“Oh, cool! Show me. Pretend I’m Brittany!” The girl turned and went into a fighting position.
Shaw gave a laugh and kept on walking. Hannah caught up.
He said, “The next alarm. The lake.”
“Fifty-nine, ninety-nine on sale.”
“What?”
“The Walmart boat. How come your father’s rules are always, like, ‘Never do this, never do that’?”
“He thought it made more of an impression. My brother called him the King of Never.”
They came to the shoreline.
“So, what’s the alarm?”
He told her, “We run fishing line through the grass about eight inches off the ground along the back of the property. Then we balance a box of kitchen pans on a plank or branch and tie the line to it. They trip the wire, the box falls and we hear.”
“Can I do it?”
He handed her the spool of forty-pound-test he’d taken from the house and they walked to the tree he’d indicated.
“Your father taught you all this?”
“Yes.”
“When you were my age?”
“Little younger.”
When he was Hannah’s age, Colter used what his father had taught him and rappelled a hundred feet off the top of Echo Ridge to where the man — his dad — lay, in the hope that he could save him. A futile hope, as it turned out.
“Tie it there.”
She started to but he stopped her. “No, this way.” He tied an anchor hitch, making sure she understood how to bind one. Then they walked along the shoreline, Hannah unspooling as they went.
Hannah looked over the property. “They could still come through the woods.” She was pointing to the dense forest to the right of the cabin as you faced the front.
“No defense is perfect. The point is to hunt time.”
“Hunt time?”
“My father. You know the expression ‘buying time’? He thought that was too mild. He said, ‘Survival is about hunting time — grabbing enough to assess the risk, enough to come up with a plan to defeat it or escape from it, enough to shelter in place until help arrives.’ ”
He looked at the woods. “They could come that way. But I put it at thirty percent. It’d mean circling around the property and hiking through forest. It’s almost a thousand yards. And it’d take a whole day for us to rig a line there. Too far.”
“You always do that, Mr. Shaw? Make percentages?”
“I do.”
“How come?”
“My father, again. You look at every possibility and assign a percentage likelihood of success. What’s the percentage of surviving a blizzard by sheltering in place versus hiking out? What’s the percentage I can free-climb this rock face when there’re no cracks to pound in a safety line piton?”
“You rock climb?”
“A hobby.”
“No way! We have a climbing wall at school.” She lifted the fishing line away from a sapling it had become stuck on. After a moment she said, “You could do percentages with boyfriends too, right?”
Shaw frowned.
She continued, “Like, there’s this guy you like, but he’s only like ten percent into you. You should forget it and look for a ninety percent.”
“Is there somebody you know who’s coming in at ten?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this guy Kyle. He’s a boarder.”
“Snow?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe. I mean skateboarder. Mom’s all, ‘Tell me about him, what do his parents do, maybe when you’re at the mall hanging with him, I can come by...’ Jesus.” She tugged at her ponytail. “It’s like we ignore the ninety percent ones and go for the ten percent, even if it’s a bad friggin’ idea.”
Amen to that.
They continued along the shoreline. Shaw broke the silence. “Something you should read. I think you’d like it.”
“Yeah?”
“An essay. Self-Reliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“Who was he?”
“Philosopher from the eighteen hundreds. A lecturer, poet, activist. An abolitionist.”
“We studied that. Antislavery. What’s the book about?”
“It’s about being yourself, a nonconformist, not relying on anyone else, or anything else. Not being swayed by other people’s opinions unless you respect them. My father gave me a copy. Think you’d like it.”
“Can I download it?”
“Probably. But it’s better to have a printed copy.”
Hannah pulled down a stand of tall milkweed and continued stringing the alarm line.
“That’s good,” he told her.
She nodded but appeared distracted.
“Mr. Shaw... can I ask a question?”
A glance her way. Hannah’s eyes were wide and there was something conspiratorial about her smile. “Will you teach me how to shoot?”
63
“Dad got me a BB gun when I was twelve. I was good!” She nodded toward his waistband. “Your father’s rules — never be without a weapon, right?”
“Don’t need one. You’re with me.”
“But I don’t have anything.”
“Guns take lots of training.”
“I know how they work. I’ve seen all the Mission: Impossibles... Just kidding! You can train me.”
“Your mother doesn’t like guns.”
“I’m here because of my mother.” Hannah said this in an even voice that once again was laced with an adult edge.
Shaw debated, then drew the revolver from his waistband. It was an elegant weapon, the six-inch barrel and the receiver richly blued, the grip splendid mahogany.
The girl stared.
He pressed the catch and swung out the cylinder. He emptied the six blunt .357 rounds into his palm and pocketed them.
Closing the cylinder with a sharp click, he ignored her outstretched hand, which she lowered.
“Colter, listen to me.”
“Okay, Ash.”
The children are encouraged to call their parents by their given names. This draws curious looks from friends and family but is in keeping with the philosophy of self-reliance encouraged by Ashton and Mary Dove.
Colter is ten years old. This is a milestone year, he will later learn. It is the firearms age in the Shaw family. He and his father are alone, standing behind the cabin in the Compound.
“This is a revolver because... the cylinder revolves.” The wiry man with a bushy beard and wild hair spins it with a satisfying series of clicks. “It’s also called a wheel gun.”
“All right.”
Ashton opens the cylinder and displays the empty chambers.
“Is the gun loaded?”
“No, sir.”
“Yes, it is.”
The boy looks from the cylinder, which is as empty as empty can be, to his father’s stern face.
“Never assume a weapon is unloaded. Even if you see it with your two eyes, then close it up yourself, it’s still loaded. You understand?”
Not exactly, but: “Yessir.”
“What’s the rule?”
“Never assume a weapon is unloaded.”
Colter wants to take the gun and start pulling the trigger and shooting. He will learn he is a long way off from that.