Chapter 9 #2
"One more thing, for the man on the rock specifically."
Burner did not move.
"I let you walk out of that grass above the road," Halstead said. "You, the child and the dog. My man wanted to go up the slope after you and I told him no, and I told him no because it was eight miles and a half tank and a dog track and none of that was worth four men on a hillside."
The night was completely silent.
"I've thought about that every day since," the voice said, "and I'd like you to know that I don't regret it. I'd make the same call again on the same facts. But I've now spent six days watching what you did with the time I gave you, and I want to say, in front of my men and yours,
that you're the only person in two years who has cost me anything."
Nothing moved in the grass.
"You should have stayed on your mountain," Halstead said.
The lights went out.
Burner's right eye, shut tight for four minutes, opened onto a world that was dark but not blind, and he saw the pickup back up, and turn, and go, and behind it the second set of lights swung away south,
and then there was only the sound of two engines going down the two track and the frost settling.
Nobody on the spur said anything for a long time.
"He didn't come in," Sable said finally.
"No."
"Why not? The camp's empty. There's four of us, maybe, as far as he knows. He had ten men and two trucks."
"Because there was nothing in it," Burner said.
"He looked at empty buildings and a stripped greenhouse and he understood in four seconds that everything he wanted was somewhere else, and coming through a gap in the dark against an unknown number of rifles for a pile of lumber is exactly the kind of thing he doesn't do."
"Then why come at all?"
Burner sat back against the granite.
"To say that," he said.
Delacroix spoke from behind her boulder, and it was the second thing Burner had ever heard her say.
"He came eleven miles at night to give a speech."
"He came eleven miles at night to make sure fifty people spend the next four days walking scared instead of thinking," Burner said. "And to find out whether there was anybody still on this ground, which he now knows there is. And to tell us he knows we're carrying everything we own."
"Is he right?"
"About the tracks? Yes."
"Then he'll find the canyon."
"He'll find it Thursday, like he said."
Sable turned and looked at him in the dark.
"Then it doesn't matter what we do," she said.
"It matters exactly as much as it did an hour ago," Burner said. "Nothing he said changes one thing about the plan. He'll be at the canyon on Thursday. Which means he isn't at the yard on Thursday."
He got up.
"He just told us where he'll be and when," Burner said. "He thinks he was intimidating us. What he actually did was give us a timetable."
They caught the camp at half past one in the morning, three miles short of the canyon, strung out along a bench in the dark and moving at the speed of the slowest person, which was Weathers, seventy-one and carrying a crate of medicine because she would not let anyone else touch it.
Halloran came back down the line when he saw them.
"Well?"
"They didn't come in."
Halloran stared.
"They turned around at the gap," Burner said. "Halstead gave a speech and left."
"What kind of speech?"
"I'll tell you at the canyon. Keep them walking."
They came into the box canyon at four in the morning.
It was better than Burner had feared and worse than he had hoped.
The mouth was forty feet wide with rock walls going up sixty on either side, which was as good a gate as any man could ask for.
The floor was a quarter mile of flat gravel with a stand of spruce at the back and a spring that came out of the wall and ran down a channel somebody had cut a hundred years ago.
The caves were real. Two of them, both dry, one big enough to hold every person in the camp lying down.
And it was, in every direction, a trap.
Burner walked the whole thing at first light while people slept on the gravel in their coats, and by the time the sun came over the east wall he had confirmed what Halloran had already known and had not wanted to say.
One way in. One way out. No back door. No second route.
Sixty feet of rock on both sides that a man with rope could get onto in about two hours.
He came back and sat down next to Halloran on a rock by the spring.
"Tell me about the walls," he said.
"There's three places a man could get up. I've known about them for a year."
"Can they shoot down into the canyon from up there?"
"They can shoot into about a third of it."
"Which third?"
"The gravel. Not the caves."
Burner nodded slowly.
"Then we live in the caves and we die on the gravel," he said, "and they can put four men on the rim and starve us at their convenience."
"Yes."
"You knew that when you picked it."
"I knew it," Halloran said. "I picked it because it's a place where twenty children can sleep out of the wind and there is nowhere in this country that is both safe and reachable in four days. I picked the best bad thing."
"That's what all of it is now."
"Yes."
They sat with it.
"He'll come Thursday," Burner said. "He told us so himself and I believe him, because he's not bluffing anymore, he's scheduling. He'll bring twenty-five and he'll leave four on the yard."
"And you'll be gone by then."
"We'll leave tomorrow night. The twenty-fifth. Seven of us." Burner looked out at the mouth of the canyon. "Twenty-six miles from here to the yard the way we have to walk it. Two nights. We hit it Thursday at first light, at the exact hour he's standing in front of that gap."
Halloran nodded slowly.
"And what am I doing on Thursday?"
"You're holding a forty foot gap for four hours."
"With thirteen adults and two rifles that matter."
"Yes."
"Against twenty-five."
"You're not fighting twenty-five," Burner said. "You're making twenty-five slow down. That's all. You cannot win that gap and you must not try. Every hour you cost him is an hour I've got in his yard."
"And when he comes through?"
"Then you're in the caves with fifty people and he's standing in a canyon in the dark, and he's got a choice about whether to come into a cave mouth after armed people, which is the single worst thing a man can be asked to do."
Halloran was quiet.
"He won't do it," Burner said. "He'll sit down in front of it and wait, because waiting is free and cave clearing costs men. And the longer he sits, the longer I've got."
"And how does it end?"
Burner looked at him.
"It ends when a man sitting in front of a cave gets told that his yard is gone and his fuel is gone and his shop is gone and twelve people he was counting on for the winter are walking north," he said. "And then he has to decide whether to keep sitting there or go home."
"That's it?"
"That's the whole plan. There's nothing clever in it. I take his winter and you make him spend four days not noticing."
Halloran put his hands over his face for a moment.
"There's about nine places that goes wrong," he said.
"There's about thirty. I counted last night."
They picked the seven that afternoon.
Burner. Sable, who was a condition and not a volunteer. Delacroix, who did not ask and was not asked, and simply stood up when the list was read and walked over to stand beside Burner.
A man named Otway, who was fifty and had been a wildland firefighter for twenty-two years and knew more about fuel and burning and how fire moves on a slope than anybody in the camp, and who Burner wanted for one specific reason he had not told anybody yet.
A woman named Brill, thirty, who could run nine miles without stopping and who Burner wanted as a runner and nothing else, and who understood that and did not sulk about it.
Teague.
That one Burner tried to refuse.
"You've got two grandchildren here and one of them's got a hole in his hip."
"That's my business."
"Teague."
"I voted against fighting," Teague said.
"Twice. I sat in that hall and I did the sum out loud in front of everybody and I've had to live in this camp since."
He was not looking at Burner. "And then a round came through a wall and hit a nine year old. And I know it isn't the same, I know there's no arithmetic that makes it the same, and I have still got to go."
Burner looked at him a long moment.
He had told himself he would not say that word again. He did not correct the man.
"Can you do what you're told the second you're told it?"
"Yes."
"Even if it's lie down and don't move while something terrible happens forty feet away?"
Teague's face went gray.
"Yes," he said.
"Then you're the sixth."
The seventh was Priest.
Burner said no three times and the third time Weathers came and stood in front of him with her arms folded.
"Through the meat," she said. "Clean in and out. It's six days on and the swelling's down and he's got full movement below ninety degrees and he can carry a pack on the other side."
"He's sixteen."
"He's sixteen and he shot straight in the dark with a hole in him, which is more than I can say for four of the adults you've got on that list," Weathers said.
"And I'm not going to stand here and pretend I like it, because I don't, and if you take him and he doesn't come back I'll never speak to you again."
"Then why are you saying it?"
"Because you asked me for a medical opinion and I gave you one," she said, "and if you'd asked me for a different kind you'd have got a different answer."
Burner took him.
They left at dusk on the twenty-fifth.
The whole canyon came to the mouth to watch them go, which Burner would have stopped if he could have, because it turned it into a ceremony and ceremonies made people think about not coming back.
Halloran shook his hand.
"Four hours," he said. "I'll give you more if I can."
"Give me four and go in the caves."
"Burner."
"Yes."
Halloran's face was working.
"If it goes bad here, and you come back and we're not in the canyon," he said, "there's a game trail out of the north cave. It's eleven inches wide in one spot and there's a fall on it and I would not send a child up it except to save their life. It comes out on the shoulder above the lake."