Chapter 14 #4
"He lived in my woodshed for eleven days and he taught me everything I know, and he died a mile and a quarter from here on the seventh of October and I built the wall over him myself."
"I."
"Eat first."
Cass Tunny ate two bowls of fish stew and cried into the second one without appearing to notice he was doing it, and then he talked for two hours.
He confirmed every piece of June's account and added four things that mattered.
The first was the tree.
"How'd you find it?" Tom asked.
"Birdy told me about it in November. Nell told her."
"And you went nine miles to put food in it."
"Eleven. I don't take the pass." The boy looked at his hands. "There's a man on the pass four days out of seven."
"Whose man?"
"I don't know. He's got a coat like the orange beard's people wore and he sits up in the rocks above the notch and he's been there since about the twentieth of March."
Tom and Kindra looked at each other.
"Say that again."
"There's a fella sitting on the pass," Cass said. "Four days a week, roughly. Not every day. He comes up in the morning and he's gone by dark."
"He's watching the pass."
"He's watching the east side," Cass said. "That's the thing. He sits facing east. He doesn't care about this side at all."
Tom sat back slowly.
"He's watching the flats," he said.
"That's what I figured."
"Somebody survived February," Kindra said.
"Somebody survived February and has been sitting on a notch in the mountains for six weeks watching a ranch," Tom said. "And that's why an eleven mile walk instead of a nine mile walk, and that's why we've had elk in a tree for six weeks."
The second thing was the elk.
"Where's the meat from, Cass?"
"I killed a cow in the second week of April."
"With an empty rifle?"
"With a snare and a rock," Cass said, and then, at Tom's face: "Not a snare for the elk. A snare for rabbits. I got about forty rabbits between March and April and then in April the elk came back through the bottom and one of them went into the creek at a cut bank and got stuck in the mud."
"She got stuck."
"They do that in April. The ice goes out and the banks are soft and they're weak from winter." He was talking fast now. "Chip told me that. He said in April you don't hunt elk, you watch the mud, because every year the river gives you one."
Tom put his hand over his eyes.
"He said that to me in September," he said. "Word for word. I forgot it entirely."
"I killed her with a rock and the butt of the rifle and it took me a long time and it was bad," Cass said. "I'm not proud of how it went."
"How much did you get?"
"Two hundred and eleven pounds off her, and I did it alone over two days and I hauled it four miles."
"Cass."
"What?"
"That's the best thing anybody in this valley has done all year," Tom said.
The boy did not know what to do with his face.
The third thing was the seeds, and Tom made him list them.
"There's a coffee can."
"What's in it?"
"Envelopes. Loreen counts them about twice a week."
"How many?"
"Nineteen."
Kindra said, "Do you know what's in them?"
"Some of them's got writing." Cass frowned. "Beans, there's four of beans. Squash, three. Beets. Carrots, two. There's one that says Kale and one that says Turnip and there's four that just say a year on them."
"What year?"
"Twenty nineteen."
"That's fine," Kindra said. "Beans and squash keep four or five years if they're dry and cold and that barn's been both."
"Will they grow?"
"Some of them. Not all. You lose maybe half the germination at five years but half of nineteen envelopes is still a garden."
The fourth thing was the one that changed the shape of everything, and Cass said it sideways at the end of the second hour, as an afterthought.
"You got a dog?"
The whole camp stopped.
"Say that again," Tom said.
"There's a dog been coming round the ranch since about the end of March." Cass shrugged. "Big pale one. Won't come in. She sits up on the hill about two hundred yards out and watches the house and then she's gone, and then four days later she's back."
Kindra had gone white.
"What color?"
"White. Kind of yellow white."
"How big?"
"Big. Wolfy."
"Cass," Tom said, and his voice was not steady. "Is there anything wrong with her shoulder?"
The boy's eyebrows went up.
"She's got three stripes on the right side," he said. "Grey. Like she got raked."
Nobody said anything for four or five seconds.
"That's our dog," Kindra said.
"She's yours?"
"Her name's Shyla and she's been with us eleven years and we lost her on the second of February and my six year old has asked about her every single day since."
Cass Tunny looked around at the two adults.
"She's alive," he said. "She's skinny but she's alive. Birdy's been leaving her fish heads."
Kindra sat down on a rock and put her face in her hands.
"Is she." Cass hesitated. "Is she all right? I mean, would she come to you?"
"She'd come to my daughter from four hundred yards."
"Then somebody ought to go get her, because she's not eating right," Cass said. "She's hunting and she's not good at it. She got a marmot one time and she was chewing on it up on the hill and Petey watched her the whole afternoon."
Tom got up and walked eleven feet away and stood with his back to everybody for a minute.
Then he came back.
"Cass," he said. "How long does it take you to get home?"
"Two days, the way I go."
"And how long the short way, over the pass?"
"A day. But there's a man on the pass."
"Four days out of seven."
"Four days out of seven."
Tom looked at Kindra.
"Say it," she said.
"I'm going to say four things and I want everybody here to argue with me, including the boy."
"Go ahead."
"One. There are nine people on the far side of that saddle and eight of them can't hunt, and the one who can is fifteen and has an empty rifle and has been hauling meat eleven miles a week to feed us."
"That's true," Cass said.
"Two. They've got nineteen envelopes of seed and we've got none, and a hand pump well and three buildings and a barn and flat open ground, and we've got a burned bench that every raider in this valley has walked across."
"That's also true," Kindra said.
"Three. There's a man sitting on the pass watching east, which means there's something left of the orange beard's people, and it means they are looking at the flats and not at us,
and it means that ranch is the safest place in this valley right now for exactly as long as somebody else is worth looking at more."
"And four?"
Tom looked at June, and at the baby asleep against her chest, and at a fifteen year old boy with a rifle he had not been able to load in two months.
"Four," he said. "There are fifteen of us."
Kindra's head came up.
"Say that number again."
"Six of us. Nine of them." Tom spread his hands. "Fifteen. And I have spent seven months building everything around six, and running from everything because six people can't hold anything, and the entire reason we've survived is that we never once stood still."
"And you want to stand still."
"I want to stop being six," Tom said. "That's not the same thing. Fifteen people can put a garden in and run a trapline and hold a watch rotation and not be exhausted, and six people can't do any of it and I've known that since October and I've had no way to fix it."
"There's only one of them that can work," Cass said.
"There's one of you that can hunt. That's different." Tom turned to him. "Can Loreen sew?"
"She does all of it."
"Can the one legged man make things sitting down?"
"Hobby makes everything. He made the snare wire. He makes the."
"Can Birdy carry water?"
"Birdy does carry water."
"Can the two women who came in October do anything at all?"
Cass thought.
"Frankie can cook," he said. "And Dee doesn't talk much but she dug the whole garden last year by herself."
Tom sat back.
"Then there's nine people over there and eight of them work," he said, "and the only thing wrong with them is that nobody's brought them any food since the eleventh of March."
Nobody said anything.
"Tom," Kindra said quietly. "That's eleven miles. With Sofie and Nell and a hundred and ninety pounds in the ground on this side."
"I know."
"And it's a place he named on a rock."
"I know exactly what it is."
"He wrote go there in April."
"He wrote go to the flats in April," Tom said. "Not the ranch. The flats. And every single thing we've learned in six weeks says he was sorting his house in February and that the people he left behind are the people he didn't need."
"That doesn't make it not a trap."
"No," Tom said. "It doesn't. And there's one more thing and I want it on the table before anybody decides anything."
"What?"
Tom looked at Cass Tunny.
"Son," he said. "On the eleventh of March, when you walked back into that ranch alone. Did anybody send you?"
The boy's face went completely still.
Tom watched him and did not say anything else.
Eleven seconds went by.
"He did," Cass said.
Kindra's hand went to the Beretta without her appearing to notice.
"Say the whole thing," Tom said.
"I wasn't going to tell you."
"I know you weren't. Say it anyway."
Cass Tunny put both hands flat on his knees the way a person does when they have decided to go through with something.
"On the fourth of February," he said, "up in the timber past the flats, he found me. And he'd been shot through the top of the shoulder and he was grey. And he gave me his rifle and he said, go back to the ranch, and don't tell anybody you saw me,
and in the spring there's going to be people on the other side of that mountain, and when there is, you feed them."
Nobody moved.
"And I said why," Cass said. "And he said, because I've run out of road, and they haven't."