“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 abouthuntingtime—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.