Chapter 14 #2
"Mister, I spent four months in a house where the smartest thing anybody did was keep their mouth shut." She adjusted the sling. "You think I haven't been running the same arithmetic on you? I walked eleven miles toward a drawing on a piece of bark. For all I know you're four men and a story."
Kindra laughed out loud.
"So here's what happens," Tom said. "You stay here. This lean-to is stocked and there's four days of food in it and fuel and a fire kit. We're four hundred yards off and we're going to be watching this approach for three days."
"Three days."
"Three days, and in that time either somebody comes down that rib behind you or nobody does."
"And if somebody does?"
"Then we're gone and you're on your own and I'm sorry."
"And if nobody does?"
"Then on the fourth day we come and get you and you meet my family and you sit at my fire," Tom said, "and I'll tell you every single thing I know about this valley, and you'll tell me every single thing you know, and we'll figure out what we are to each other."
June considered it.
"Three days is a long time for her," she said, looking down at the sling.
And that was the moment Kindra Thorn made the decision that changed everything, and she made it in about two seconds and she did not consult anybody.
"Then I'll stay," she said.
"Kindra," Tom said.
"I'll stay with her for the three days."
"Absolutely not."
"Tom, I'm going to say four things and then you're going to agree with me."
"I doubt that."
"One. That baby has about eleven days, and I want you to hear that number, because I have been looking at her for twenty minutes and I am not exaggerating for effect."
Kindra's voice was perfectly level. "Two. Three days of nothing is three days of nothing for her, and whatever we're going to do for her has to start today or it isn't worth starting."
"Kindra."
"Three. If this is a trap, then it's a trap for the whole family, and the entire point of your system is that the family is never in one place. So one of us being here is exactly what the system is for."
Tom opened his mouth.
"Four," Kindra said. "I'm the one who knows how to do it. You don't. Kenz doesn't. Nobody else in this family has ever brought a starving child back and I've done it once in the last four months and it took me ten days to get the ratios right and I am not going to explain those ratios to you at
four hundred yards."
Tom stood there with the rifle in his hands.
"That's four things," he said.
"Do you disagree with any of them?"
"No," he said. "I disagree with all of it and I can't argue with any of it, which is different."
"I know it is."
"Kindra, if this is him."
"If this is him, then he's spent five months building something to separate us and it worked, and I'll have made the wrong call with all the information I had." She stood up. "And I'd rather make the wrong call about a baby than the right one."
Tom looked at her for a long moment.
"Eggs," he said.
"What?"
"You'll need the eggs and the fat and the liver, and they're four hundred yards away, and I'm not having you walk back and forth on a route twice a day for three days."
Kindra's face changed.
"You're agreeing."
"I'm agreeing on conditions and there's four of them."
"Say them."
"One. You're armed and you keep the Beretta on your body, not on a rock, not in a pack, on your body, sleeping, always."
"Agreed."
"Two. Three clacks and two, every hour on the hour, from you to the rib, and if we miss two in a row we come in hot and we don't ask questions first."
"Agreed."
"Three. Nobody else comes here. Not Kenz, not Oliver, and above all not Nell, and June doesn't learn a single thing about where we are or how many we are or what's in the ground."
"Agreed."
"Four." Tom's voice went rough. "Three days. Not four. And at the end of three days, if that baby is still where she is, you come home anyway and we figure something else out, because I am not losing my wife to a six month old I've never met."
Kindra crossed the four feet between them and put both hands on his beard.
"That's a deal," she said.
They brought supplies at noon and they did it the careful way, which meant Tom carried everything to a rock two hundred yards out and left it and went away, and Kindra fetched it after he was gone.
Four eggs. Eleven pounds of rendered fat in a sealed crock. Two pounds of dried elk. Three pounds of fresh liver from the deer Tom had taken on the twenty fourth, wrapped in cloth and packed in snow from the north side of the gulch, which was the last snow left in four miles.
A small pot. A bar of soap. Cloth. Two hides.
And a folded piece of birch bark that said, in Tom's handwriting: THREE DAYS. I LOVE YOU. DON'T BE CLEVER.
Kindra started at half past twelve and she did it the way she had done it in December, which was slowly and with total discipline and with a great deal of explanation that the mother did not want and needed.
"First thing," she said. "Nothing big, ever. Six feedings a day minimum, eight if she'll take them, and every one of them small."
"She'll take more."
"She'll take more and it'll kill her," Kindra said. "That's the thing nobody knows and it's the thing that kills the ones who get rescued. A starved body can't handle a big load. It pulls minerals out of the blood to process it and the heart stops."
"That happened to a girl at the gymnasium," June said. "Nell told me about her."
"Ama."
"Yes."
"Then you already know."
She started with fat.
"Not the egg first. Fat first, in broth, thin, warm." Kindra melted a spoon of rendered elk into four ounces of broth and stirred it until it went cloudy. "Fat is the safest calorie there is for this. It doesn't demand anything from the body to process. Starch and sugar are the dangerous ones."
The baby took it from a cloth teat, a scrap of boiled linen twisted and soaked, and she took it with a desperation that made both women look away.
"Slow," Kindra said. "Take it out of her mouth. Yes, she'll scream. Take it out."
"That's cruel."
"It's the kindest thing in this camp." Kindra timed it. "Four ounces in fifteen minutes and then we stop for two hours."
At half past two, the first egg.
Kindra boiled it eight minutes, peeled it, discarded the white entirely.
"Why?"
"Because at six months the white can set off an allergy and the yolk can't, and because the white is the part with nothing in it."
She mashed the yolk with the back of a spoon and thinned it with warm broth until it was a paste.
"All of it. One yolk. That's a third of what she needs in a day, right there, in one spoon."
Wren ate the entire yolk in eleven minutes.
Then she fell asleep with her mouth open.
June watched her sleep and did not move for twenty minutes.
"She hasn't done that in a month," she said.
"Done what?"
"Slept after eating. She eats and then she's awake and she frets." June's voice was thin. "I thought it was colic. I thought I'd done something."
"It's hunger," Kindra said. "A hungry baby can't sleep. Their body won't let them, it keeps them awake looking for food. That's all that's ever been."
At five o'clock, the liver.
Kindra scraped it with the edge of a spoon, working across the grain, and got a tablespoon of dark red paste, and cooked it in fat for thirty seconds and mashed it with a quarter of a yolk.
Wren ate two teaspoons and made a face and then ate the rest.
"That's it," Kindra said. "That's the one. If she takes liver we've got her."
At eight, broth with marrow.
At eleven, fat in broth.
At two in the morning, a quarter yolk.
At five, fat in broth again.
And at six o'clock on the morning of the twenty eighth of April, Kindra Thorn was sitting by a fire under a rock overhang with a baby asleep on her chest and June Cullen asleep four feet away for the first time in two days, and she clacked three stones and then two,
and four hundred yards away on a rock rib her husband clacked three and two back.
She did it every hour for three days and she never missed one.
On the second day, June talked.
It came out the way it always did, in pieces, in no order, while her hands were busy.
She had come to the ranch in September, seven months pregnant, walking.
Wingman had let her stay.
"Everybody thought that meant he was soft," she said, "and then in October he put two men out in the snow for stealing and they didn't come back."
"Nell said that exact sentence in December."
"Then Nell was listening." June almost smiled. "That kid heard everything. Everybody talked in front of her like she was furniture."
"Tell me about him."
June was quiet for a while.
"He fed us," she said. "That's the thing I can't get around. Every day, all winter, everybody, weighed out on a board with a rock for a counterweight. Even the kids. Even me and I wasn't working."
"That's not nothing."
"It's not nothing and it's not enough, and here's what I've decided about it after seven months." June looked into the fire. "He didn't feed us because he cared. He fed us because a fed person works and a starved person steals, and he'd run the numbers."
"And in February?"
"In February the numbers changed."
She told it flatly.
On the thirty first of January, Wingman had come back from three days somewhere and had told the whole house that there were trucks on the river on the far side of the saddle.
On the first of February he had taken eleven men and gone east at four in the morning.
"Eleven?"
"Eleven, and four dogs, and all four rifles, and every round in the house."
"And what did he say?"
"He said, to the whole room, out loud." June's jaw worked.
"He said: there's people coming into my valley who don't know how to hold it. I'm going to go take the place they came from. Anybody who can walk nine miles on crust, come. Anybody who can't, stay, and there's eleven days of food in the cellar."
"Eleven days."
"Eleven days for nine people in the first week of February."
Kindra put her hand over her mouth.
"And then he left," June said. "And he never came back, and we never saw one of those eleven men again."
"Not one?"
"Cass came back in March," June said. "Alone."