Chapter 6 #2
Camille lifted it with a stick under the buckle and laid it in a flour sack and Davey wrote out what it was and where it was found and the date, in the sack, on a paper, because that was Davey and he had built that habit in a bad year.
Then Stuart made them do the thing nobody wanted to do, which was to work outward from the bench in a circle.
It took three hours and the light was gone before they finished and they found exactly two things.
The first was the knife place.
It was eleven feet east of the collar and it was a single knee print, one, with a small scatter of leather shavings beside it where somebody had trimmed the cut ends of the stitches off, and Camille knelt over it for a long time in the last of the light.
"One knee," she said.
"So?"
"So a person who cuts stitches in the snow goes down on both knees or on their heels. This one went down on one knee and put the other foot flat and kept it under them." She looked up. "That is how you kneel when you intend to get up in a hurry."
"That's a person who's worried about something."
"That is a person who is worried about something," Camille agreed, "on a bench with nobody on it, two and a half miles from anywhere, with five dogs. Whoever they are, Stuart, they are not comfortable either."
The second thing was the sledge marks.
They found them where the bench fell off east into a draw, and it was a narrow runner, hand made, about sixteen inches across, and it went down into the draw and out the far side and away east into country Stuart had walked four times in five years and could not have drawn you a map of.
A man had been put on it.
You could see it in the depth. The runners went in an inch and a half going east and they had gone in half that coming west.
And beside the runners, both ways, were dog prints.
"They took him east," Stuart said.
"He went east in December," Davey said.
Stuart stopped with his hand on a fir branch.
"What."
"In the book." Davey had it under his coat and had not let go of it all day. "You said it yourself in the back room this morning. He went east for four days and then he turned around, and the entry on the fifteenth says the east road is watched, I cannot get to her."
The three of them stood in the dark on the edge of a draw.
"Then east is not away from the Ninemile," Stuart said.
"No."
"East is toward something else."
"East is toward the something else he was trying to get to in December and could not," Davey said, "and it took him four days from wherever he started, and this morning something out of the east came across four hundred yards of our snow and took him."
They came back into the town at eight at night with lanterns and the whole valley in the lane.
Davey stood on the Hall step and told them the truth in order and did not shave one thing off it, and when he was done there was a silence in that lane of a kind Stuart had heard twice before in his life.
Then old Hal Brewer said, "How many dogs have we got."
"Eleven," Davey said. "Twelve."
"Where are they."
"Every one of them accounted for this morning in front of witnesses and every one of them accounted for right now, because I did it myself before I came up this lane."
"Then I want them in," Hal said. "In houses. Tonight and every night."
"Why," somebody said.
"Because a man who can stop five dogs at nine feet in the dark can call eleven," Hal said, "and if I am wrong it has cost this town nothing at all except some fleas indoors."
It went by voice and nobody voted against it.
Stuart went home at ten.
Camille was already there and had the stove going and had not taken her boots off, and Juno came up off the floor and put her head against his leg and leaned on him the way she had done every night since a creek in April.
He stood there in the door with his hand on the dog's head for a long time.
"Say it," Camille said.
"I keep coming back to one thing and I cannot get it to sit down."
"Which."
"Five dogs," Stuart said. "Five. Not one and not two. Five animals that come four hundred yards in a line and stop on a word."
"So?"
"So who has five trained dogs in the fifth winter."
Camille put her cup down.
"Nobody," she said.
"Nobody," Stuart agreed. "Not one person in four valleys. Vinegar Hill has got the most dogs of any place I have ever walked into and it has got six, and four of them are pups out of Juno and the Hutchins girl has been at the fifth one for a year and cannot get it to do a quarter of what she gets
out of Piety."
"It takes years."
"It takes years and it takes meat," Stuart said. "You cannot train a dog on nothing. You have got to have meat to give it and time to spend and a reason, and the number of places in this country that have had all three of those since the lights went out is about four."
Camille was very still.
"Then they are not a camp," she said.
"No."
"They are an establishment."
"They are an establishment," Stuart said, "and they have been at it long enough to put five out on a flat at four hundred yards and stop them cold, and that is not one winter of work and it is not two."
He sat down and got his boots off and looked at the fire.
"And there's the other thing," he said.
"Say it."
"They knew about the collar."
Camille's head came up.
"Somebody laid a collar out flat on the snow on that bench," Stuart said, "before the dog got there. Before. That means whoever it was went up on that bench ahead of the whole business with a piece of leather in their pocket,
and the piece of leather had been sewn shut eleven years ago by a woman in a kennel in the Clearwater country with hands that could not hold a needle."