“Harry, did you get those oil drums like you said you were going to?” Amy Slencik fixed her husband with a no-nonsense look through her gray-tinted glasses.
“Yeah, I threw six of them in the back of the pickup last night,” Harry said. “Old Peachy ain’t gonna be happy when he finds them gone, but I got them, all right.”
“Well, you just back the pickup into the garage and keep your mouth shut,” Amy said. “Peachy’ll never know who took ‘em, and we can haul them over to the cabin this weekend.” She looked around at the small group of people gathered in her tiny Bozeman living room that evening — Mel Tapper, who lived on the little five-acre farm behind their place on Grizzly Creek; Doc Chamberlain, who was living year-round now just down the creek from them; Rod Kelley, with the cattle ranch right below Doc’s place; Mel’s huge son Tom, looking like some rawboned modern-day Paul Bunyan in his heavy beard and his Tractor Town baseball cap; her own two strapping sons Garth and Elmer, with their two pregnant wives whispering to each other in the background; and an uncomfortable-looking Harry sitting off to the right of her. “If we’re going to store gas, we’ve got to have oil cans to store it in,” she said, “and I say we’ve got to start storing gas — five gallons extra for the cans every time anybody hits the gas station. I’m telling you guys, if we’re going to make our move out there at the creek, we’d better do it now, because tomorrow’s liable to be too late. This plague thing hasn’t hit Bozeman yet, but it’s going to, sure as God makes the moon come up. It’s all over the place down in Wyoming, from what I hear, and lots of people down there are doing just what we’re planning to do — the ones that are lucky enough, that is.”
“You mean holing up and hiding,” Mel Tapper said glumly.
“Well, you can call it whatever you want to, Mel,” Amy said impatiently. “I call it covering ourselves, and covering our kids, while we’ve got the chance. Between us we’ve got the land and the resources to make it work, if we move fast enough. Self-sufficiency is what we need — just as much self-sufficiency as we can manage, so that we don’t need anything from anybody, and we don’t owe anybody anything, and we can stay clear of anybody carrying a lot of bugs around with them. But I think we’ve got to move, because we haven’t got much time left.”
“You’re sure right about that,” Ben Chamberlain spoke up, a little unexpectedly, since he hadn’t had much to say about the whole idea so far. “If we’re going to do anything at all, we’d better fish or cut bait. I’m not so sure the whole thing is going to hang together — I’m not even sure it’s legal — but I guess we can fight that out when the time comes.”
“Why wouldn’t it be legal?” Amy demanded. “What’s illegal about people pooling their land and their labor and setting up a little freehold for themselves and their kids, way out of harm’s way? We own the land, don’t we? Free and clear? No mortgages, nobody else’s fingers on it? Mel?”
“Mine’s bought and paid for. Deed’s in the box in the bank.”
“Your taxes all paid up?”
“Every year.”
“All right, Mel’s got five acres nobody can take away from him. Good rich soil for hay, grain or vegetables. Good possibilities for irrigation as long as the creek runs, and it doesn’t show any sign of going dry that I can see. Mel’s got two horses that could drag a plow if they had to, and chickens, and two pigs and all Martha’s goats, and God, do those goats make more goats. What’s more, Mel’s a crack shot with that old open-sight .30-.30 of his. I don’t know how he ever hits anything with it, but he’s the best darned still-hunter in this part of the state, and you all know it. If we end up having to poach some venison, Mel can do it up brown.”
Amy sat back and looked around the room defiantly. “So Mel’s got plenty to offer, and a wife and a boy to take care of. Harry and I are in the same boat: resources to offer, and a family to protect. We’ve got nine acres between Mel’s farm and the creek, easy to clear of brush and plow and plant and irrigate. We’ve got Harry’s backhoe and loader and drag blade to do heavy work, if we can lay in enough diesel fuel to run them. We’ve got a good stand of fir timber up the hill there, as well as cottonwood till hell won’t have it, down on the creek bottom for firewood. Harry can wire anything that needs wiring and fix any piece of machinery that lets out a squeak, and Mel can too — between them they can keep things running. And we’ve got two boys with strong backs and pregnant wives. If it was just me and Harry alone, I guess we could take our chances in town, but we sure do want to see those grandchildren. We want these kids of ours to have something left when it’s all over.”
Amy took off her glasses and polished them on her shirttail. “Then there’s Ben here — he’s got more to offer than anybody. Ben, you’ve got sixteen acres of good arable land on the creek, enough to produce a surplus of food and run a few head of cattle for meat and milk as well. I could grow more spuds on half an acre of that south meadow of yours than we could eat in ten years. You’ve also got timber and cover for birds. And best of all, you’re a doctor — you could keep us all alive. You can treat glanders, can’t you?”
“Glanders.” Ben scratched his chin. “I reckon I could if I had to.”
“Horses get glanders,” Amy said firmly.
“And people get plague.”
“Only they don’t have to,” Amy said. “That’s the whole idea of having our own safe spot. We’re not going to get the plague — if there’s some kind of medicine to get, Ben can get it for us. And we’ve got a place we can keep together when everything else falls apart. We’ve got everything we need, right out there on Grizzly Creek with our thirty-one acres of pooled land and the work each one can contribute. It’s a perfect Freehold, everything we all need to take care of ourselves and our families. And if Rod Kelley wants to come in with us with his grazing land down the creek, he’s got another one hundred sixty acres right there. Of course, that’s mostly desert, but he knows stock-raising and you can sure graze steers on that land if you can get water to it. With that, we could have enough beef to sell or trade for anything we need. It’s a natural-made Freehold — and if it comes to that, we’ve got enough artillery to hang onto it, too.”
Yes, Ben thought, we’ve sure got the artillery. It was not like the bunches of crazies he’d been reading about down in California, with their stockpiles of submachine guns and automatic rifles and bazookas and mortars and Christ only knew what else — but they had enough iron there on the creek to keep the peace. He alone had his Browning .270 bolt-action rifle, high muzzle velocity and flat trajectory, drop a running bull elk at 450 yards, and his wife’s old Remington .30-.06 with a Weaver scope that she’d used when she was still alive. And his Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun, clean pump action, and his wife’s Ithaca twenty-gauge. The old World War I Enfield .30-.06 that had been gathering dust in the storeroom all these years, and the snub-nose .38 five-shooter pistol he’d hardly ever fired except once in a while at a stray grouse. Harry and Amy and their boys all had their hunting weapons, and certainly Mel did, including that damned old muzzle-loader of his that sounded like a cannon going off and nearly broke your shoulder every time you fired it …
Yes, we’ve got the artillery. That’s not the question. Ben stared thoughtfully at the small, wiry, sharp-nosed woman across the room, with her sly gray eyes behind those gray-tinted glasses. Amy Hyatt Slencik, must be about forty-five now, he figured, if she hadn’t been lying on her last birthday. How long had it been since he’d first set eyes on her? Twenty-three years? Twenty-four? Something like that. That was about when she and Harry had first come out to Grizzly Creek, looking for some cheap bottomland to build a summer cabin on, to get away from the Bozeman heat. Young things, then, with the two boys still just babies. Harry was the same now as he was then — big, friendly, easygoing, generous to a fault. But Amy — how she’d changed since those days!
Ben Chamberlain had pieced the story together, even as he’d watched her changing. Amy Hyatt had been a Missoula girl to start with, only child of a good, solid, upper-middle-class family, at least to all outward appearances. George Hyatt had owned and run the big hardware store there in Missoula and built himself a small fortune from it in spite of a lot of heavy drinking right from the first. They had a big white middle-western house with heavy summer curtains on a tree-shaded street in the fashionable part of town, and two cars and a boat, and Amy had had everything she could ever have wanted, including a lively Appaloosa pony they’d boarded out at a nearby rancher’s place. Until she was sixteen years old Amy Hyatt was a pampered, protected baby, friendly with her little clique of girl friends, imperious with the boys, a middling good scholar, with camps and riding school to while away the summer months.
Then the halcyon days of Amy Hyatt had come crashing to a halt in the course of a single year. First her mother had the stroke, a bad one but not quite bad enough, and Amy discovered the facts about living with and caring for a hemiplegic. Then the tax man nailed her father on a foolish Caribbean Island tax dodge he’d been playing for half a dozen years, unknown to anyone but a half-wit Missoula lawyer, and stripped him of every penny he had. George Hyatt crawled into the bottle then and never came out again until he died of cirrhosis two years later, leaving Amy to tend her mother and run the hardware store as well.
It was a staggering burden. The girl bent her back and took it, and toughened to the load, but she hardened, too. It was that summer at age seventeen that she’d met Harry Slencik, come over from Bozeman as ramrod for the construction company that won the bid to underground all the light wires in Missoula’s historic downtown section. Harry was big, bland-faced, good-natured — and adoring when it came to Amy. She was a real beauty in those days, a lithe, blond-haired girl, laughing and sly of humor when she could find a few hours free, and sharp enough to recognize a good solid workingman when he came walking down the pike. She loved to square dance and square dance they did, she and Harry, all summer long … but then those long, feverish evenings parked in Harry’s pickup after the dances finally caught up with her. Harry married her the week after the doctor confirmed the baby — people still did that sort of thing in those days — and moved into the big white house for the rest of his stay in Missoula. With patient thoroughness he helped her inventory the store and sell it for enough to place Mamma in the best nursing home in Missoula for all the years that were necessary, and by the time snow flew that fall he packed the pickup with all it would carry and took his pregnant bride back home with him to Bozeman.
It hadn’t been the richest life they’d had together, at first. A second baby boy followed fast on the first, healthy kids that ate a lot and grew like jungle cats. The work was neither steady nor plentiful, for many years, and when the work was there Harry wasn’t one to crowd the boss for money or privilege. Harry had a lot of rough edges on him that wouldn’t wear off, and Amy henpecked him, and slowly, slowly, the sly humor began to sour slightly and take on an edge of malice. Later, when Harry started his own construction outfit, and made it go, and started bringing some money in, Amy was happier, perhaps, but didn’t change back; the cutting edge was there to stay.
Dr. Ben Chamberlain had sold them a chunk of some family land he had on Grizzly Creek in the mountain foothills seventy miles from Bozeman, nothing worth a whole lot, just cottonwood bottoms and half-desert hills with some small stands of fir and pine. He watched Harry build the cabin with his own hands, and take to firewood-sawing all day when he needed to get away from Amy. Ben had watched the kids grow up, those two hulking, muscle-bound boys; he was spending more and more time at his own place down the creek since his Emmie had died from the breast cancer, and he kept an eye on Amy and Harry’s place when they weren’t there. They had been good neighbors to Ben, over the years; there was nothing Harry couldn’t fix or wire or screw together for him; Amy baked him cakes and fed him lasagna; they gathered sometimes for evening drinks and talked incessantly about hunting; and the friendship of proximity grew over the years — and bit by bit, the older man had watched Amy change.
Now, in the little living room, listening to her sharp voice and watching her sharp eyes and seeing her beat her little fist into her little palm, it struck him just how very much she really had changed. She could bring a whole whale of a lot to this Freehold she was talking about if she wanted to. She was tough, physically strong, hard-minded. As an organizer, an administrator, she could keep things on the track, Ben thought. There’d be no coyotes in the chickens when she was around. But she’d have to come down a long notch or two if anybody was going to be able to live with her for any length of time. If the Freehold was to have any chance at all, he thought, somebody would have to teach her how to shut up and give in once in a while …
Well, it wouldn’t be Harry that brought her down, that was sure, and it certainly wasn’t going to be Mel Tapper or Rod Kelley, either. So that left him.