Chapter 2 #2
"You live here," she said.
"Yes."
"By yourself?"
"Yes."
She thought about that.
"That's sad," she said.
Burner did not have an answer for it, so he built a fire.
He fed her deer liver fried in its own fat with the last of the salt, and two potatoes from behind the rib, and she ate all of it and then fell asleep sitting up with the fork still in her hand.
He caught the fork before it hit the stones.
He carried her the eight feet to the sleeping platform and put her down on it and covered her with both blankets and the deer hide, and she did not wake up, and her hand came up in her sleep and closed on a fistful of the wool and stayed there.
Burner sat down by the fire and put his head in his hands.
Alone. That had been the rule. He had made it in the first winter, with his back to a wall and a dead man in the snow forty feet away, and he had kept it for eleven months and it had worked, and he had believed it was the only thing keeping him upright.
The rule had lasted exactly as long as it took a child to crawl out of a pile of deadfall.
He did not try to talk himself out of it. That was the strange part. There was no argument going on in him at all. Somewhere between the clearing and here, without ever being put to a vote, it had simply become true that he was going to keep this kid alive, and everything else was now just details.
The details were bad.
She could not survive winter here. He could, barely, with luck. A child in a canvas shelter at six thousand feet from December to April with no medicine and no real shoes was not a plan, it was a slow way of being sorry.
That meant somewhere else. That meant walking her out to something. And he did not know of anything to walk her out to, which meant he was going to have to find out, which meant going toward people instead of away from them, which was the exact opposite of everything he had built.
And there were six men north of here with a working truck.
He looked at the fire for a while.
Then he pulled his pack over and got out the loading kit.
It was not much of a kit. A Lee hand press he had taken out of a ransacked sporting goods store where everything with a trigger was gone and the reloading aisle had not even been touched, because people running through a store in a panic wanted guns and not the boring green boxes.
A set of 7.62x39 dies. A hand primer. A little balance scale with tweezers.
Three pounds of powder in a sealed can, and maybe four hundred primers in flat plastic trays, and a coffee can of brass he had been picking up off the ground for eleven months like a man collecting bottle caps.
It was the single most valuable thing he owned. More than the rifle. A rifle without ammunition was a club.
He worked by firelight with the kit laid out on a flat stone.
He started with the brass. He had already deprimed and cleaned this batch, tumbling it in a jar with water and sand and a drop of the last dish soap on earth, and it sat in a row, dull and scratched but sound.
He checked each case mouth with his thumbnail.
Two had splits starting and he set those aside for scrap.
He sized them one at a time, pressing each case into the die with the handle, feeling the brass squeeze down and the spent primer pocket come clean.
Then the primers. This was the part he did slowly and did not rush and did not do tired, because a primer seated crooked could go off in your hand and there was no emergency room anywhere in the state of Montana.
He seated each one by feel, until it bottomed, just below flush.
Powder next. He had one load worked up, twenty-six and a half grains of a surplus ball powder behind a hundred and twenty-three grain bullet, and it was not fast and it was not fancy but it shot to the same place every time out of his rifle and it had put down a two hundred and forty pound buck
that morning.
He threw each charge and trickled it up on the little scale with the tweezers and a bent piece of wire until the beam floated level. Twenty-six point five. Twenty-six point five. Twenty-six point five.
Thirty-one times.
That was how many bullets he had left. Thirty-one.
He seated them last, one by one, pressing each one down into the case mouth with the die set to the overall length he had scratched into the base of the press with a nail so he would never have to remember it.
He set the finished rounds upright in a row on the stone as he went.
Thirty-one shining brass soldiers with copper heads, standing up in the firelight.
He looked at them for a long time.
A hundred and ninety-one in the magazines and the cache, plus thirty-one. Two hundred and twenty-two rounds for the rifle. Fifty-eight for the revolver.
Against a truck. Against six men.
Not a fight he could take. Not for a second.
If it came to standing in front of six men with rifles, two hundred rounds did him no good at all.
The only numbers that mattered out here were the ones that governed distance, and ground, and dark, and knowing where a thing was before it knew where you were.
He boxed the rounds and put the kit away and banked the fire down to coals.
Shyla had not moved. Her fist was still knotted in the blanket.
Burner sat with his back against the rock and the Rhino in his lap and watched the coals go from orange to red to almost nothing.
He fell asleep sometime after two, sitting up.
He woke because Yak's head came off his paws.
The sky was gray. Not dawn yet, the flat colorless hour before it. The fire was dead and there was frost on the canvas and his breath was hanging in front of his face.
Yak was standing.
The dog was faced east, downslope, and his hackles were up, and this time he did not growl at all, and the silence of him was the most frightening thing Burner had ever seen an animal do.
Burner came up off the rock with the AK in his hands.
He listened.
At first nothing. Wind. The creak of a lodgepole somewhere.
Then, from down in the timber, closer than the voices had been, close enough that he heard it clean and clear and knew exactly what it was:
The sound of a bolt being worked on a rifle.
And a man's voice, perfectly calm, not twenty yards below the camp.
"I know you're up there, friend. We followed your dog's tracks right in."