Chapter 18 #3
It was a piece of birch bark, folded four times, and it was old. Weathered grey, brittle at the folds, and it had clearly been carried a long way by somebody before it was left.
He unfolded it.
There were four lines cut into it with something hard, in square capitals, and Tom Thorn had not seen that hand in nine years and knew it before he read a word.
Tom did not read it out loud.
He read it once to himself and then folded it back along the old creases and put it in his chest pocket, and eleven people watched him do it and nobody said anything, because by then it was understood that Tom Thorn sat on a thing for two days before he spoke about it.
He sat on that one for four.
He spent them working, because that was how he had always done his thinking, and it was April and there was more work in April than in any other month of the year.
That week the camps did the things they did every April, and a boy of nine named Charter Thorn followed his father through all of it and asked four hundred questions, and Tom answered every single one,
because a man had once done that for a fourteen year old named Cass Tunny and it had ended up saving nineteen people.
"Why now?" Charter asked, on the first morning, at the sap.
They were at the box elders along the creek, four of them, and Tom had eleven taps in and was checking the buckets.
"Because the nights are freezing and the days are thawing, and that's the only time it runs."
"Why does that make it run?"
"Because the tree's a pump and the cold and the warm work it." Tom pulled a spile and showed him. "At night it freezes and the wood pulls water up out of the roots. In the day it thaws and the pressure pushes it back out. Any hole in it leaks. That's all a tap is, it's a hole with a spout in it."
"What if it's warm at night?"
"Then it stops, and it's over for the year, and it's about eleven days total and you cannot be late."
"Why box elder? Kenzie said maple."
"Because there's no sugar maple within four hundred miles of here," Tom said, "and box elder is a maple, and so is big leaf, and so is birch, and every one of them runs and every one of them's worse than sugar maple and better than nothing."
"How much worse?"
"Sugar maple's about forty to one. Water to syrup. This stuff's about sixty to one and some years seventy."
The boy did the arithmetic, which he had been doing in his head since he was six because Kindra had made every child in both camps do it.
"So a gallon of syrup is sixty gallons of sap."
"That's right."
"That's a lot of boiling."
"That's four days of boiling with four fires and eleven people and about a third of a cord of wood," Tom said, "and it produces one gallon of the only sweet thing anybody in this valley will taste all year, and I want you to understand exactly why we do it anyway."
"Why?"
Tom sat down on a stump.
"Because in February somebody gets sick," he said. "And they can't keep food down and they've got nothing left and they're going to die of not being able to take in calories. And a spoon of syrup in water goes in when nothing else will."
"That's it?"
"That's most of it. The other part is that it's sweet and it's April and everybody's been eating squash and dried elk since November, and there's a thing that happens to people who eat the same four things for five months, and it isn't a nutrition problem."
"What is it?"
"It's that they stop wanting to eat," Tom said. "And then they eat less, and then they're weaker, and then they can't work. I watched it happen to four people the second winter and I didn't understand what I was looking at until Frankie told me."
Charter thought about that.
"So the syrup's for morale."
"The syrup's for morale," Tom said, "and morale is a survival system, and it took me three years to work that out."
On the second day they did the bark.
That was the big April job and it involved both camps and it lasted eleven days, and it was the single most important thing either camp did in the spring, and almost nobody outside would have understood why.
"Why now?" Charter said, standing at the base of a lodgepole with a wedge in his hand.
"Because the sap's running, which means the cambium's wet, which means the bark will slip." Tom drove the wedge. "Come here. Put your hand on this."
The boy put his hand on the sheet of bark and Tom levered it and four feet of bark came off the trunk in one piece with a sound like tearing cloth.
"Whoa."
"Try that in August. It won't come. It'll come off in chips the size of your thumb and you'll spend a day for four pounds."
"So it's only April."
"April and the first two weeks of May. That's it. Eleven months of the year that tree is just a tree, and for four weeks it's roofing, and containers, and canoes if anybody ever gets ambitious, and tannin for the leather pits."
"What's tannin?"
"It's what turns a hide that rots into leather that doesn't."
Tom held up the sheet. "Everything in Kenzie's book that's written down is written on this. That's why we're here. Two hundred and eleven pages in Camp One and two hundred and eleven in Camp Two and every year we add forty more and every year they all have to come off a tree in April."
They peeled four hundred pounds of bark in eleven days.
Eighty of it went to the book makers. Two hundred and eleven went into the tanning pits, shredded and layered with hides and water, where it would sit for eighteen months and come out as sole leather that Hobby Nils would cut pump seals and boot soles out of for four years.
The rest went to roofing and containers.
On the third day, Tom took the boy out to the snares and taught him the thing about April that he had gotten wrong himself in his first spring and had never forgotten.
"Pull them," he said.
"All of them?"
"Every snare on this line. Today."
Charter stared at him.
"Why? There's rabbits everywhere."
"There's rabbits everywhere and they're all pregnant," Tom said. "That's why."
He crouched and pulled the first loop and coiled it.
"Here's the thing nobody understands until they've starved once. A trapline isn't a way to get food. It's a way to farm an animal you don't own."
"How?"
"By taking less than they make." Tom held up the wire. "There's maybe four hundred rabbits in this drainage. If we run eleven snares hard all year we take about two hundred, and in three years there's forty rabbits here and everybody's confused about why."
"So we stop in spring."
"We stop the first week of April and we don't start again until the middle of August, and that's the whole rule, and I want you to know it cost us a winter to learn it."
"Which winter?"
"The third one." Tom stood up. "We ran the line through the spring because we could, and we ate well in May, and in the following February there was nothing on this creek and four of us walked eleven miles to hunt and came back with a marten."
They pulled every snare that week, in both camps, and hung the wire in coils in the shelter roofs, and Tom made Charter count them.
"Ninety one snares."
"Ninety one, and every one of them is a piece of wire that cannot be replaced, and in August you're going to help put them all back out and you're going to find that eleven of them have rusted through and we'll have eighty."
"And then what?"
"And then Hobby draws new wire, and when Hobby dies somebody else will have to know how, and that's why Sima's been standing at that forge every Tuesday for four years."
On the fourth day, Tom did the thing he did every year on the fifteenth of April, and had done since the second spring, and had never once missed.
He took everybody under sixteen out of both camps and made them build a shelter and sleep in it.
Eleven kids that year.
They walked two miles up the creek and Tom gave them a knife and an axe and nothing else and told them they had until dark.
"Are you helping?" a twelve year old asked.
"I'm sitting on that rock."
"That's it?"
"I'll answer any question anybody asks me," Tom said, "and I will not pick up a single stick, and at dark I'm going home to sleep in my own bed and you're all staying here."
They got it up by seven in the evening and it was bad.
Tom walked it before he left and said four things and did not say a fifth, which was the hardest part.
"Your ridgepole's green."
"So?"
"So it'll bend under the debris and by two in the morning you'll be sleeping in a taco. That's not going to hurt anybody, so I'm letting you find out."
"What else?"
"You've got about ten inches of debris on the north side and about two feet on the south."
"We ran out of light."
"Everybody runs out of light," Tom said. "That's not a reason, that's a description. The question is which side you put the two feet on when you knew you were running out, and you put it on the side that was easy to get to instead of the side the wind comes from."
He got to the fourth thing and stopped.
"What's the last one?" Charter said.
"There isn't one. Good night."
There was one. The bedding was four inches deep and it needed to be eighteen, and they would all be awake at one in the morning with the cold coming up through the ground into their hips, and they would have to go out in the dark and cut boughs,
and that was the entire lesson and it did not work if he said it.
They came in at seven the next morning, all eleven, cold and filthy and extremely pleased with themselves.
"How was it?"
"The ridgepole bent," Charter said.
"Did it."
"At about midnight. And we all got cold from the ground and we had to go out and cut boughs in the dark and it took forever."
"How deep did you make it?"
"About this deep." He held up his hands, eighteen inches apart.
"And was it better?"
"It was completely different."
"Write it in the book," Tom said. "Not the camp book. Your own."
Because by then every child in both camps had their own book, which had been McKenzie's idea in the sixth year, and which by the ninth year Tom considered the most important thing anybody in that valley had ever thought of.
On the fifth day he told them about the bark.