Chapter 1 #2
"The watch is two people," Stuart said. "Day and night, two people, same two hours, same corner, and they have been standing it since the third year and they are good at it."
"Then what's wrong with it."
"Nothing's wrong with it in February. Something's wrong with it in the ninth day of dead air." Stuart put his hands on the table. "I want four. I want them rotated every hour and I want the hour to be a bad number so nobody can get comfortable in it, and I want the north corner walked and not sat."
Davey looked at him for a while.
"That's twice the people for the same road."
"That's twice the people for a road that hasn't had one thing on it since the eleventh of December," Stuart said, "which is exactly the road that is going to have something on it."
"You've got a reason for this?"
"I've got an old man with a hand sledge and a story about nineteen fifty-one."
Davey laughed. Then he stopped laughing, because he had been in the north country three years longer than Stuart had, and he had a grandmother too.
"Four," he said. "Rotated. I'll put it up tonight."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Davey said. "You know who's going to have to stand the extra two."
They were the new people, mostly. There was no way around it, and Davey did it straight and said it out loud at the board, that the town had doubled and the watch had not, and that the doubling was the reason for both.
Four men from the east side of the long room stood the north corner from the fourth of January onward, in the dark, in the cold, for a town that had voted on them in May.
Stuart stood it with them.
He took the worst hour of the four every night and did not tell anybody why, and after about a week one of them, a broad quiet man named Sorenson who had come in March with two daughters and a bad shoulder, said to him at the changeover, "You don't have to do this."
"I know it."
"That's what I'm saying. Everybody knows you don't have to."
"That's the point of it," Stuart said. "A thing a man has to do proves nothing about him to anybody. Get warm."
The ninth of January was the tenth day.
Stuart marked it on the door frame of his own house with a pencil the way he had marked the others, ten short lines in a row, and stood there looking at them with his coat half on.
Ten days of no wind.
He had never seen it. Four winters in that valley and he had seen six once and thought that was the end of the world, and here was ten, with the smoke going straight up and the snow lying on the fence rails in an unbroken line a quarter mile long,
not one flake of it moved since the second of the month.
It was the most peaceful thing he had ever looked at and it made the hair stand up on his arms.
He went out at two in the afternoon into the middle of those still gray hours and walked the north corner with a rifle he had not fired at a man since April.
Nothing.
The north road went out of the gate and up across the white and went into the timber a half mile out, and there was not a mark on it. Not a bird track. Not a deer crossing. Ten days of nothing on a road he had walked four hundred times.
Juno came out with him and did not range.
That was the first thing. She was a shepherd and she was nine or ten years old and she had walked two hundred miles in a February, and her way was to go out fifty yards and quarter and come back, and she had done that every single day of her life since the creek.
She did not do it.
She came out the gate at his heel and stopped, and stood, and put her nose up.
"Go on," Stuart said.
She did not go on.
She stood in the packed snow of the gate with her whole body gone stiff from the shoulders back and her nose working, and her ears went forward, and Stuart Redman felt the ten days come apart under him like river ice.
"Where," he said.
She looked north.
He looked north and there was nothing there at all, a half mile of unbroken white and a line of dark timber and a flat sky above it with no seam in it anywhere, and he stood in that gate for ninety seconds with his heart going and saw absolutely nothing,
and every part of him that had gotten tired of looking said out loud, in a reasonable voice, there is nothing on that road.
He had heard that voice before.
"Sorenson," he said.
The man came down off the corner.
"Get Davey. Get Camille. Get them quiet and get them now, and do not ring anything."
"What is it?"
"I don't know yet," Stuart said, "and that's why nobody's ringing anything."
They came in four minutes. Davey with the long glass, Camille with the Lebel and her coat unbuttoned because she did not waste time on buttons, and Camille went up on the corner post and put the rifle across the rail and did not say a word for a full minute.
"There is nothing," she said.
"Look again."
"Stuart, I am looking. There is nothing on that road, there is nothing at the timber, there is nothing."
"The dog says different."
"The dog is old."
"The dog is old and she walked from February to June and she has never once been wrong about a road," Stuart said, "and she will not leave that gate."
Davey had the glass up.
"How far can you see."
"To the timber."
"Past it?"
"There's no past it," Davey said. "It bends."
They stood there.
The still gray hours went on around them, no wind, no sound, the smoke of twenty-six chimneys standing up straight behind them in a row like fence posts, and Stuart Redman had the strongest feeling of his life that he was looking directly at something and could not see it.
Then Camille said, "Ah."
"What."
"The snow on the third rail," she said.
Stuart looked.
There was a rail fence running out along the north side of the road for two hundred yards, four rails, and every one of them had carried an unbroken white line for ten days.
The third rail had a gap in it about eighteen inches wide.
"Somebody leaned on it," Camille said.
"When."
"Today. The edge is sharp. In one hour the cold will round it and it is not rounded." She came down off the post in one motion. "And it is on the far side, Stuart. Whoever leaned on that fence leaned on it coming out of the field and not off the road."
"There's no tracks in the field."
"There is no track anywhere," Camille said. "That is what has been wrong with this for ten minutes. There is a gap in that rail and no track to it and no track from it, and I do not like it at all."
Stuart looked at the white field.
And then he understood, and it was so simple that he swore out loud in the gate of his own town.
"It's crusted," he said. "Ten days, no wind, it's frozen hard on top. A man could walk that whole field and not break through and leave you nothing to see but where he put a hand down."
He was already moving.
"Davey, get the gate. Camille, north stringer, go."
"Stuart."
"Go."
He went out the north road at the fastest thing his hip would give him, four hundred yards, with the dog out ahead of him now and running hard and low and not once looking back, and at the rail he stopped and put his own hand on the gap where another hand had been.
The crust held his weight.
It held his weight all the way out across the field, ninety steps, past the rail and past the old ditch line to the low place where the ground fell away into a fold that you could not see from the gate and had never once been able to see from the gate in four years.
Juno was already down in it.
She was standing over something, with her legs braced and her head down, and she was not barking.
She was licking a face.
Stuart came down the slope and went to his knees in the snow and got hold of the shoulder and rolled it toward him, and the coat was frozen board stiff and there was a rag wrapped four times around the head with only a slot for the eyes, and the hands were bare and the color of a plum,
and the man had come in on the crust from the north for God knew how many days on God knew what, and had made it to within four hundred yards of a chimney and lain down in a fold in a field.
Stuart got the rag off.
The face under it was young and burned raw across both cheeks and the beard was frozen to the collar, and Stuart Redman stopped with the rag in his hand and did not move for about four seconds, because he knew it.
He had last seen it at noon on the twenty-first of April, at the mouth of a cut in the Clearwater country, on a young man who had turned six wagons around and let six people walk.
"No," Stuart said.
The eyes came open.
They did not track at first and then they did, and they went up his face and found it, and something that was not quite a smile happened in the frozen beard.
"You said," the young man got out. "Some other morning. Different weather."
"Kestrel."
"Different weather," Kestrel said.
Stuart got both arms under him.
"You're not talking anymore. You're not doing one more thing. I've got you."
"No." The hand came up off the snow and got a fistful of Stuart's coat and held it, and there was nothing left in the grip at all and it held anyway. "Listen. I walked nineteen days. I have to say it while I can still say it."
"Say it in a house."
"There's another one," Kestrel said.
Stuart went completely still in the snow.
"Another what."
"Another Kiln," Kestrel said. "It isn't over the divide. It's south."
And then his eyes rolled back and his hand came loose from Stuart's coat and he went down into the snow, and up at the gate four hundred yards behind them somebody finally started ringing the bell.