four hundred yards that Kenz says is a woman with a baby, and there are nine hundred yards of timber behind her that none of us can see into."
Kindra shut her mouth.
"I'm not saying she's a lie. I'm saying I don't know, and neither do you, and we're going to find out the way we've found out everything since September, which is slowly and from cover."
He pulled the .22 off the rack. "Kindra, Beretta, north side of the overhang, behind the deadfall, and you cover the approach and not the shelter. Kenz, back on the rib and you watch the back trail, and Kenz, that's the important job."
"I know it is."
"If there are four men following her at three hundred yards, you're the only person who'll see them."
"What's the signal?"
"Two clacks and then three, and then you go west and you don't come down."
He put Oliver and Sofie and Nell in the timber two hundred yards north with a pack and a rule.
"You go if you hear anything you don't like. You don't wait for permission and you don't come to find us."
"Dad."
"Oliver. Say it back."
"We go if we hear anything we don't like and we don't wait and we don't come find you."
"Good."
Nell said, "Can I come?"
"No."
"She might know me."
"That is exactly why you can't come," Tom said. "Nell, if that's somebody from the ranch and they see you at the lean-to, then whatever happens next happens with your face in it. And if it goes wrong, you're the thing they came for."
Nell's jaw set.
"That's not fair."
"No," Tom agreed. "It isn't."
He was in position under the overhang at 6:40 and the woman came down the rock rib at 7:15.
She took thirty five minutes to cover four hundred yards and Tom watched every step of it and learned more from the walk than from anything she said in the next two hours.
She stopped four times. Not to rest. She stopped and turned and looked behind her, all the way back up the rib, for a full minute each time.
She never once walked in the open where the rib flattened. She went around, through the scrub, adding forty yards, and she did it without appearing to think about it.
And at the last two hundred yards she stopped and put the pack down and left it and came the rest of the way with nothing on her back and both hands empty and held out from her sides.
"That's a careful person," Tom said quietly.
She stopped fifty feet from the shelter.
"Hello the camp," she said.
Her voice was not loud. It was the voice of somebody who had learned to make sound carry without volume, and it was rough at the edges in a way that suggested she had not used it much lately.
Tom did not answer for a moment.
He looked at her.
She was somewhere between thirty and forty five and it was impossible to say which, because she had a face that had been outside all winter. Dark hair cut short with a knife. A man's wool coat, too big, belted with rope. Boots that were actual boots and had been good ones.
And in a sling on her front, wrapped in what looked like four separate blankets, something very small.
She had no rifle. She had a knife on her belt and Tom could see the handle of it.
"That's far enough," he said.
Her head came around toward his voice and she did not flinch.
"All right."
"How many are you?"
"Two."
"Anybody behind you?"
"Not that I know of, and I've been checking every hundred yards since four o'clock this morning."
"Who are you?"
She hesitated.
"That's a longer answer than you want standing up," she said.
"Try the short one."
"My name's June."
Tom closed his eyes for one second.
"June," he said.
"You know the name."
"I know the name."
"Then she made it," June said, and her legs went.
It was not a faint. She simply sat down on the rock, hard, all at once, with the baby against her chest, and she put one hand over her face and stayed like that.
Tom came out from under the overhang with the rifle pointed at the ground.
"Kindra," he called.
"Coming."
"Slow."
They did it properly even then. Kindra came in from the north at an angle and Tom kept forty feet and did not close, and neither of them touched the woman for eleven minutes.
"June," Tom said. "I'm going to ask you some questions and they're going to sound cruel."
"Ask them."
"Is the baby alive?"
"Yes."
"How old?"
"Six months and one week."
"Is it yours?"
"Yes."
"Anybody hurt you to get it?"
June's head came up.
"No," she said. "He was a good man and he died in Deer Lodge in April of last year and I was already four months gone when everything stopped."
"All right."
"That's a hell of a question to ask somebody."
"It is," Tom said. "And I asked it because if the answer had been anything else I'd have wanted to know it before my children met you, and not after."
June looked at him for a long moment.
"That's fair," she said.
"How did you get here?"
"I walked eleven miles in two days and I slept in a culvert under the road last night and I nursed her three times in twenty degrees."
"You walked nine miles."
"I walked eleven, because I didn't take the pass." She wiped her face with her wrist. "The pass has got a man on it four days out of seven and I've known that since March."
Tom and Kindra looked at each other.
"Sit her down," Kindra said. "Now. Tom, now."
They got her under the overhang and Kindra got a fire going in four minutes and had water on it in five.
And then Kindra Thorn said the thing that Tom would remember for the rest of his life as the moment he understood exactly who he had married.
"Give me the baby," she said.
June's arms locked.
"No."
"June."
"No."
"All right," Kindra said, immediately, and sat back on her heels. "That was a bad thing to ask and I take it back and I'm not going to ask again. But I want to see her face."
June thought about it and then opened the top of the sling.
Tom looked and his stomach went cold.
The baby was alive. She was awake and her eyes moved and they came around and found her mother's face.
And she was the size of a two month old.
Her cheeks were flat. There was loose skin at her thighs where fat should have been. Her hair was thin and it was coming in wrong at the temples.
"What's her name?" Kindra said.
"Wren."
Kindra did not react to the size of her at all and Tom knew exactly how much that cost.
"How's your milk?" she said.
June's face did something terrible.
"Gone," she said. "Mostly. It went in January and it came back a little in February when Cass started bringing meat and then it went again three weeks ago."
"What's she had?"
"Broth. Fat. Meat pounded in water and strained through cloth." June's hands were shaking. "She takes it. She'll take anything. She's never once refused food in her life, that's the thing nobody understands, she's not sick and she's not weak, there just isn't enough."
Kindra sat back on her heels.
"June," she said. "I've got something."
"Don't."
"I've got something and I want you to hear the whole of it before you say anything."
"There's nothing. There's no formula in this valley and there's no cow and there's no goat and I have walked into four empty houses looking."
"There's no cow," Kindra agreed. "Here's what there is."
She held up one finger.
"Fat. Rendered elk and bear, clean, double rendered, and I've got about eleven pounds of it four hundred yards from here."
"She gets fat."
"She gets fat in broth and it's not enough because it's not complete." Kindra held up a second finger. "Eggs."
June went absolutely still.
"There's no chickens. They took the chickens."
"They took eighteen chickens in February," Kindra said, "and in March we found four of them alive in the timber eight hundred yards from the house, because chickens run and chickens hide and chickens are better at surviving than anybody gives them credit for."
"You've got chickens."
"We've got four hens and they started laying on the ninth of April and we're getting two eggs a day."
June made a sound.
"An egg yolk is the single best thing on this earth for a starving baby," Kindra said. "Fat, protein, iron, and vitamin A and D. Cooked soft, mashed, thinned with broth. Six months is old enough. That's two eggs a day and she can have both of them."
"You don't even know me."
"Third thing." Kindra kept going. "Bone broth, reduced, with the marrow in it. Fourth thing, and this is the one that'll actually save her: liver."
"She won't eat liver."
"She will if it's scraped." Kindra leaned forward.
"You freeze it or you chill it hard and you scrape it with a spoon and you get a paste, and you cook it thirty seconds in fat, and it's the most nutrient dense food that exists. A tablespoon of liver has more in it than four ounces of anything else. That's what brings a baby back."
"And where do you get liver?"
"From every animal we kill, and we're killing something every four days, and up until this exact minute we've been eating it ourselves."
June looked at her.
"Why would you," she said.
"Because I've got five children and four of them are fine and one of them arrived in December with a frozen foot and forty one pounds on her," Kindra said, "and because I have spent four months watching that child eat six small meals a day and turn back into a person,
and because there is not one thing in this world I know how to do better than that."
June Cullen started crying and could not stop for a long time.
They did not move her that day.
Tom would not, and he said it plainly.
"I'm not walking you into my camp today," he told her, when she had gotten hold of herself. "And I want to say why, in front of you, instead of doing it behind your back."
"You think I'm bait."
"I think you might be bait and not know it."
June nodded slowly.
"That's smart," she said.
"You're not offended."