Chapter 18
Tom did not answer for a full minute.
He lay behind the sod wall at the mouth of the shelter with the revolver on his forearm and listened to twenty five people go to ground in the dark without a single question, and he thought: that is two years of drill, and it just happened in eleven seconds,
and nobody will ever know how much that cost to build.
"Say it again," he called.
"There's four of us. One's hurt bad. We come from the west, down the flats road."
A man's voice. Middle aged. Flat, careful, nothing in it that was performing.
"How long have you been standing there?"
A pause.
"About forty minutes."
Tom's stomach went cold.
"Forty minutes."
"We came up the creek at three and we saw the shelters and we sat down in the willow and we waited for it to get light enough that you could see our hands."
"And then the dog got you."
"The dog got us about four minutes ago and I figured that was the end of the quiet part."
Cass Tunny, from the north side of the arc, said, very low, "Dad, that's a careful man."
Tom did not correct the Dad, and would not for another three years, and by then nobody would notice.
"Why'd you wait forty minutes instead of calling out?"
"Because I've done this six times in a year," the voice said, "and twice somebody shot at the voice in the dark, and I worked out it goes better if they can see you're standing still."
"How many rifles?"
"One and it's on the ground eleven feet behind me and it's been there since three o'clock."
"Who's hurt?"
"My wife."
"How?"
"She's got a leg that went bad four days ago and she's been on a sled since Tuesday and she's not talking anymore," the man said, and his voice went for the first time.
"And I'm going to be straight with you because I've got nothing to trade with. She's going to die tonight or tomorrow and I'm not standing out here for me."
Kindra was already moving.
"Kindra," Tom said.
"Don't."
"Kindra, wait for light."
"It's forty minutes to light and she's got a leg that's four days gone," Kindra said. "Cover me."
She walked out into the snow in the dark with a lamp and no weapon, and Tom lay behind a sod wall and watched his wife cross forty feet of open ground toward four strangers, and did not stop her,
and thought about a cairn in a dooryard and about the fact that there is a point past which a person's character is simply a fact about the world and arguing with it is a waste of breath.
The woman on the sled was named Petra Okonjo-Hale and she was thirty five and she had a compound fracture of the lower leg that was eleven days old.
Kindra got the light on it at four twenty in the morning and Tom, who had come out at a run when she called, saw her face change in a way he had seen three times in three years.
"Loreen," she said. "Now. And Birdy, and Frankie, and Cass, and I want the big fire lit and four pots on it and I want them boiled and I want the light I asked Hobby for in October."
"What is it?" the man said. "Just say it."
Kindra looked up at him.
"What's your name?"
"Dav."
"Dav, I'm going to tell you the whole truth and then I'm going to ask you to go sit by the fire with somebody and not watch, and both of those are because I think you've earned them."
"Say it."
"The bone came through eleven days ago and somebody put it back and closed the skin over it."
"I did that."
"I know you did, and it was the only thing you could do, and it's what I'd have done." Kindra's voice was very level. "And it means the inside of that leg has been a sealed room with dirt in it for eleven days, and it's gone to gas, and I can feel it under the skin. You know what I mean."
Dav Hale sat down in the snow.
"Yeah," he said.
"It's above the knee now."
"I know."
"You know."
"I've known since Tuesday," he said, "and I've been pulling a sled forty miles knowing it, because I didn't have a single other thing left to do."
Kindra put her hand on his arm.
"You do now," she said. "There's one thing and it's horrible and it might not work."
"Take it off."
"Yes."
"Then take it off," Dav said. "She told me to on Tuesday. She was still talking on Tuesday and she said, Dav, if you find anybody, tell them to take it."
They did it at nine in the morning on the ninth of February and it took two hours and eleven minutes and it was the worst thing that ever happened in that camp.
Tom was not in it. He was outside on the perimeter with Cass and Oliver and the rifle, because somebody had to be and because Kindra told him he would be no use whatsoever.
He heard some of it.
He heard the first forty seconds and then Loreen's voice going steady and low and constant, and then nothing for a long time, and then, once, near the end, a sound he never described to anybody.
Kindra came out at eleven twenty and sat down in the snow beside him and shook for four minutes and then stopped.
"She's alive," she said.
"Kindra."
"I took it four inches above the knee and I did it the way the book says and Loreen did the tourniquet and Birdy did the flaps and Frankie held her and Cass boiled everything, and she's alive as of right now and she'll probably be dead by Friday and I want that said before anybody gets happy."
"Why Friday?"
"Because the infection was up past where I cut. I could see it in the muscle." Kindra's hands were still going. "I went as high as I dared and there was still colour in it that I didn't like, and there's no antibiotics in this valley or any other one."
"So what do we do?"
"Everything. Hot compresses, open drainage, honey if there were honey and there isn't, garlic, yarrow, and fluids and fluids and fluids."
She looked up. "And we keep her alive long enough for her own body to do it, and her own body is thirty five and starving and has pulled a sled across forty miles of February."
Petra Okonjo-Hale did not die on Friday.
She was delirious for six days and on the fifteenth of February she woke up at four in the morning and said, clearly, "Dav?" and then went back under for another eleven hours.
She was sitting up on the twenty first.
By then Tom had spent twelve days learning who had walked into his camp, and it changed the shape of everything he thought he understood about the world.
There were four of them: Dav Hale, Petra, a girl of fourteen named Sima who was not theirs, and a man of about sixty named Bo who did not speak much English and who turned out, on the fourth day, to be the single most valuable person who ever walked into that valley.
They had come from the west.
Not from the Clark Fork. From beyond it.
"How far?" Tom asked, on the third night.
"We left Spokane in June of last year," Dav said.
Tom put his cup down.
"Spokane."
"About two hundred and sixty miles as it goes." Dav was eating slowly, the way Kindra had taught everybody to make him. "Eight months. We've wintered twice on the way, once in a grain elevator in November for five weeks and once in a school gym in January for nine days."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why leave?"
Dav Hale looked at the fire for a while.
"Because there's a thing happening on the Columbia," he said, "and it isn't good, and we decided we'd rather be four people walking than four people in it."
Tom sat forward.
"Say all of it."
"There's a man at the dams."
"What man?"
"I don't know his name and I never saw him and I don't believe he's one man." Dav shook his head. "Here's what I actually know. Grand Coulee's got a powerhouse that can be run without computers if you know what you're doing, and somebody's running it."
The whole fire went silent.
"There's power?" Oliver said.
"There's power at the dam. There's about eleven miles of it, and it runs four buildings and a fence and a shop."
Dav's face was tight. "And they've got fuel, because they've got power, and they've got a pump, and that means they've got trucks that run, and that means they can move two hundred people four hundred miles."
"Are they moving?"
"They're recruiting," Dav said. "That's the word they use."
"Explain."
"They come to a place with four trucks and a doctor and eleven hundred pounds of food. And they say: we have power and we have antibiotics and we have a school, and any group that wants in gives us four things."
"Which are?"
"Half your food, half your seed, everybody under forty who can work, and your rifles." Dav looked up. "And a lot of people take it, and I want to be careful how I say this, because a lot of people take it and it's the right decision for them."
Nobody said anything.
"They took Sima's whole town in October," Dav said. "Ninety one people. And her mother said go with Petra and Dav, and Sima went, and she's been eating herself alive about it since."
"Why didn't her mother go with you?"
"Because her mother's fifty three and there's a doctor at the dam," Dav said.
Tom sat with that for a long time.
"Is it a lie?" he said.
"Which part?"
"The doctor. The antibiotics. Is any of it true?"
"I think all of it's true," Dav said. "That's the whole problem, Mister Thorn. I think there really is a doctor and I think there really is penicillin, because I've seen a man walk out of there in August who went in with a foot like your wife's got in that shelter."
"Then why did you leave?"
Dav Hale put his bowl down.
"Because in August they came to the place we were at and they counted us," he said. "And they wrote it down. And the man doing the writing asked me how many of us could work and I said nine, and he said no, and I said what."
"What did he say?"
"He said: I've walked it. Six of them can work."
Tom felt his skin go cold.
"He'd counted," he said.
"He'd counted us before he came in, from a ridge, for two days, the way you'd count cattle," Dav said. "And then he came down and asked me a question he already knew the answer to, to see if I'd lie."
"That's."
"That's somebody who's very good at this," Dav said.
"And it's somebody who's got fuel and trucks and eleven hundred pounds of food and the only working powerhouse in the Northwest, and I have thought about it every single day for six months and I cannot tell you whether he's the best man alive or the worst one."