Chapter 15
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Tom was aware of the fire and of the baby's breathing and of a fifteen year old boy sitting with his hands flat on his knees waiting to be called a liar.
"Cass," he said.
"I know how it sounds."
"You don't, actually. Tell me how you think it sounds."
The boy's jaw worked.
"It sounds like I've been working for him the whole time," he said. "It sounds like the meat in the tree was his idea and the map was his idea and June coming here was his idea, and that I walked down here today to finish it."
"That's exactly how it sounds."
"I know."
"So why'd you say it?"
Cass looked up.
"Because you asked me straight," he said, "and because the fella with the two pistols told me something in July and I've thought about it about four hundred times since."
"What did he tell you?"
"I asked him how you know if somebody's all right." Cass's ears had gone red. "Because I was fourteen and my mother was dying and I didn't know who to be around. And he said, son, watch what a man does when it costs him."
Tom sat very still.
"He said that to my daughter," he said. "Different words. Same thing."
"And I figured, you asked me a question that costs me, and if I lie about it then I'm not." He stopped. "Then I'm not anything."
Kindra took her hand off the Beretta.
"All right," Tom said. "Now tell me the four months in between."
"What?"
"You said the fourth of February. You didn't get back to the ranch until the eleventh of March." Tom leaned forward. "That's five weeks, son. Where were you?"
Cass Tunny looked at the fire.
"With him," he said.
June made a sound.
"You said you came back alone."
"I came back alone. I didn't say I left alone." The boy's voice had gone flat and fast. "He couldn't walk. He had a hole in him the size of my thumb front and back and he was four days from dying in the timber and I was fifteen and I had a rifle with three rounds and nowhere to go."
"So you stayed."
"I stayed five weeks in a cut bank hole above the flats and I kept him alive and I don't know why and I've thought about it every day since and I still don't know."
Nobody said anything.
"How?" Kindra said finally.
"How what?"
"How did you keep a man with a through and through shoulder wound alive in a hole in February?"
"Snow and fire and rabbits," Cass said. "And he told me what to do. He told me all of it. He'd lie there grey as a fish and tell me exactly what to do and then pass out for four hours."
"Tell me what he told you."
"Why?"
"Because I want to hear it," Kindra said, "and because how a man treats a wound tells me more about him than anything he's ever said out loud."
Cass counted it off on his fingers, and Tom watched him do it and recognized the gesture and felt something cold go down his back, because it was his own gesture and it was Chip Charter's gesture and apparently it was Wallace Wingman's gesture too.
"One. Don't close it. He said a hole through meat wants to drain and if you sew it shut you've built a bag for it to rot in."
"That's right," Kindra said.
"Two. Pack it open with clean cloth boiled and dried, and pull the pack and put a new one in twice a day, and it'll hurt every time and it has to happen every time."
"That's right too."
"Three. Hot compresses, as hot as he could stand, four times a day, ten minutes."
"Four?"
"Four was yarrow if I could find it and I couldn't for three weeks, and pine pitch on the outside edges only and never in the hole."
"Cass."
"What?"
"Who taught him that?" Kindra said.
The boy frowned.
"I don't know. He just knew it."
"Because I told that exact list to a man named Tyler Clubman on my porch in October," Kindra said slowly, "and he died in a wash two miles above the flats with a healing abscess on his back, and somebody would have found him and looked at him."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"That's a reach," Tom said.
"It's a complete reach and I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying that in this valley there are about four people left who know anything, and everything any of us knows came from somebody else."
"Chip," Tom said.
"Chip, and whoever Chip got it from, and whoever they got it from."
Tom rubbed his face.
"Cass, finish it. What happened at the end of five weeks?"
"He got up."
"When?"
"About the sixth of March. He could stand and he could walk a little and the hole had closed on the back side and was still open on the front." Cass's face did something complicated. "And on the ninth of March he took the three rounds out of the rifle."
"He took the rounds."
"He handed me back the rifle and he took the three rounds out of it and put them in his pocket."
"Why?"
"He said, if you've got rounds you'll use them, and if you use them somebody'll hear it, and you're fifteen and you'll shoot at the wrong thing." The boy's voice had gone tight. "And I said that's not fair. And he said no it isn't."
"And then?"
"And then on the tenth he said go home. And I said come with me. And he said no. And I said why not."
Cass stopped.
"Say it," Tom said.
"He said, because there's nothing at that ranch I can eat that somebody else can't eat better."
The fire popped.
"That's the whole thing," Kindra said.
"That's what he said."
"And you haven't seen him since?"
"Once." Cass's head came up. "On the nineteenth of April."
Tom went completely still.
"Where?"
"On the pass."
"Say all of it."
"I was coming back from the tree," Cass said, "the long way, eleven miles, and I came up over the shoulder above the notch to look at the man who sits there, because I look at him every time."
"And?"
"And he wasn't there," Cass said. "And there was somebody else up in the rocks above where he sits. Two hundred yards above him. Just sitting."
"Did you see his face?"
"No."
"Then how do you know?"
"Because he was sitting the way he sits," Cass said, "with his back on a rock and his knees up and his head down like he's asleep and he isn't."
They did not decide anything that night, which was Tom's rule, and for once nobody fought him about it.
They came off the rock rib on the first of May.
That was Tom's decision too and he explained it at the fire with the whole family and June and Cass and everybody sitting in one place for the first time.
"Two reasons," he said. "One, we've been camped within four hundred yards of one spot for eleven days and that's how people die. Two, the moment the boy walked down that rib, this location stopped being ours."
"I didn't tell anybody," Cass said.
"I believe you. And you didn't tell anybody about the tree either, but Birdy knew, and Nell told Birdy, and June walked eleven miles to a drawing."
Tom spread his hands. "That's how it goes. Nothing stays secret. You don't build a plan around a secret, you build it around a schedule, because a schedule you can change."
They moved four miles west and made a camp in a fold above the river with two escape routes and a spring that ran out of clean rock, and it took a day and a half.
And the first evening in the new camp, Sofie Thorn met a baby.
Kindra had been carrying Wren for four days by then, in shifts with June, because June was so far past exhausted that she had stopped being able to judge her own state.
Sofie came and stood in front of them.
"Can I see?"
"Come sit down."
She sat down cross legged and Kindra put the baby in her lap with both hands under her, and Sofie looked at her for a long time without saying anything.
"She's little," she said.
"She's very little."
"Is she going to be all right?"
Kindra looked at June across the fire.
"Say it," June said.
"I don't know," Kindra said. "She's better than she was four days ago. She's taking an egg yolk and a spoon of liver every day and she slept five hours last night and she's got about eleven days' worth more fat on her than she had. But she's got a long way to go and she might not."
Sofie absorbed that.
"Okay," she said.
Then she said, "I'll be in charge of her."
"You'll what?"
"I'm in charge of the boil. And Shyla's feet." Sofie looked up. "I can be in charge of the baby too."
June Cullen put both hands over her face.
And the extraordinary thing, Tom thought, watching from the other side of the fire, was that it worked.
Sofie Thorn, six years old, became the baby's person over the next nine days in a way that no adult could have arranged.
She was not useful in the way Kindra was useful.
She could not judge a feeding or spot a problem.
But she was there, all day, every day, and she narrated, and she carried her in a sling for an hour at a time so June could sleep four hours instead of two, and she sang a song about pinecone people that had no tune.
And June slept.
That was the thing nobody had accounted for. By the sixth day June Cullen had slept twenty two hours out of seventy two instead of eight, and her face had changed, and on the seventh day at four in the afternoon she said, in a stunned voice, "I think there's something."
"What?"
"There's something. There's a little." She was staring at nothing. "It's not gone."
Kindra came fast.
"How long since you last tried?"
"Three weeks. Maybe four. It stopped and I stopped trying because it was."
"Because it was awful."
"Yes."
"June, it doesn't come back from nothing. But it comes back from almost nothing, and it comes back on fat and sleep and the baby being at you, and you've had all three for a week for the first time since January."
Kindra's voice was very careful. "Try her. Right now. And then try her every time, before every feeding, even if there's nothing, and especially if there's nothing."
"Why especially?"
"Because it's the asking that makes it."
They worked on it for nine days and it did not fix anything and it changed everything.
By the tenth of May, Wren was getting perhaps a fifth of what she needed from her mother and four fifths from egg and liver and marrow and fat, and she had gained enough that her cheeks had started to come back,