K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

Abel’s words did little to lift the mantle of guilt from Winnie’s shoulders, but she was relieved to be talking about the tragedy. She longed to divulge her own story, to throw down her burden in the hopes of atoning for her sins.

“I haven’t told you why this all happened.”

Abel shrugged. “Does it matter now?”

“It matters to me.”

“Okay, then it matters to me, too.”

“I stumbled upon his home.”

“You did?”

“I was trying to get here by car, but I had to abandon it, I don’t know, twenty, thirty miles from here.”

“You came through on foot? Through that storm?”

“I did. I managed to get to an intersection with a house to the west. I went to it. It was that man’s residence. I managed to get into the house and rummage around in it.”

“You were in there? What did you find?”

“I discovered a small arsenal of firearms and ammunition, not really too far over the edge, though, except for a few things.”

“A few things? Such as?”

“They had materials in there for making pipe bombs.”

“Whoa, that’s a revelation.”

“They had a pipe threader, threaded caps, fusing material, and enough black powder to do damage.”

Abel scratched his head, weighing everything Winnie conveyed. “You say they. There were others.”

“At least several other individuals. And there was the food.”

“Food you say?”

“The men were stealing from you. Your farm cheese was stacked in cold storage with bulk foods from here, I think. There were boxes and boxes stacked to the ceiling full of supermarket goods, too. That had to come from the local area, from people’s homes. They had been stealing for a while, rather methodically, if I were to guess.”

“So they were in it for the duration.”

“They were.”

“Any other people involved?”

“I think so, but there was no sign of anyone else at the house except the dog.”

“The dog?”

Winnie rubbed her eyes with her fingers, dreading the incident with the man’s shepherd. She stalled, not wanting to continue.

“What about his dog?” Abel probed.

“There was a small shepherd. It came to the house along with the big man. I noticed the dog through a basement window. The man let the animal into the house. That’s when I left. It could smell that I was in the basement. I ran into the woods and was well away from the building when he let the dog out. The thing came straight for me.”

She stopped her tale and lifted both hands to her forehead.

“What’s the matter, Winnie?”

Eyes dilated fully, casting the look of a frightened child, she stammered, inhaled deeply. “I shot it. I killed his dog. I never killed anything before.”

“He heard the shot?”

“Of course he did. If the dog hadn’t been killed, Pelee would be alive today.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It touched off everything, don’t you see.”

“No, I don’t see.”

“Shooting his dog was all the excuse he needed. What’s he do? He comes to the village the very next day with a loaded semiautomatic. I was afraid of that. That’s why I came to the meeting when I did. I thought I would wait until your meeting was over and surprise you. I thought you’d like that. But I was scared. I had a feeling there could be some trouble. I thought you had to know.”

“I see,” Abel said, his face deadpan. “And what about your firearm? Where did that come from?”

“I brought it with me when I came north. I had it for self-protection. I almost forgot I had it with me.”

“I’m glad you had it.”

“You’re glad? It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, Abel. Your daughter died because of it.”

“I lost Pelee because of corn, not because of the death of a dog. All this was about resources. It was about protecting a critical resource from an outside threat. We represented a threat to that stored food supply in Sweetly. That’s how Regas saw it, I imagine. It’s certainly how his foster father, a man named Harland Sven, sees it even now. It’s how they see the National Guard, which is working hard to get to towns up and down the South Dakota line. The Guard has orders to pull grain out of every grain silo in every county they can get to.”

Abel rubbed his hands over the wood stove. “Winnie, you have to understand something.”

“What?”

“A week ago or ten weeks from now, it makes little difference. Andy Regas or somebody else like him was bound to show up on our doorstep to prevent us from getting access to Sweetly grain. The dog was an excuse. There could have been other excuses. What’s certain is that you stopped him with a bullet before he stopped us.”

“I didn’t kill him with a bullet.”

“Huh?”

“He didn’t die from a bullet wound.”

“I’m not following.”

“He was wearing a bulletproof vest, you know, body armor of some sort. My rounds couldn’t get through it. I figured that out soon enough.”

“Well, then how did he die?”

“He killed himself.”

Abel grimaced. “Suicide?”

“No. I used my pistol to move him. I could push him with the blows from the bullets. They couldn’t get through the armor, but the impact of them, he couldn’t stand the impact. So he fled toward the lake. I drove him to the shore. He froze to death in the icy water. The elements killed him.”

Abel threw his head back and gawked at the ceiling. The two remained quiet for some time. Winnie broke the silence.

“Abel, what are you going to do about the grain?”

“What about it?”

“You need corn from Sweetly, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“How in the world are you going to persuade the people in that town to share anything with you?

“Well, it took a while to figure it out. But we did it.”

“What are you going to do?”

Abel let loose a light chuckle. “In a few days, we will set off down the lake to, umm—how should I say this?—to borrow a little good Sweetly corn for a while.

Winnie wrinkled into a smirk at the odd remark. “What do you mean, borrow?”

“I mean precisely that.”

ANational Guard unit, maneuvering Army Corps of Engineers heavy equipment, arrived overnight at the Sweetly town line five miles from the village after nearly six weeks in a pitched battle with volcanic elements to open the rails along the eastern flank of the South Dakota. Another few days and they’d have the train at the town crossing.

A strategy to block the Guard from the offloading of Sweetly Coop grain from the grain elevator complex consumed Harland Sven. The angular Swede hoped he would find a large circle of fellow farmers at the coop, ready to fend off the ash-removal crews. A confrontation, he told anyone who would listen, would be a struggle for the town’s survival.

With food supplies all but exhausted in the region, each of Sweetly’s grain-elevator silos was an immense lifeline. Sweetly Coop manager Jim Bottomly rigged an antique belt-driven gristmill to produce corn and soy meal for local families and for what few head of livestock and egg-laying hens had managed to survive the threat of the butcher’s knife.

Harland convinced many of his friends and neighbors that it would be suicide to give up a huge food resource when there were no assurances that food shipments could reach Sweetly from the east. In organizing farmers for this very day, Harland had been overwhelmed by the shrill outcry from the local farmwomen. Whereas the men saw the coming confrontation with the Guard in dollars and cents, the women saw it in the more stark terms of protecting their families from the ravages of hunger. The cry of pain from children with empty bellies was shock treatment for the women. They howled at the idea of Sweetly grain slipping through their hands when there were young mouths to feed. Many had told Harland they would be joining their husbands down at the coop, guns at the ready, if it came to that. The reaction and heartfelt support had stunned the farmer.