Chapter 16 #4
Same thing. North fence, forty feet out, stopping. Six stops this time instead of eleven.
And at the sixth stop, laid flat in the snow in the same place as before, was a deer.
It had been field dressed properly. Hung and cooled, by the look of it, and it was a young doe and it had been shot through the lungs at what Burner estimated from the entry was a fair distance, with a rifle.
Nobody touched it for an hour.
"It's poisoned," somebody said.
"It's not poisoned," Weathers said, standing over it with her arms folded. "Look at the cuts. Somebody spent forty minutes on this animal and did a nicer job than most of you would."
"Then what is it?"
Burner crouched in the snow beside it.
"It's the same thing as the canvas," he said.
"Which is what?"
"Reporting in."
They argued about the deer for four hours.
It was, Burner thought afterward, the strangest meeting the camp ever held, seventy people in a shop frame arguing about whether to eat a hundred and ten pounds of meat left by a man who had cut a throat in that same building in October.
Ferris said burn it.
He said that taking it was the beginning of a conversation and that a conversation was exactly what had cost them four graves, and that there were people in this room who would be dead if a certain man had been told no in September.
Rowe, on his crutches, said eat it.
"There's a hundred pounds of meat on the ground," he said, "and it's the fourteenth of January, and I have watched a camp starve before and I will not vote to burn food for a principle."
That was the whole argument, put plainly, and it went around for four hours without either side finding anything better to say.
The vote was forty-four to twenty-five to take it.
Halloran said afterward, "And that's on all of us," and nobody disagreed.
Burner did not sleep that night.
He lay in the shop frame listening to the stove tick and turned the thing over, and somewhere around three in the morning he understood what was actually being done to them, and it was so much cleverer than anything Halstead had ever tried that he sat up in the dark.
He went and found Sparrow at first light.
"It's not clever," he said.
"What isn't?"
"That's what I've been getting wrong all night. I've been lying there working out what Cutter wants and what the deer means and what the play is, and there isn't one." Burner sat down on a drum. "He's not doing anything to us."
"Then what is he doing?"
"He's trying to belong to something," Burner said.
Sparrow did not say anything.
"He did what Halstead said for two years and Halstead is dead and there is nothing left in the world that tells him what to do," Burner said.
"So he's walking twenty-six miles to leave a report and a deer at the fence of the only organized group of people left in this valley, because it's the only behavior he's got."
"That's a very generous reading."
"It's not generous at all," Burner said. "It's the most frightening one. A cruel man you can predict. A man looking for somebody to belong to will do absolutely anything, and the only question is who gets to him first."
Sparrow sat with that.
"Then what do we do?"
"I don't know," Burner said. "But I know what we don't do, and that's leave him out there for four months deciding on his own."
He brought it to the camp on the sixteenth.
"I want to talk to him," he said.
The shop frame went up like a struck match and Halloran had to shout them down twice.
"He killed Oates," Ferris said. "He killed Prentice and Hobbes. Three of the four graves outside that wire are his and you want to sit down with him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because in four months we're going to walk out of here to ninety places in a notebook," Burner said, "and every one of those places is going to be nine frightened people with rifles. And if there is a man out there who does whatever he's told and is looking for somebody to tell him,
then either we deal with that or somebody else does."
"Or we shoot him."
"That's a real option and I want it discussed properly," Burner said.
"I'm not going to stand here and pretend there's something wrong with it. He's killed three of ours and if this camp votes to put a man in the rocks north of that fence and wait for him, I'll do it myself and I'll not argue about it afterward."
The room went quiet at that.
"But I'd want everybody to understand what we'd be voting for," he said. "Not a defense. An ambush. A planned killing of a man who has, in six weeks, brought us news of a death and a hundred pounds of meat, and nothing else."
Delacroix stood up.
It was the fourth time she had spoken in front of the camp and the room went silent for her the way it always did now.
"I'd like to say something about ambushes," she said. "I had Halstead in my crosshairs in this yard in September and I didn't take the shot because Burner had made a rule and the rule was don't shoot men who are standing still."
She put her hand against her side, unconsciously, the way she always did now.
"I have thought about that for four months and I still don't know if I was right. But I know what the rule was for. It was so that none of us would have to be the person who decided, in a second and a half, on our own."
She looked around.
"And now we're being asked to decide it slowly and together, with our eyes open, and I'd like us to notice that's different. That's better. That's what all of this has been for."
She sat down.
They voted to talk.
Thirty-nine to thirty-one, which was closer than Burner had wanted and exactly as close as it should have been.
They did it on the twenty-second of January.
Burner walked out alone to the sixth stop on the north fence at three in the afternoon, in daylight, with no rifle, and he put a folded strip of canvas on the ground and weighted it with a stone and walked back.
It said, in his own handwriting:
WE GOT THE DEER. THERE IS FOOD HERE AND A FIRE. IF YOU WANT TO TALK, COME IN DAYLIGHT TO THE NORTH FENCE AND PUT THE RIFLE DOWN AT FORTY FEET. NOBODY WILL SHOOT YOU. THAT IS A PROMISE FROM SEVENTY PEOPLE WHO VOTED ON IT.
He did not sign it.
Then he waited.
Nothing happened for nine days.
On the thirty-first of January the canvas was gone and there was nothing in its place, and Burner stood at the fence and looked at the ground and could not tell from the tracks whether the man had stood there for one minute or an hour.
On the fourth of February there was another deer.
No message.
On the eleventh of February there was a third deer and a piece of canvas, and the writing on it was the same enormous dragged letters, and it took Burner a while to read it because three of the words were wrong.
It said:
I DON NO WHAT TO TALK ABOUT.
Burner read it four times.
Then he sat down in the snow at the north fence with his back against a drum, in full view of four hundred acres of open ground, and stayed there until dark.
Nothing came.
He went out again the next day and sat there for six hours.
And the next.
On the fifth day, Weathers came out and stood over him.
"This is the stupidest thing I have ever watched a person do," she said.
"Probably."
"You're sitting in the snow in February in the open."
"I know."
"Why?"
Burner looked out at the burned ground.
"Because he said he doesn't know what to talk about," he said, "and I've been trying to work out what you say to that, and I've got nothing, so I'm sitting where he can see me and I'm not doing anything."
Weathers was quiet for a moment.
"That's not the stupidest thing I've ever watched a person do," she said, and went back inside.
On the nineteenth of February, at about four in the afternoon, with the light going yellow and the cold coming down, a man walked out of the burned ground four hundred yards north.
Burner saw him from a long way off.
He came slowly and he came straight, and at a hundred yards he stopped and put a rifle down on the snow and left it there, and then he came the rest of the way with his hands out from his sides.