Chapter 16 #4
"What's that mean?" Petey said.
"It means we stopped being people who are running out of things," Tom said.
The meat came in October and it came the way it had come the year before, which was in a rush and all at once.
The elk moved down on the eleventh and the camp was ready, because Tom had spent September building a throat.
He did it in the creek bottom where the willow narrowed between two cut banks and the elk had walked every autumn since before anybody was born, and he did it with eleven spears made by Hobby.
They were not bone.
Hobby had made the heads out of a truck leaf spring, forged and ground and tempered, eleven inches, socketed onto seasoned ash.
"That's better than anything anybody's had in this country in a hundred years," Tom said, holding one.
"That's a Chevrolet," Hobby said.
They took four elk in nine days.
Not by spear alone. The first one went onto the spears exactly as the spike bull had the year before.
The second and third they took with the .
30-06 at forty yards, one round each, from a blind, because there were eleven rounds in the box that Wingman had left and Tom had decided that four elk was exactly what those rounds were for.
The fourth one Cass took with a snare and a spear at a creek crossing, alone, in a way he would not explain fully and which McKenzie recorded in the book as CASS, 19 OCT, COW, CREEK CROSSING, METHOD SEE CASS.
Eleven hundred pounds of meat.
It took twenty people nine days to process it and the camp smelled of woodsmoke and blood and rendered fat, and the racks ran eighteen hours a day over four buried trenches, and Kindra ran the whole operation like a foreman.
"Thin," she said, forty times a day. "If you can't see light through it, it's too thick."
They had salt. Four pounds from the barn and eleven more that Loreen produced from a source she would not disclose for two days and then admitted was a mineral lick in the hills that she had known about since 1994.
They rendered a hundred and forty pounds of fat.
They made eleven gallons of pemmican, and Kindra taught the whole camp to do it and made every single person over the age of six make at least one batch with their own hands.
"Why everybody?" Frankie said. "It's four people's work."
"Because next year one of the four of us might be dead," Kindra said, "and because a thing only one person knows how to do isn't a skill, it's a liability."
They wrote it all down.
By the first of November, McKenzie Thorn's book was ninety one sheets of birch bark bound between two thin cedar boards with sinew, and it contained the planting dates and the frost dates and the yields and the four ways they had lost beans and the exact ratio of the soap and the method for the
snow shelter and eleven pages in Kindra's hand about wounds and fevers and what to do about each.
On the last page of the first volume, Tom made her write a list.
"Of what?"
"Of everybody," he said. "Name, age, what they can do. Everybody in this camp."
"Why?"
"Because in forty years somebody's going to read this and they're going to want to know who was here."
She wrote it.
Tom Thorn, 43. Kindra Thorn, 33. McKenzie Thorn, 13.
Oliver Thorn, 11. Sofie Thorn, 7. Nell, 9.
Loreen Tack, 62. Hobby Nils, 50. Dee Marchetti, 41.
Frankie Pell, 30. June Cullen, 28. Wren Cullen, 1.
Cass Tunny, 16. Birdy Sandoval, 11. Petey, 7.
And the four others who had come out of the ranch house and whose names Tom had made himself learn on the first day and had never once gotten wrong since.
"That's nineteen," McKenzie said.
"And the dog."
"The dog goes in the book?"
"The dog goes in the book," Tom said.
Winter came on the ninth of November with fourteen inches and it did not stop.
And it was, by every measure, an ordinary winter, and Tom Thorn spent four months being quietly astonished by that.
There was enough wood, because eleven people had cut it in August instead of two cutting it in October.
There was enough food, because there was nine hundred pounds of squash and two hundred and eighty of beans and eleven hundred of elk and four hundred of root vegetables in sand.
There were enough hands, so that when it went to twenty eight below on the fourth of January nobody had to go out in it, because everything had been brought in on the second.
Nobody came.
That was the thing Tom could not get used to. He ran the watch rotation all winter and never once relaxed it, and there were three false alarms and one genuine one on the twentieth of January when Shyla put four men out of the barn at two in the morning and they ran and left a sled behind.
Tom did not chase them.
"Four men on foot in January," he told the camp, in the morning. "They took nothing. They were in that barn about eleven minutes and the dog put them out."
"So what do we do?"
"We double the barn watch for two weeks and we do nothing else," Tom said. "They'll be back or they won't. If they come back we'll talk to them at four hundred yards, and if they come back in numbers we'll be in the creek bottom in eight minutes."
"That's it?"
"That's it. There's no rule that says we have to respond to everything."
Nobody came back.
On the eleventh of February, Kindra told Tom she was pregnant.
She told him at four in the morning in the dark in a half dug shelter with four other people asleep eleven feet away, which was not how either of them would have chosen it.
Tom did not say anything for a while.
"Say something."
"I'm doing arithmetic," he said.
"Don't do arithmetic."
"I'm going to do arithmetic for about thirty seconds and then I'm going to be happy, and I'd rather do it in that order," Tom said. "October."
"Early October."
"That's after harvest."
"That's after harvest and before the worst of it, and it's the best month in the year to do it, and I did not plan it."
"Kindra."
"What?"
"I'm forty three."
"I'm thirty three."
"There's no hospital."
"I know exactly how many hospitals there are," Kindra said, "and I have delivered nothing and assisted at nothing and read about it in 2013, and Loreen has done it four times, twice on a ranch,
and she says she can do it and that she'd rather do it in a camp with twenty people and a fire than in most of the hospitals she's been in."
Tom lay in the dark.
"Are you frightened?" he said.
"Yes."
"Good. So am I."
"Is that the happy part?"
"No," Tom said, and rolled over, and put his forehead against hers.
"The happy part is that in October there's going to be a person who was never alive before the lights went out and never will have been, and who's going to grow up in a camp with a forge and a garden and a book with everything in it, and who's going to think all of this is just how the world is."
"That's the happy part?"
"That's the happy part," Tom said. "That's the whole thing. That's what we've been building since February and I didn't have a word for it until right now."
Spring came early and wet.
They planted on the fourth of May with four times the seed and eleven times the knowledge, and McKenzie's book told them, in Tom's own handwriting, to hill dirt over the bean seedlings if the evening went cold,
and on the eighteenth of May it went cold and they hilled them and lost four plants out of two hundred.
"It worked," Tom said, standing in the bean bed in the morning, knocking dirt off seedlings with his hand.
"You wrote it down," McKenzie said.
"You wrote it down."
And on the twenty seventh of May, a year to the day since Tom Thorn had walked into a barn and found two hundred and eleven pounds of elk behind a wall of hay bales, Cass Tunny came down off the bench at six in the morning and did not run, and said:
"There's a cairn on the road."
Tom stood up.
"Where?"
"Mile and a half. Right at the top of the rise where the road comes into the flats." Cass's face was very still. "And it's not like the others."
"What's different?"
"It's finished," Cass said.
Tom took McKenzie and Cass and they went up at seven and they circled it wide for forty minutes before they went near it, because that was the rule and it had never once been broken.
It stood in the middle of the road at the top of the rise where a person coming from the east would see it from a quarter mile away.
Flat river rock, laid in courses, chinked with smaller stone.
But it was not three feet.
It was five, and it was capped with a single flat slab that had been carried from somewhere, because there was no rock like it within a mile.
And at the base of it, laid in a neat row on the ground, were three things.
A hatchet head with no haft in it.
A folded strip of red cloth.
And a boot.
One boot, worn out, the sole separated at the toe, and Tom crouched and turned it over without touching the rest.
The right heel had a chunk out of it.
He knelt there in the road for a long moment.
Then he looked up at the cap slab, and there was writing on it, cut deep, and it was four lines like everything he had ever written, and it was the last one.
IF YOU ARE STANDING HERE THEN YOU CAME EAST IN THE SPRING LIKE I SAID
I AM NOT UNDER THIS
DO NOT DIG
I PUT IT HERE SO THERE WOULD BE SOMETHING ON THIS ROAD THAT SAYS SOMEBODY WAS HERE
THE OLD MAN WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU AND WRONG ABOUT ME AND THAT IS THE WHOLE ACCOUNT