“That’s it, the old barter system. Swap a bushel of this for a bushel of that.”
“No money changes hands?”
“We can’t eat money, Harland. Neither can you.”
“Never liked the taste of it anyway,” Harland said, cracking a toothy smile.
The little aside severed the tension between the parties. Abel and his few cohorts laughed aloud at Harland’s remark. For the first time since arriving on the bluffs among strangers, the farmer felt he could let his guard down a little.
“When would you want to get started?” Harland queried.
A grin brightened Abel’s face. The farmer had arrived at the exact place the town’s founder hoped he would. “Let’s get going as soon as the Guard drives that train out of Sweetly. It will take us a few days to get the logistics down and harvest and pack for shipping. Does that work for you, Harland?”
Harland’s tilted his head back and clamped his eyelids tight to squeeze the fatigue from his eyes. “Yeah, that works, mister.”
Chapter One Hundred-Eleven
Canada Route 2 rolled northward, a strand of grit and tar lost on a table-flat ocean of early fall snow and range stubble. Driving under an icy moondog halo encircling a hazy half moon, Sinopa ferried Liz north to Calgary, humming a tune at the wheel. Slumped in the passenger-side seat, the geophysicist sowed disjointed thoughts. Through the window floated flippered plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, creatures that inhabited the inland Cretaceous sea that had laid down the dead-level sediments sweeping by the car windows. If it would ever warm up again, Canada could at least turn to these tabletop ranges and flat wheat lands to feed itself several times over, Liz speculated.
To stimulate conversation to help pass the three night hours to Calgary, Liz called Sinopa’s name.
“Yes, Elizabeth.”
“What will you do if cold persists next summer? How will you people manage?”
“As we once did,” said Sinopa flatly, eyes fixed tight to the road. “White Elk says the buffalo will provide for us. They eat the grass. No matter what the weather, the grass is immortal.”
“You can’t live on buffalo meat alone.”
“There are a hundred wild plants that provide nourishment, but you must know what they are and where to look for them.”
“Name one.”
“Oh, let’s see, timpsula, the prairie turnip, is a good one. Boil it, bake it, fry it, pickle it, it doesn’t matter. Whites moving into this country called it Indian breadroot. Topeka root, too, is very good, something like potato.”
“I can’t imagine the plants maturing in the cold.”
“These wild plants have always lived with cold weather. They evolved in it. It is nothing to them. They are free for the harvesting. We know them well.”
“You’ve eaten them, then?”
“Of course. Some of us have not forgotten these foods. They have always sustained the Blackfoot in times of hardship. When the Whites murdered the buffalo herds for sport and left us to starve to death, we turned to the wild plants. Without them, we would have perished.”
Several miles of road passed under the car before Sinopa found her voice again. “And what will you do a year from now, Elizabeth? How will you sustain yourself?”
The last smudge of red illuminated the mountains to the west and the hard level edge of the limitless prairie to the east, backlighting dark milk-carton-shaped forms of great, aging wood-sheathed grain elevators rising twenty miles apart. The radio scratched out a single evening radio preacher, steeped in Revelations, broadcasting a warning: “Two of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were already astride the land in the wake of the Yellowstone disaster. The others would follow soon, very soon.”
Calgary, as cold a metropolis as Russian cities of the Siberian interior, crept over the horizon. As promised, Sinopa delivered Liz to the airport. Specialists from the Cascades Volcano Observatory were on their way from the west coast, bent on employing the international airport as a staging area for the first research helicopter flights into the Yellowstone country. Teams would soon amass gear and personnel for the journey. Liz had every intention of joining fellow scientists on the first trip to edge of the new caldera.
Chapter One Hundred-Twelve
Fierce Yellowstone sunset reds lingered in the evening sky, unblemished by earth’s satellite in dark new-moon phase. As the fires in the stratosphere ebbed, forward legions of solar flare particles entered the ionosphere of earth. The galactic flood of supercharged radiation from the sun, interacting with the earth’s lean outer atmosphere, provided the spark to light the halls of heaven to neon brilliance.
Abel strode across the town common in the darkening hour, a heavy homespun wool sweater over a flannel shirt and long johns. He toyed with worry as he moved through the glassy cold, turning over in his mind imaginary snowscapes shivering under the vicious freeze of the first Yellowstone winter to come. Would weather destroy food crops in the unheated greenhouses? Would the cold bring down Independency?
The man had experienced minus forty-eight once, an unearthly reading. That sort of temperature was heavy air from the northern outrun slopes of the Brooks Range of Alaska come calling. The Siberian gulag camps at Kolema could scarcely be colder. How many such nights would a Yellowstone January yield?
Such temperatures could kill. Deer, huddled in deeryards beneath thick stands of evergreens and weakened by weeks of brute cold, froze to death standing fully erect. Step outside, Abel knew, and one had to pull a scarf across the face to trap the warmth of breath against the flesh. Super cold air could damage tissues in the larynx and lungs.
The man parked a hand on the entrance railing to the CC and turned to survey the snapshot-still, frostbitten landscape of October, then craned his neck to find Cassiopeia, the star queen in her great W-shaped throne of distant suns. In the east, green and red curtains of aurora fluttered across the night sky. Abel was the only customer at the celestial carnie show. Maybe, he thought, a moment might arrive when a single last human remained on the planet to see such a brilliant performance. On all sides, that singular individual would have witnessed his or her companions vanish, children shrivel to bone, the elders crawl into the bush to hasten the end, women go barren for lack of sustenance and civility, and the men war among themselves until the lone victor stood triumphant over a world of ruin and an empire of corpses.
The complex order of things had already been turned on its head, and just in a handful of months, Abel reflected. The whole of it, that frenetic economic marvel machine out there, had been undone by a single geological event. It seemed incomprehensible, the stuff of black magic.
Abel pushed open the door to his upstairs office, seeking the farmer, who had spent his first full day at Independency in the workspace sleeping fitfully and eating little. A cot had been prepared for the guest and food brought up. Penny and Doctor Ruchelshouse had checked in on him often, Abel, too, when he awoke from his sleep of exhaustion.
Harland lay awake on the cot, breath rattling in his throat, the glow of a single nightlight illuminating his weathered, sharply angular Scandinavian features and tightly cropped white hair. The low wattage light shed an aura of severity over Harland’s wiry frame. He could not bring himself to lift his eyes to acknowledge the being entering the room.
Abel took a seat in a chair at the foot of Harland’s cot and sat in silence for several minutes, trying to settle on an opening inquiry that might free up the farmer’s tongue.
“Did the doctor come to see you, Harland?”