Chapter 17 #5
"Yes," Burner said. "That's why I did it."
They walked a while.
"Two hundred and eleven people," Sparrow said. "And the nine rifles were a quarter mile back where he could barely see them."
"That was Neve."
"I know it was Neve." Sparrow's burned hand was in his pocket. "I'd like you to notice something and then I'll shut up about it."
"Go on."
"Two years ago you stood on a rock and told a camp what to do, four times, and you were right four times, and if you'd been wrong once we'd all be dead."
Sparrow looked at him. "This week you sat on a drum for six hours and said you were the worst person to listen to, and a twenty-two year old who was in a shed when you met her came up with the thing that worked."
Burner walked with his stick.
"I know," he said.
"How does it feel?"
"Like the best thing that's ever happened to me," Burner said, "and I have spent four days working out why it also feels like grief, and I think I've got it."
"Say it."
"Because I was good at the other thing," Burner said.
They came back to the yard on the twenty-second of August.
Ninety-six people, and a hundred and fifteen more heading home in eight directions, and the potatoes coming in three weeks.
Burner stood at the gate and watched the yard fill up, and Yak came out to meet him, gray in the face now and slower every year, and put his head under Burner's free hand without being asked.
Shyla came and stood on his other side.
"That went well," she said.
"It did."
"So it's over."
He looked down at her.
Eleven years old. Four inches taller than she had been in May. A girl who had crawled out of a deadfall three years ago and who now argued in front of ninety-six people and was listened to.
"No," he said.
She grinned, which she had only started doing that summer, and which he had not entirely gotten used to.
"Good," she said.
That night there was a fire in the yard and most of the camp sat around it, and somebody had made something that was almost beer and that everybody agreed was terrible and drank anyway.
Burner sat on his drum at the edge of it with his bad leg out and watched.
Halloran was arguing with Otway about acreage.
Neve had eleven children in a circle and was telling them something.
Delacroix and Sable were cleaning rifles, badly, because they were talking.
Rowe was laughing at something Nate had said.
Priest was sitting with a girl from the ranger station and pretending not to be.
Cutter was at the far edge of the firelight, alone, as he always was, and nobody had asked him to be closer and nobody had made him leave.
Weathers came and sat down beside Burner without being invited, which she did about once a year.
"Hip?" she said.
"Bad."
"It'll be bad in the cold for the rest of your life."
"You've told me."
"I'll tell you again in November." She looked out at the fire. "I want to say a thing and then I'm going to go to bed."
"Say it."
"Three years ago you walked into a valley that had about four hundred people in it who all thought they were alone," Weathers said, "and next month there'll be a harvest that eleven camps are going to share out, and I did a count last week and it's somewhere over five hundred people."
"That's not me."
"No," Weathers said. "It isn't. And I want you to notice that you said that instantly and meant it, because the man in that notebook couldn't have."
She got up.
"Goodnight," she said.
Burner sat by the fire for a long time after most of them had gone.
At about one in the morning, when it had burned down to red, a shape came and sat on the ground with its back against his drum, and it was Shyla, and she did not say anything.
They sat like that a while.
"I've been thinking about my dad," she said eventually.
Burner did not say anything. He had learned, over three years, that this was the correct thing.
"He said get in the hole and don't come out for anything," she said. "And I did it, and I was right to, and I've never once been angry at him for it."
"No."
"But I've been thinking about how that was the only thing he could think of." She had a stick and she was turning it over in her hands. "He had about four seconds and the best thing he had was a hole. That's all there was. One man and a hole and four seconds."
Burner waited.
"And there were two hundred people in that field," Shyla said.
She looked up at him.
"That's what changed," she said. "That's the actual thing, isn't it. Not you and not the fire and not any of it. Just that there's two hundred people now instead of one man and a hole."
Burner looked at the coals for a long moment.
"Yes," he said.
"Good," Shyla said.
She put her head back against the drum and looked up at the sky, which was completely black and completely full of stars, and had been every night for three years, and which neither of them ever quite got used to.
"There's still Cutter," she said.
"There's still Cutter."
"And the four camps that didn't answer."
"Yes."
"And whoever comes next year."
"There'll be somebody," Burner said. "There always is."
Shyla nodded slowly.
"Then we'd better get the potatoes in," she said.