Chapter 20 #2
"Camp Two's better. You can't see the shelters at all. But you can see the wheat and the garden and the path, and if you sat there two days you'd count everybody who walks to water."
"That's the flaw," Cass said. "It's always the water path. Everybody walks to water four times a day and you can count a camp off the water path alone."
So they fixed the water path, and it took eleven weeks and it was tedious and nobody enjoyed any of it.
Four separate routes to water at each camp, screened with planted willow and dead brush, used in rotation by week.
Three cisterns dug at Camp One and lined with bark and clay, so that in a month when it mattered, nobody had to go to the creek at all for eleven days.
And the thing Tom was proudest of, which was Sofie's:
"Move the visible work," she said, in December. She was seventeen.
"Say more."
"Everybody's thinking about hiding," Sofie said. "But he's not counting buildings. He's counting people. So the question isn't can he see the camp, it's can he see thirty eight people."
"And?"
"And we do almost everything outdoors in daylight in the open because it's easier."
Tom sat back.
"That's exactly right."
"So we move it," she said. "Not all of it. But the forge goes under a roof with a smoke trench like the smokers. The hide work goes into the timber. The threshing goes into the barn instead of the yard."
"That's four hundred hours of building."
"It's four hundred hours once," Sofie said, "and it means a man on a ridge sees eleven people instead of thirty eight."
They did it over two years.
And in the eleventh year of the camp, in the fourth week of July, a runner came down from the north bench at four in the afternoon and did not run, because nobody in that valley had run with news in nine years, and said:
"There's a man on the ridge."
Tom Thorn was forty six.
He went up with Oliver and Cass and Nell and they took four hours to cover two miles, because that was how it was done, and they came onto the north bench from the back and lay in the rocks for a full day.
He was there.
One man, alone, four hundred yards along the ridge, in a good spot with a rock at his back and a clear view of the whole bench below.
He had a pack and a bedroll and no fire.
And he had a board on his knees with paper on it, and Tom watched him through a gap in the granite for eleven minutes and saw him write four separate times.
"That's him," Cass said.
"That's somebody."
"Dad, he's writing."
"I can see he's writing." Tom's mouth had gone dry. "I want everybody to hold still and I want to watch him for the rest of today and all of tomorrow, and I do not want one single person moving on this ridge until I've seen him sleep."
They watched him for thirty one hours.
He slept at nine and woke at four. He ate twice a day out of the pack and it was food he had brought and it was not much. He did not build a fire either night, in July, at seven thousand feet, which told Tom he had done this before and had been cold on purpose before.
And he counted.
He counted all day both days, and Tom lay eleven feet from a rock face and watched a man four hundred yards away count his family, and felt something he had not felt since the second of February of the first year, which was the specific cold of being read by somebody good at it.
At four in the afternoon on the second day the man packed his bedroll.
"He's going," Oliver whispered.
"He's going."
"Dad."
"I know."
"If he walks off this ridge, he walks four hundred miles and comes back with trucks."
"I know exactly what he does."
"Then we have to."
"Say the whole sentence, Oliver," Tom said. "Don't stop at have to."
Oliver Thorn was twenty three and he had a rifle and he was four hundred yards from a man with a clipboard and he did not finish the sentence.
"That's right," Tom said. "And I want you to remember for the rest of your life that you couldn't say it, because that's the only reason this valley is what it is."
"Then what do we do?"
Tom lay in the rocks for another four minutes.
Then he said, "Nell."
"Yes."
"How many of us can he have counted?"
"From here?" She had been lying in the exact spot the man had used for ninety minutes the previous evening while he was asleep, which Tom had not authorized and had not been able to stop.
"He sees the north garden, the barn, the creek crossing, and four shelter roofs. And the water path, except we run four of them now."
"Number."
"Eleven," Nell said. "Maybe fourteen. He cannot possibly have got more than fourteen."
"And how many are we?"
"Fifty one."
"Fifty one," Tom repeated.
He put his forehead down on his forearm for a second.
"Eleven years," he said. "Eleven years of moving the forge and screening the water path and burying the smoke, and it worked, and I want everybody to notice that it worked because of four hundred hours of extremely boring labour and not because of anything clever."
"So he's got us at fourteen," Cass said.
"He's got us at fourteen, and fourteen people with a garden and a barn is a place you visit with one truck and four men, and it is not a place you bring a convoy to."
"And when he comes down and finds fifty one?"
"Then he's already down," Tom said, "and he's at a fence at forty feet in daylight, and that is the only ground this family has ever won on."
The man came off the ridge on the twenty ninth of July at nine in the morning.
He did not sneak. He walked down the game trail and out onto the flats road and up to the fence line at the top of the rise, in the open, alone, with his hands out from his sides, and he stopped at forty feet.
Tom was waiting for him.
So were eleven adults, all unarmed and visible, standing in a loose line in the open. So were four rifles nobody could see. So were thirty six people four miles south at Camp Two, gone since the twenty seventh.
"Hello the camp," the man said.
"Hello the ridge," Tom said.
The man's face moved slightly.
"How long?"
"Thirty one hours," Tom said. "You slept at nine and woke at four and you wrote four times on the first afternoon and eleven times on the second morning."
"That's good."
"We had a man teach us."
"I'd like to meet him."
"You can't," Tom said. "He died six weeks ago and there's a rock pile on that rise with four lines cut into it."
Something went across the man's face that Tom could not read.
"I'm Alder," he said.
"I know who you are."
"You do?"
"You're fifty two, you run the intake at Grand Coulee, you count a settlement for two days from high ground before you come down, and then you come down and ask the person in charge a question you already know the answer to, to see if he'll lie."
Alder stood very still at forty feet.
"Who told you that?"
"Wallace Wingman," Tom said. "Who I buried on the nineteenth of June."
Alder took a step back.
It was not a large step and he caught himself immediately, and Tom had spent eleven years learning to read exactly that kind of half movement, and he thought: he knows the name, and he did not expect it, and it means something to him that it has taken me completely by surprise.
"He got here," Alder said.
"He got here fifteen months out of Wilbur with nine people carrying him and he lived four years longer than anybody thought and he spent the last winter of it dictating fifty one settlements to a woman with good handwriting."
"Fifty one."
"From the Idaho line to the Columbia," Tom said. "Where the water is. Who's left. What's growing. And eleven entries that say how many you took and how many you left and what was there the following May."
Alder did not say anything for a long moment.
"You want to ask me your question now," Tom said. "The one you already know the answer to."
"Yes."
"Go ahead."
"How many of you are there?"
Tom Thorn stood at a fence in the open on a Montana morning and looked at a man with a clipboard, and thought about a dead fir with four pounds of elk in it, and about twenty six rock piles, and about a slab that said we are not counting you, we are telling you how many we are.
"Fifty one," he said.
Alder's head came up.
"You're lying," he said. "I counted fourteen."
"I know you did," Tom said. "That's why I told you."
Alder did not move for a long time.
Forty feet of cleared ground and eleven people standing in the open, and a man with a board under his arm who had been reading settlements for four years and had just been handed a number he could not do anything with.
"Why?" he said.
"Say the rest of the question."
"Why would you tell me that." Alder's voice had gone flat and careful. "You had me at fourteen. Fourteen is a place I send one truck and four men to and I'd have come back in September with a doctor and a list and you'd have had four months to do whatever you wanted about it."
"That's right."
"Fifty one is a convoy," Alder said. "Fifty one is four trucks and eleven men and I'd bring it in October when the road's still good. You've just spent the only thing you had."
"I know exactly what I've spent."
"Then why?"
Tom Thorn stood at the fence and did not answer immediately, because he had spent thirty one hours lying in granite working out this exact sentence and he wanted to get it right.
"Because we have been counted before," he said.
Alder's eyes went to the fence post beside him, where a flat slab had been set four years earlier with four lines cut into it, and Tom watched him read it.
"There's twenty six of those," Tom said.
"From here to the Clark Fork. Every one of them says how many we are. Every single one. They've said thirty one and thirty eight and forty four and now they say fifty one, and we've been changing the number every spring for eleven years, and we've never once lied on one."
"Why?"
"Because the number is the whole message," Tom said. "Everything else on that rock is decoration."
"That's not a strategy."
"No," Tom agreed. "It's not a strategy. It's a habit, and I want to be clear about the difference, because it took me about nine years to understand it myself."
He came four steps closer to the fence, still in the open, still with nothing in his hands.