Chapter 15 #3
"For four days?"
"That's not what it says. It says the man's people left him up here four days." Tom looked at the body. "It says he wasn't going to sit with him any longer, which is a different thing, and I don't know how long that was."
Cass had gone the color of ash.
"That's his writing," he said.
"I know."
"That's his."
"Cass, sit down before you fall down."
The boy sat down on a rock and put his head between his knees.
"He was up here," he said. "On the nineteenth. I saw him and I didn't know and I walked past."
"You saw somebody in the rocks and you walked past, which is exactly the right decision," Tom said. "You did not do anything wrong."
"I could have."
"You could have walked up to an armed man alone at fifteen with an empty rifle and found out what he was," Tom said. "Yes. And you'd probably be alive and you might not be."
McKenzie was still looking at the bark.
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"The last part."
"I know."
"Go down and look in the barn."
"I know, Kenz."
"That's an instruction."
"That's an instruction on a piece of bark in a dead man's hands on a mountain pass," Tom said, "and I want everybody to notice that this is the eleventh time somebody has told this family where to go and what to look at, and we have never once done it on the schedule we were given."
They went down the east side that morning with forty pounds each and they did not go to the barn.
Tom took them into the creek bottom instead, a mile and a quarter south of the buildings, and they cached the load in the timber and came back the next day.
"You're not going to look?" Cass said.
"I'm going to look at the ranch for four days first," Tom said.
"From up on the bench, with glasses I haven't got, at three different times of day. And then I'm going to walk the whole property in a circle at four hundred yards and read the ground. And then, maybe, on about the twenty ninth, I'm going to look in a barn."
"But what if."
"Cass, has anybody been in that barn since March?"
"Loreen goes in for the seed can."
"How often?"
"Twice a week."
"And what's she seen?"
The boy stopped.
"Nothing," he said.
"Then whatever's in that barn has been in that barn for six weeks and it'll be there on the twenty ninth," Tom said. "And if it won't, then it was a thing designed to make me hurry, and I'd rather lose it."
He watched the ranch for four days and what he found was worse than anything in a barn.
He found the shape of what nine people had been living in, and it took him until the third day to see it properly, because he was looking for threats and the problem was not a threat.
"They're not surviving," he told Kindra, on the twenty seventh, back in the creek bottom. "They're waiting."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning nobody's doing anything." He sat down heavily. "Kindra, I watched that place for four days. Nobody went out. Not once. Two hundred yards to the creek for water, three times a day, and back. That's it. That's the entire radius of nine people."
"There's no firewood stacked," McKenzie said. "I looked for it. There's a pile of about a day's worth by the little house and it's all broken fence."
"They're burning their own fence," Tom said.
"Why?"
"Because there's nobody who can cut timber and haul it, and because the ones who could have been gone since February, and because when you've had four months of nothing happening, you stop starting things."
"That's how Christina Clubman looked," Kindra said quietly.
"Yeah."
"That's what surrender looks like from outside."
"Yeah."
They walked in on the twenty eighth of May at ten in the morning, in the open, with their hands out.
Tom did it that way on purpose and he thought about who he had learned it from the entire four hundred yards.
Cass went in front because Cass was known.
"Hello the house!" he shouted, from a hundred yards. "Loreen! It's Cass! There's people with me and they're all right!"
The door of the little house opened four inches.
"How many?" a voice called.
"Eleven!"
"Eleven?"
"Loreen, it's all right."
"You say that like a boy who's had a hot meal," the voice said. "Stop where you are."
They stopped.
An old woman came out onto the step with a shotgun and she held it like a person who had decided a long time ago that she would use it and had never enjoyed thinking about it.
Loreen Tack was sixty two and she looked eighty and she had the flattest eyes Tom had seen since Nell's.
"June Cullen," she said.
"It's me, Loreen."
"You left in the night."
"I told you I was going."
"You told me at two in the morning while I was half asleep and then you were gone and I have spent four weeks deciding whether I forgive you." The old woman's eyes went to the sling. "Is she alive?"
"She's alive."
"Bring her here."
June brought her.
Loreen Tack looked at that baby for about eleven seconds and then she put the shotgun against the doorframe and sat down on the step and cried like somebody being pulled apart.
Tom looked away, and so did everybody else, because there are things you do not watch.
The introductions took two hours and Tom insisted on doing them properly.
"Every person says their name and one thing they can do," he said. "Ours too. Everybody. That's the first rule of this and we're going to keep it forever, because the worst thing that can happen to fifteen people in one camp is that nobody knows who's good at what."
It took two hours because eleven of them were strangers to nine of them and because everybody kept crying.
Hobby Nils was fifty and had one leg below the knee and a stump he had cared for with a discipline that Kindra examined and pronounced better than anything she could have done. He had been a farrier and then a fabricator and he could make almost anything if you sat him down with material.
Frankie Pell was thirty and had run a kitchen in Butte and could stretch a pot further than anybody.
Dee Marchetti did not speak and had not for a year, and could read and write, and had dug the entire ranch garden alone in 2025 and would do it again.
Petey was seven and hid behind Frankie the whole time.
And Birdy.
Birdy Sandoval was eleven and thin as a rake handle and had a scarred hole where her left ear had been, and she came out of the little house at the very end, last, walking slowly, and stopped about eleven feet away from the group.
Nell had been standing behind Kindra for two hours.
She came out.
The two girls looked at each other for a long moment across eleven feet of dirt.
"You came back," Birdy said.
"No I didn't," Nell said.
"You did."
"I didn't. I sent food and I sent a drawing and I stayed on the other side of the mountain and then eleven people carried me over here."
Nell's voice was shaking so hard it was barely working.
"I said I'd come back and I didn't come back, and I want to say that out loud in front of everybody so nobody tells you a nicer version later."
Birdy Sandoval walked eleven feet and hit her hard enough to knock her sideways onto her bad foot, and then held on.
"I got your food," she said, into Nell's shoulder.
"I know."
"I wrote my name."
"I know. I saw it. I can read now."
"Me too."
"I know," Nell said. "I could tell."
They got to the barn at four in the afternoon and Tom did it alone, over the objections of four people.
"Loreen goes in twice a week," Kindra said.
"Loreen goes in and gets a can off a shelf inside the door."
"Tom."
"Kindra, it's four days late instead of six weeks early, and I'm going in alone, and everybody else is going to be two hundred yards away in the willows where a thing going wrong in a barn doesn't touch them."
He went in.
It was a pole barn, sixty feet by forty, with a dirt floor and a loft over the east third and two vehicles in it that had not run since the ninth of March of the previous year.
The trucks were gone. There were ruts where they had been and the ruts were dated to February.
Fuel drums along the north wall, four of them, and Tom rapped them with his knuckles and got the sound of empty from three and something from the fourth.
The seed can was on a shelf inside the door, exactly where Loreen said it was.
He went all the way to the back.
And in the northeast corner, behind a stack of broken pallets, somebody had built a wall.
It was four feet high, made of hay bales, eleven of them, stacked two deep in a rectangle about eight feet by six, and the top was covered with loose boards and a canvas tarp weighted at the corners with rocks.
Tom stood and looked at it for four minutes before he touched anything.
Then he took the rocks off one at a time and folded the tarp back and lifted the boards.
Inside, in the dry, out of the light, on a floor of loose hay:
Two hundred and eleven pounds of dried elk in rawhide bundles, wrapped and labeled with tally marks cut into the hide.
Sixty pounds of dried fish.
Eleven gut skins of rendered fat, sealed with tallow.
A crock of salt, about four pounds.
Four coils of snare wire.
A hundred feet of rope.
Two axe heads, a bow saw blade in oiled cloth, and four files.
A case of .30-06 ammunition with eleven boxes in it, unopened.
And a cardboard box, sealed with tape, with something written on the top in square capitals.
Tom sat down on the dirt floor of a barn and did not move for a while.
Then he cut the tape.
Inside was seed.
Not envelopes. Seed in quantity: four one gallon coffee cans, sealed, and each one labeled in the same hand.
BEANS 4 KINDS 2019 AND 2021
SQUASH WINTER 2021
CORN FLINT 2018 SOME WILL GROW
BEETS CARROT TURNIP KALE 2020 2021
And under the cans, flat on the bottom of the box, a single sheet of birch bark with more writing on it than anything Tom had ever seen from him.
He read it once in the barn and then he carried the box and the bark two hundred yards out to the willows and put them down in front of twenty people and read it out loud.
IF THIS IS THE THORN MAN THEN YOU CAME IN MAY AND I WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU AGAIN
IF THIS IS SOMEBODY ELSE THEN PUT IT BACK
I TOOK 11 MEN EAST IN FEbrUARY AND I KNEW 4 WOULD NOT COME BACK
IT WAS 9