Chapter 6 #3
At dusk the yard did something that changed everything.
The flatbed came out through the gate and turned north.
Burner got the glasses up. Six men in the bed. Two in the cab. Fuel cans strapped along the rail.
"That's not a supply run," Sable said.
"No."
"They don't go out at dark. Sixteen days. They have never once gone out at dark."
Burner's mouth had gone dry.
He tracked the truck along the gray road until the timber took it, and then he lay there and did the thing he was best at in the world, which was to take a set of facts and refuse to be comfortable about them.
North.
The Kettle was north.
"How long to your camp from here," Sable said.
"Eleven miles as the crow goes. Eighteen the way a man has to walk it."
"And by road?"
"There's no road all the way. The old state route goes northeast and then there's nine miles of two track and then the last four miles is foot."
"So a truck can't get there."
"A truck can get within four miles. Maybe three."
They looked at each other.
"He said the twenty-eighth," Burner said. "He sent a man to my gate and told us the twenty-eighth at sunrise."
"It's the twenty-second."
"I know what day it is."
He was already moving. He had the pack on before he had finished deciding, rolling back off the rocks into the slot below the crest so he would not skyline, and Yak came up beside him with his ears forward.
"Wait," Sable said.
"I can't."
"Six hours, you said. Eighteen miles, you said. You will not beat a truck."
"I don't have to beat the truck," Burner said. "The truck stops four miles out. Then it's twelve men on foot in the dark through doghair lodgepole and blowdown, and I have walked that ground every day for a week and they have not."
"You still won't beat them."
"Then I'll get there second," Burner said, "and I'll be behind them instead of in front of them, and there's worse places to be."
He turned and looked back at her.
She was still lying in the rocks with her hands on the shotgun, thin as a rail, sixteen days into a vigil that had no end to it.
"Come with me," he said.
She stared.
"I can't leave him."
"You are not leaving him." Burner crouched back down.
"Listen to me. You said it yourself. There is no gap for one person. There is no version of this where you lie on this hill and a door opens. He is in a shed with eleven others and he will still be in it in a week, because they are not killing those people, they need them,
that's the only good thing in this entire situation and you should take it."
"And if they move them?"
"Then you'd have watched them go and been able to do nothing."
He held her eyes. "I am not telling you to give up on him. I'm telling you that the road to that shed goes through fifty-one people at a place called the Kettle, and tonight is the night they either hold or they don't, and if they don't there's nobody left in this country who could ever help you."
Sable did not move for a three count.
Then she was up on her knees, stuffing the canvas bag.
"Eighteen miles," she said.
"Sixteen if you can do rock."
"I can do rock."
They came off the knob in the last of the light and went north, fast, the way men and women only move when the thing behind them is smaller than the thing in front of them.
They did not talk.
Burner set a pace that would have killed him a year ago and Sable held it for four miles and then started falling back, and he slowed, and she caught up and did not thank him for slowing and he did not mention that he had.
At nine o'clock they crossed the old state route.
The tracks were there in the dirt. Fresh. Dual rear wheels, cutting north, and over them and beside them a scatter of boot prints where men had gotten out to check something and gotten back in.
At eleven they hit the two track and followed it.
At half past midnight they found the truck.
It was parked in a wide spot under the trees with the hood cold and the tailgate down, backed in so it faced out, and there was nobody with it.
Burner stood in the dark beside it with his hand on the fender and looked north at the black wall of the timber and made himself breathe.
Three and a half miles. Uphill. Through blowdown.
They had at least a ninety minute head start.
"Can we catch them?" Sable whispered.
"No."
"Then what do we do?"
Burner was already moving.
"We go the other way around," he said.
They went east and up, off the two track entirely, onto the granite shoulder where the going was murder and the noise was nothing, and they climbed with their hands as much as their feet.
Yak went ahead and came back and went ahead.
At half past two they came out on the north rock above the bowl, the same rock where Burner had sat with a map and stones on the corners, and they lay down at the edge and looked into the Kettle.
It was dark.
It was quiet.
There was no fire in the yard, no lamp in a window, no shape moving anywhere.
And on the frame outside the long hall, the three iron bars hung perfectly still, and the length of pipe was lying on the ground beneath them, where nobody had ever left it.