Chapter 13 #2
Burner wanted every child in the camp sleeping in one place, in the largest tent, with two adults awake in it at all times, and about fifteen parents told him exactly what they thought of that, and one woman shouted at him for four minutes in front of forty people.
He let her.
When she finished he said, "You're right that it's terrible and you're right that it's not how people should live. I'm not going to argue with either of those. I'm asking you to do it anyway for six weeks and I don't have a better reason than that a man sat on a rock and looked at them."
She did it. All of them did.
And they hunted.
Burner took every rifle that could be spared and sent them out in pairs, and they killed nine deer and two elk in six days, which sounds like a great deal and which Weathers calculated would feed seventy-two people for eleven days.
On the seventh night Delacroix woke up.
She had been in and out for nine days and mostly out, and Weathers had said three separate times that she would not last the night, and each time she had.
Burner was sitting outside the tent splicing a length of rope when Weathers put her head out.
"She's asking for you," she said.
He went in.
Delacroix was the color of paper and she had lost so much weight in nine days that her face had changed shape, and she looked at him and said, in exactly the flat voice she had always used:
"Four."
"Four," Burner agreed.
"You put it in the record."
"I did."
"Did we get them out?"
"Twelve out of the shed and Neve out of the shop," Burner said. "Twenty came north. Everybody who went through that wire came back out of it."
Delacroix closed her eyes.
"Then it was worth it," she said.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Do the thing where you sum it up," Burner said. "You're not finished. Weathers says the fever's broken and that if you get through this week you'll get through all of it."
"Weathers says a great many things."
"She's been right about most of them."
Delacroix was quiet for a moment.
"There's something I've been thinking about," she said. "For nine days, mostly badly, because I've been half out of my head."
"Say it."
"The man in the yard. In the canvas coat. Standing in the middle of it while the tanks went."
Burner went still.
"I saw him through the scope," Delacroix said. "For about three seconds, before I got hit. I had the crosshairs on his chest and I was at a hundred and sixty yards and I have made that shot four hundred times."
"And?"
"And I didn't take it."
"Why?"
Delacroix opened her eyes.
"Because he wasn't doing anything," she said. "He was standing still with his hands behind his back and he wasn't shooting at anybody and you had told me not to shoot at men standing still."
Burner sat down on the ground beside the cot.
"That's on me," he said.
"It isn't."
"It is. That's exactly what that order was, it was a rule made in advance so that nobody in this camp would have to be the person who decided, and it was a good rule, and it cost us the war in a second and a half."
"It didn't cost us anything," Delacroix said. "That's what I've been lying here working out. If I'd killed him there'd be nineteen men with no one to hold them, in a burned yard, with winter coming and nothing to lose."
Burner sat with that.
"You may be right," he said.
"I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying I don't know, and I've had nine days, and I'd like you to hear that from me before you spend a winter deciding what you'd do the next time."
On the eighth day the first snow came.
It came in the afternoon, three inches, wet and heavy, and it took down a tent and it soaked forty people to the skin and it put out two fires, and by evening the whole basin was white and the timber edge had gone from dark green to a thing you could not look at without seeing shapes.
And every track in the world was now visible.
Burner understood the consequences of that about four minutes before the man on the north listening post did.
He was standing by the cook fire and he looked out at the unbroken white of the firebreak and thought: nobody can cross that now without leaving a line.
And then: which he knows.
The shout came from the north post.
Burner got there in forty seconds and Halloran got there in sixty and by the time they arrived there were nine people on the edge of the firebreak looking out at the snow.
There were tracks.
A single line of boot prints came out of the timber, crossed the hundred feet of cleared ground in the open, walked directly up to the edge of the camp, stopped, turned, and went back.
They had been made in the last hour.
"He walked up to us," Brill said. Her voice was not steady. "In daylight. In the open."
Burner crouched at the end of the line where the prints turned.
The man had stood here for a while. The snow was packed and there were two deeper impressions where he had shifted his weight.
From here, at ninety feet, you could see the cook fire, the children's tent, the cave of the medical tent with a lamp in it.
And there was something in the snow at the toe of the prints.
Burner brushed it clear with two fingers.
It was a strip of canvas about a foot long, cut clean with a knife, and it had been folded twice and laid flat on the ground.
He picked it up and turned it over.
There was writing on it in pencil, in a small, square, careful hand.
He read it, and then he read it again, and then he stood up and put it in his pocket and did not say anything at all.
"What does it say," Halloran said.
"Not here."
"Burner."
"There are nine people standing behind you," Burner said quietly, "and one of them is fifteen. Not here."
They read it in Halloran's tent with the flap tied shut, and there were four of them: Halloran, Weathers, Sable, and Burner.
Burner put the canvas on the packing crate that served as a table and smoothed it flat.
It said:
I have counted seventy-two. I have counted two and a half months. I have counted nineteen who can hold a rifle and perhaps six who can use one. You are welcome to check my numbers, I have checked them four times.
I am not coming in November. That is what you have been telling them and you were right to, and it is wrong.
I am not coming at all.
On the fifteenth of December you will send people out of that basin to look for food, because you will have to, and they will go in twos and threes because that is how you will have to send them. I will be out there. So will my men. We have eleven miles of country and all winter.
You will lose one in December and two in January and by February nobody will go out, and then it is only a question of how long seventy-two people can look at each other.
This is not a threat and I would ask you not to read it as one. It is the schedule.
There is an alternative and I will put it in writing so that the whole camp may consider it, because I understand you people vote.
Send me the twelve I am owed. Not chosen by me. Chosen by you, as before. They will be fed and housed and worked and none of them will be harmed, which is more than the basin can promise any of you past February.
You have until the fifteenth of December.
H.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Weathers sat down on a crate.
"He's right about the food," she said.
"Yes," Halloran said.
"I mean he's exactly right. Two and a half months. I did that count myself and I did it on the twenty-ninth and I have not told anybody the number since." She looked up. "How does he know that?"
"Because I said it out loud in front of seventy-two people," Halloran said. "At the count. He was probably sitting on a rock four hundred yards away with the wind in the right direction."
"Or somebody told him," Sable said.
The tent went very quiet.
"Say that," Halloran said.
"I'm not accusing anybody of anything. I'm saying there's seventy-two people in this basin and twelve of them came out of a shed nine days ago and nobody here knows a thing about any of them, and one of them has a sixty year old mother in that yard,
and I'd be a fool not to say the sentence out loud."
"One of them's your brother."
"That's why I'm the one saying it," Sable said. "Because if I don't, in three weeks somebody else will, and they'll say it about all twelve at once."
Burner had not spoken since he had unfolded the canvas.
He was still looking at it.
"He's wrong about one thing," he said.
They all turned.
"The dates are right. The numbers are right. The plan is right and it's better than anything he's done yet, because he's finally found the one thing he can beat us with, which is time." Burner put his finger on the canvas. "But he's wrong about what this is."
"What do you mean?"
"He says it's not a threat, it's a schedule. He says it four different ways in nine lines." Burner looked up. "A man who tells you four times that he isn't threatening you is a man who's made his whole life out of that sentence."
He sat back.
"I've spent three weeks trying to work out what he is," he said.
"I thought he was a warlord and he isn't. I thought he was a business and he isn't. He's built a thing out there where nineteen men get up in the morning and believe they're running a system, that it's proportional, that it's arithmetic and not appetite. That's what Sparrow said to me in the grass.
He called it a system and said systems can be lived with."
"It works," Weathers said quietly. "That's the horrible part. It's worked for two years."
"It works because everybody agrees to the language," Burner said. "He says owed. Look at it. Send me the twelve I am owed. As if there were a ledger. As if somebody had signed something."
He stood up in the small tent with the canvas in his hand.
"Every man in that yard gets to be a clerk instead of what he is," he said.
"That's the whole invention. That's what he built. It isn't a gang and it isn't a kingdom, it's a faith with a book-keeper's face on it, and every person in this valley has been made a communicant of it for two years, including us, because we've spent nine days doing sums off his numbers."
"Then what do we do about it?" Halloran said.