Chapter 17
They did not dig.
That was the first decision and Tom made it standing in the road with his hand on the cap slab, and he made it out loud so there would be a witness.
"Nobody touches this cairn," he said. "Not today, not ever. Not for curiosity and not for the rock."
"Why not the rock?" Cass said. "There's four hundred pounds of flat stone in that and we've got no chimney at the forge."
"Because he asked."
"He's not here."
"That's exactly why," Tom said. "Cass, a request you can ignore without consequence is the only kind that tells you anything about you."
They took the three things at the base.
Tom debated it for eleven minutes and took them, and afterward he wrote his reasoning in the book because he had started doing that with every hard call.
The hatchet head went to Hobby, who looked at it for a long time and did not haft it and put it in the box of stock iron at the forge and never used it for anything.
The red cloth went into Tom's chest pocket with the two pieces of bark and the four rings of scorched tin.
The boot he burned.
"Why burn it?" McKenzie asked.
"Because it's a dead man's boot and it's got a mark on it that's been in my head for nineteen months," Tom said, "and I'd like to stop reading that heel in every patch of mud I ever look at again."
"Do you think he's dead?"
Tom fed the fire.
"I think a man who can't carry forty pounds and can't work a revolver and can't walk in that boot put down every single thing he had on a road where we'd find it," he said. "And then wrote four lines that end with the whole account."
"That's not an answer."
"No," Tom said. "It isn't."
They went east on the fourth of June and this time Tom went.
The council voted on it, three to two, and Kindra was one of the two and said so and then supported it, which was the thing about Kindra that Tom had never once been able to describe to anybody.
"You're the only person who's talked his way through a fence line twice," she said. "Chip and Cass. Both times you did it by standing forty feet back and asking questions. Fine. Go do it."
"That's a yes?"
"That's a lost vote and an honest opinion and full support," Kindra said, "and I want everybody in this camp to watch how that's done, because in ten years there's going to be a council meeting where somebody loses a vote about something that matters more than this."
Four went: Tom, Cass, Frankie Pell, and Dee.
Tom picked them and explained the picks, because he had learned that too.
"Cass because he's sixteen and he's been over more of this country than anybody and he's the best walker here. Frankie because if we end up at a fire with strangers I want somebody who can cook,
and because she argued against this for four days and I want the person who thinks it's a bad idea standing there while we do it."
"And Dee?" Frankie said.
"Because Dee doesn't talk," Tom said, "and because when four people arrive at a house, the one who doesn't talk sees everything."
Dee Marchetti wrote on her board: GOOD.
They took four days of food, the .30-06 with four rounds, and a pack that had nothing in it except eleven pounds of dried elk, four pounds of pemmican, two bars of soap, and a coffee can with one cup of bean seed and one cup of squash seed in it.
"What's that for?" Cass said.
"That's the whole trip," Tom said.
They walked four miles east on the road on the fourth of June and lay up on a bench above the big bend and watched for two days.
It was worse than McKenzie had reported in September, and it was worse in the specific way that Tom had been afraid of.
There were not eleven people anymore.
There were seven.
"Four men, three women, four kids," Tom said, on the first evening, flat on his belly in the sage. "That's what Kenz counted in September. I'm getting two men, two women, three kids."
"Four fewer," Cass said.
"Four fewer, and the ones missing are the ones you'd expect to still be there."
"Which is?"
"Two of the men," Tom said. "Look at who's carrying water."
The two who were carrying water were a woman of about fifty and a child of maybe nine.
The men, both of them, sat.
They sat by the door of the house and they had a rifle leaning on the wall between them and they did not get up all day except twice, and Tom lay on that bench for two days and watched it and felt something cold settle in.
"That's not a family," he said, on the second evening.
"What is it?"
"That's two men and five people they're eating."
Dee wrote on her board: AGREE. WATCH THE TALL ONE.
"What about him?"
She wrote: HE COUNTS THE FISH.
Tom looked through the willow at four hundred yards for another hour.
She was right. The tall man went to the drying rack four times a day and counted, and the woman of about fifty came nowhere near it, and at the evening meal the tall man handed things out.
"He's running a ration," Frankie said.
"So did Wingman," Cass said. "Everybody ran a ration all winter. That's not."
"He's running a ration and he's not hauling water," Tom said. "That's the difference. Wingman weighed it out on a board and then walked eleven men over a saddle in February and didn't come back. That's a bad man doing arithmetic. This is something else."
"What is it?"
"This is two fellas who've worked out that if you're the one with the rifle you don't have to carry anything."
They were going to leave on the seventh.
Tom had decided it on the second night and the whole reasoning was in his head and was clean: two armed men who do no work are not people you approach at four hundred yards with a coffee can of seed, they are people you note and avoid and reconsider in a year.
And then at five in the morning on the seventh of June, the tall man hit the nine year old.
It was not remarkable. That was the terrible part. It was a cuff across the back of the head, for something to do with a bucket, and it was so casual and so practiced that the child did not even react, just picked the bucket back up.
Tom heard Frankie Pell make a sound beside him in the sage.
"Don't," he said.
"I'm not."
"Frankie."
"I said I'm not." Her hands were shaking. "I'm just going to lie here and I'm going to remember that, and you're going to have to decide something, and I want you to know I'm going to hold you to whatever it is."
Tom lay in the sage for another hour.
Then he said, "All right. Here's the problem and I'm going to say all of it out loud."
"Go ahead," Cass said.
"There are five people down there who need to not be down there. Two women, three children."
"Yes."
"And there are two men with two rifles and nine rounds, or nine rounds as of last September, and possibly fewer, and possibly more."
"Yes."
"And there are four of us with one rifle and four rounds, four hundred yards from a house, eleven miles from home, with no way to get a message back and no support."
Dee wrote: AND WE ARE NOT KILLERS.
Tom looked at the board for a long moment.
"That's the actual sentence," he said. "That's the one. Dee, I've been lying here for two days trying to find that and you just wrote it."
"What does it change?" Frankie said.
"It changes everything, because every plan I've built in my head for two days has had a version in it where four of us come over that rise and two men decide it isn't worth it, and every single one of those plans depends on those men believing we'd do it."
"Would we?"
Tom did not answer for a while.
"I would," he said. "If they came at my camp. I'd have done it in February and I'd do it now and I've made my peace with that. But going four hundred yards downhill to start it is a different thing, and once this camp does that once, it's the kind of camp that does that."
"So we leave," Cass said.
"So we leave and we come back in a year and there's three people down there instead of seven."
"Then what?"
Tom rolled onto his back in the sage and looked at the sky and thought about a cairn and a fence line and an old man with two pistols talking too much.
"We do it the way it's always worked," he said.
They did not go to the house.
On the eighth of June, four hundred yards from the big bend, Tom Thorn built a cache.
Not hidden. The opposite.
He built it in the open at the head of the draw where the women went for water, two hundred yards from the house, in a place where anybody hauling a bucket would walk within eleven feet of it and where anybody sitting by the door of the house could not see it because of the shoulder of the hill.
He built it as a cairn, because that was the language this valley had learned to speak.
Flat rock, laid in courses, three feet, and a cavity in the middle covered with a slab.
In the cavity he put the eleven pounds of dried elk, the four pounds of pemmican, both bars of soap, and the coffee can with the bean seed and the squash seed.
And on the flat slab that capped it, Tom cut four lines with a nail, and it took him two hours and his hands cramped and he did not stop.
He cut:
THIS IS FOR THE ONES WHO CARRY THE WATER
THERE IS MORE OF IT WEST
FOLLOW THE ROAD TO THE FLATS AND THEN THE CREEK SOUTH
COME IN THE OPEN AND CALL OUT
NOBODY WILL SHOOT YOU
And then, because he thought about it for a long time and decided it mattered more than anything else on the rock:
WE ARE 19 AND WE HAVE FOOD AND WE DO NOT KEEP PEOPLE
They lay up on the bench for one more day to see who found it.
The woman of about fifty found it at eleven in the morning on the ninth of June.
She came up the draw with two buckets and she saw the cairn and she stopped dead for so long that Tom thought she was going to turn around.
Then she put the buckets down and she walked up to it and she looked at the writing on the slab for a very long time.
"She can't read," Frankie whispered.
"Wait."
The woman crouched. She put her finger on the letters and moved it along the first line, slowly, the way Nell had done in December in a snow shelter.
"She can read," Tom said. "She's just out of practice."
The woman lifted the slab.
She looked into the cavity.