Chapter 1 #2
There was a meat pole between two lodgepoles, high enough that a bear would have to work for it.
He hung the quarters and covered them with cheesecloth against the flies, though the flies were mostly done now.
Then he sat down on the flat rock he used as a chair and let the pack strap marks come back out of his shoulders.
Yak put his head on Burner's knee.
"Yeah," Burner said. He scratched the dog behind the left ear, the spot Yak had never been able to reach himself. "Good morning's work."
He had gotten the dog from a breeder outside Missoula four years before the lights went out. Yak had been a fat gray thing then, one of eight, and he had walked straight over to Burner and sat on his boot and that had been the end of the conversation.
The name was a joke that had outlived the man who made it. Burner's brother had looked at the puppy's ridiculous shaggy shoulders and said the animal looked like a yak. He had said it once. It stuck.
His brother had lived in Denver.
Burner did not think about Denver.
He built the fire up small and set water to boil, and while it heated he took the AK apart on a square of canvas and cleaned it with a rag and the last quarter inch of oil in a bottle he had been rationing since June.
The rifle had come to him the way most things had, at cost. He had traded a case of canned peaches and a wood stove to a man in a bad situation who needed the peaches more than the rifle, and the man had cried when he handed it over, though whether from grief or relief Burner had never figured out.
He had a hundred and ninety-one rounds left for it. He knew the number the way he knew his own name.
That was the real clock. Not winter. Not the food. The ammunition.
There were nine hundred rounds in the world that he could get to, spread across three caches he had built and stocked over the summer. Every shot he fired came off the total. When it hit zero he was a man in the Montana wilderness with a knife and a dog, and then the arithmetic got very unfriendly.
He had done it again. He shook his head, annoyed at himself.
Under his jacket, riding in a leather crossdraw rig against his ribs, was the revolver.
He took it out and looked at it while the water came up.
The Chiappa Rhino was the strangest looking handgun he had ever owned and the only one he had ever loved.
It fired from the bottom chamber of the cylinder instead of the top, which put the barrel in line with his hand instead of above it, which meant a .
357 Magnum out of a snub barrel did not try to break his wrist every time he fired it.
It looked like something from a movie about a future nobody got.
Flat sided, hexagonal cylinder, all wrong angles.
He had fifty-eight rounds for it. He knew that number too.
The Rhino was not for deer. The Rhino was for a bad five seconds at contact distance, and in eleven months he had needed it exactly twice.
He did not think about those two times either, if he could help it.
He drank tea made from rose hips and pine needles because it was what he had, and he ate a strip of jerky from the last deer, and he sat with his back against warm rock and watched the light move across the far ridge.
It was, he would have admitted if anyone had asked, a beautiful place.
The larches were just starting to go gold up high. You could see three peaks from where he sat, still holding a little snow in the north-facing couloirs, and the sky over them was that hard scrubbed blue you only get in the mountains in the fall.
Eleven months ago he would have taken a photograph of it.
There was nobody to send a photograph to now, and no way to send it, and the thought was so useless that he let it go.
In the afternoon he worked.
That was the other thing people would not have understood.
There was no such thing as a day off. He split wood until his shoulders burned and stacked it under the overhang, and the stack was now eleven feet long and four feet high and by his estimate it was two thirds of what he would need to get to April.
He checked his snare line, four of six sprung, two rabbits, one of them taken by something before he got there.
He hauled water. He scraped the deer hide and worked brains into it, a filthy job that he had learned out of a book and gotten wrong the first three times and eventually gotten right.
He pulled the last of the potatoes out of the ground behind the rib, seventeen of them, small and knuckled, from seed potatoes he had sprouted in a window before he left the house. They were the best thing he had grown. They were probably the best thing he had ever done.
The sun went behind the ridge at five and the temperature dropped fifteen degrees inside of half an hour.
He was carrying an armload of split lodgepole when Yak stopped.
The dog was thirty feet ahead of him on the path from the woodpile. He did not bark. He did not growl. He simply stopped walking, one forefoot still off the ground, and turned his head east.
Burner set the wood down without a sound.
He had trained himself for this the way you train yourself for a fire drill, so that the body moves while the mind is still catching up. He was down on one knee behind the woodpile with the AK off his shoulder and in his hands before he had consciously decided to do any of it.
Yak's hackles came up along his spine in a ridge.
Now the growl. Low. Barely a sound at all, more a vibration in the air.
Burner put his hand flat on the dog's shoulder and the growl stopped.
He listened.
Wind in the lodgepole. The creek, far down. A squirrel somewhere going off about something, which might mean nothing or might mean everything.
And then, carried thin on the air from the east, from down the drainage where the old road came up:
Voices.
Not one voice. Two, maybe three. Too far to make out words. Men's voices, pitched loud, unworried, the way men talk when they are not afraid of being heard.
Burner's stomach went cold.
In eleven months he had heard a human voice other than his own exactly four times.
He stayed absolutely still and he counted. A hundred and twenty seconds. The voices came again, and this time there was laughter in them, and the laughter was worse than anything else could have been.
Men who laughed out loud in the woods were men who believed the woods belonged to them.
Then a sound he had not heard since the first winter. Flat, distant, unmistakable. An engine.
Something was running. Something mechanical was alive down there, grinding low in a gear, and it was coming up the old logging road.
Burner lay in the frost behind the woodpile with his hand on his dog and every muscle in his body locked, and he did the only thing he could do, which was nothing at all, for a very long time.
The engine sound faded north. The voices went with it.
He did not move for another twenty minutes after they were gone.
When he finally stood up his hands were shaking, and he was disgusted with himself for that, and he could not make them stop.
He did not sleep much that night. He lay on the platform under two wool blankets and a deer hide with the Rhino under his hand and stared up at the tarp and listened to the wind.
At some point past midnight he made a decision.
He needed to know. Not because he wanted to meet anybody. Because a man who does not know what is moving through his country is a man waiting to be surprised, and being surprised was the only way he was going to die out here.
He would go look. He would go quiet, he would go careful, he would stay off the road and above it, and he would find out how many there were and which way they were headed and whether they were passing through or settling in.
Then he would come back and he would decide whether to stay or to move.
He was on the trail before first light with the AK slung and Yak at his heel.
It took him four hours to work down and east, staying in the timber, crossing the open bench on his belly. The old road came up into a saddle and then ran along a creek bottom in a series of switchbacks that had been washing out since before the lights went off.
He cut the tracks at nine in the morning.
Tire tracks, deep, dual rear wheels, in the mud beside a seep. Something big. And beside them, boot prints, five distinct patterns that he could separate and probably a sixth.
He crouched over them for a long time.
Then he followed.
The smell reached him before he saw anything. He came around the shoulder of a ridge into a stand of big old spruce where somebody had once had a camp, and the air moving up the drainage carried it to him, and it was a smell he knew and had hoped never to know again.
Yak whined once, very quietly, and would not go forward.
Burner went forward alone.
There was a camp in the clearing. Had been a camp. A small dome tent, collapsed and slashed open along one side. A cook kit scattered across the fire ring. A woman's blue jacket hanging in a tree branch fifteen feet up, where somebody had thrown it for no reason at all except that they could.
There were two shapes on the ground under a tarp somebody had half thrown over them, and Burner made himself look, and then he turned around and put his hand against a spruce trunk and breathed until his vision cleared.
They had been here maybe two days. There had been a fire, and the fire had been used for things a fire should not be used for.
He did not pray, having lost the habit, but he stood there a while anyway.
Then he heard it.
Behind him. Left. Twenty feet, in the thick undergrowth where the deadfall and the young spruce grew together into a wall.
A sound so small he almost missed it.
Not a branch. Not an animal.
A breath, caught and held.
Burner turned with the rifle coming up, the safety already off, his finger along the guard, and put the sights on the center of that wall of green, and everything in him went as cold and as quiet as the creek water.
"Come out," he said. "Right now. Hands where I can see them."
The undergrowth moved.