Chapter 18 #2
"And you ran."
"I looked at it," Dav said, "and I thought: I've met people who count before they come in. And every single one of them I ever met, it went the same way in the end."
Tom got up and walked eleven feet and came back.
"How far is it to Spokane," he said.
"Two hundred and sixty miles."
"And how fast can a truck do it?"
"With the roads the way they are? Four days. Maybe six."
"And have they been east of the Idaho line?"
Dav Hale looked straight at him.
"Not that I ever heard," he said. "But there's four of us sitting at your fire, and we walked it, and that means it can be walked, and everything that can be walked can eventually be driven."
The council met on the twenty fourth of February and it was the longest meeting they ever held and they decided almost nothing, and Tom afterward considered it one of the two or three best days of his life.
"I want to say the thing I've been thinking for two weeks," he said, "and I want everybody to know it frightens me."
"Go ahead," Loreen said.
"Everything we've built is built for people on foot."
Nobody said anything.
"Everything," Tom said. "The cairns, the creek bottom, the mile and a quarter between the garden and the shelters, the eight minute drill. All of it assumes an enemy who has to walk, who gets cold, who can carry forty pounds, who can't come nine miles without camping."
"And if they've got trucks?"
"If they've got trucks they can put twenty people at the end of that road in four hours with eleven hundred pounds of supply and they can sit there as long as they want."
"So what's the answer?"
"I don't have one," Tom said. "That's what I want to put on the record. I have run this camp for twenty one months on the basis that I usually have an answer, and I don't have one, and I'd rather say so in February than pretend in June."
The drawn seat that quarter was Nell.
She was ten now, or eleven, and she had been on the council for eight weeks and had not said a word in any meeting, and Tom had not pushed her.
She said, "Can I say something?"
"Always."
"You do have an answer. You just don't like it."
Tom sat back.
"Go ahead."
"The answer's the same as it's always been," Nell said. "You can't stop somebody with trucks from taking the ranch. So don't be at the ranch."
"We're not at the ranch."
"We're a mile and a quarter from it up a creek with one way in and out, and there's twenty nine of us and a forge and four hundred pounds of squash in a barn that's right on the road."
Nell's voice was steady and very flat. "And if somebody drives up that road in July they'll find the garden in about four minutes, and then they'll find the creek in about a day, because everybody walks the same path to water."
Nobody said anything.
"That's exactly right," Kindra said quietly.
"So what do we do?" Loreen said. "Move again?"
"No," Nell said. "You split."
Tom put both hands flat on the ground.
"Say more."
"There's twenty nine people in one creek bottom and that's the same as one cellar with everything in it." She did not look at anybody. "Everything we've ever learned says don't do that. You said it. Never put it all in one place. You said it about food four hundred times."
"And you're saying it about people."
"I'm saying you already know," Nell said. "You've been saying it since October and nobody wants to hear it because everybody likes it here."
Tom looked around the circle at the four adults and did not find an argument anywhere.
"That's the fourth time," he said.
"What?"
"Fourth time the drawn seat's said the thing nobody else would."
They argued about it from March to May and it was the healthiest thing the camp ever did, because for the first time the argument was not about survival, it was about what kind of thing they wanted to be.
The plan that came out of it was Tom's and Dee's and it took four drafts.
They called it the Three Camps and it went into the book on the nineteenth of May.
Camp One stayed in the creek bottom: the shelters, the forge, the main garden, the ranch buildings as warehouse and nothing else. Fifteen people.
Camp Two went four miles south into the hills at a spring Bo found in April, because Bo, it turned out, had spent thirty one years in a water district in eastern Washington and could look at a hillside and tell you where the water was and be right four times out of five.
Nine people, a second garden of a half acre, and every single thing duplicated: seed, tools, a second copy of the book.
"That's the part I care about most," Tom told the camp, when it went up. "The book gets copied. Every page. Kenz and Birdy and Sima are going to spend all summer copying two hundred pages onto bark by hand."
"That's four hundred hours," McKenzie said.
"That's four hundred hours."
"Dad, that's insane."
"Kenz, what happens to everything we know if Camp One burns?"
She did not answer.
"That's the answer," Tom said. "Four hundred hours."
Camp Three did not exist yet and that was deliberate.
"Camp Three is a cache and a shelter frame and nobody lives in it," Tom said. "It's eleven miles east at the big bend."
"At the big bend?" Ada Kemper said.
"At the big bend, and here's my reasoning and I want to hear the objections."
Tom drew it in the dirt. "It's a place with a roof. It's got a creek. It's eleven miles east of here on a road, which means that anybody who comes up that road from the west has to go past us to get to it and anybody who comes from the east hits it first."
"That's a good reason and a bad one," Frankie said.
"Say the bad one."
"Reese and Dell."
"Reese and Dell have been gone fourteen months and the house has been empty since last April."
"And if they come back?"
"Then they find a shelter with food in it and four lines on a rock," Tom said, "and that's exactly what I want them to find, because I have been thinking about those two men for two years and I've decided something."
"What?"
"That the only thing I ever did that changed anybody was leave something where they'd find it."
They split on the fourth of June.
It was harder than anybody expected and it was hard in ways nobody had predicted. It was not the labor. It was that nine people walked four miles south and then the camp at the creek bottom was quieter at dinner and the fire was smaller and everybody felt it.
Sofie cried for two days because Birdy went south with Camp Two and Nell stayed at Camp One.
"I'll see her every week," Sofie said, furious at herself. "It's four miles. It's stupid to cry."
"It's not stupid," Kindra said.
"It's four miles."
"Bug, four miles in this world is further than four hundred used to be, and everybody in this camp knows it, and that's why everybody's sad."
They built the runner system that summer and it became the fourth institution.
Two people, every four days, between Camp One and Camp Two, carrying letters and news and whatever needed moving, and the rule was that the runners were always one adult and one person under sixteen, and the person under sixteen changed every time.
"Why?" Cass asked.
"Because in eleven years everybody under sixteen in both camps will have walked that route forty times," Tom said, "and there will never again be a situation where only one person knows how to get somewhere."
By August of that year there were three gardens, two forges, two copies of the book, thirty one people, and eleven cairns on the road east with food in them.
Nobody drove up the road.
Nobody drove up the road that summer or the next one, and after four years Tom stopped waking up at four in the morning listening for an engine, and after six he stopped entirely,
and by the time he was fifty he had trouble explaining to the children born after the split why every shelter in both camps had a second exit.
But the road east grew.
That was the thing nobody planned and it happened anyway, and Tom Thorn spent the rest of his life saying that the only thing he ever did on purpose that worked was the tree.
The eleven cairns became nineteen, and then twenty six.
The chain reached the flats and the big bend and the culvert and the ridge above the Clark Fork, and every single one had four lines cut into a cap slab, and every single one was restocked by two people on a rotation, forever, as a rule in a book.
And people came up that chain.
Two in the first year. Six in the second. Eleven in the fourth year, including a family of four who had walked from Kalispell and who had followed rock piles for nine days without ever seeing a human being.
"How did you know to follow them?" Tom asked the father.
"Because the second one had food in it," the man said. "The first one, I thought somebody had left something behind. The second one, I knew somebody was putting it there."
"That's what we hoped."
"Mister, I've walked three hundred miles and there's nothing out here. There's nothing and there's nobody and there's houses with the doors open." The man's hands were shaking. "And then there's a rock pile on a road with writing on it, and it says somebody's counting."
"Counting what?"
"It said we are thirty one. That's what the second one said." The man looked up. "That's the first number I'd seen in two years that was somebody saying how many of them there were instead of how many they'd lost."
Tom sat with that for a long time.
That night he added a line to the standard slab text, and it stayed in every cairn on that road for as long as any of them stood.
WE ARE NOT COUNTING YOU
WE ARE TELLING YOU HOW MANY WE ARE
In the ninth year, in the third week of April, a runner came in from the easternmost cairn on the Clark Fork ridge and reported that somebody had left something in it.
Not taken. Left.
The runner was seventeen and had been born in a hospital in Missoula and did not remember it, and she brought it four days to Camp One in her pack without opening it because that was the rule.
Tom Thorn was fifty two.
He opened it at the fire with Kindra beside him and eleven people watching.