He did not explain this to anyone and no one in town ever asked him to because there are some griefs that a man carries alone and everyone who has ever lost someone they loved understands that without being told. His father had been a hard man in the way that the frontier made men hard. Not given to softness or sentiment, but not cruel either. The kind of man who would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He had taught Elijah two things that stayed with him longer than anything else.
The first was that a man's word was worth more than his land, because land could be taken by drought or fire or the kind of legal trickery that men in suits practiced down in Denver. But a word freely given could not be taken back or diminished by anything outside the man who gave it. The second thing his father taught him on a night when Elijah was 14 years old and snow was falling and a family of strangers appeared at their door with nothing but hunger in their eyes was that hunger did not care what language a man spoke or what color his skin was and that a full belly had a way of making enemies into neighbors faster than any treaty ever could. His father had shared their stores with that family, even though it meant the Tanners ate thin for the rest of the winter. And Elijah had watched those same strangers ride 30 miles through a blizzard the next year to help dig his father's grave when the old man finally let go.
He did not know if his father had been wise or foolish in the way he had lived. But he knew that when the old man closed his eyes for the last time, he had not been afraid of what he would answer for. And that seemed to Elijah like the only kind of death worth having. That winter came early and came hard, the way winters sometimes do in the high country, when the patterns of weather that usually protect the valleys shift and leave them exposed to everything the north can throw down. The first snow fell before the leaves had finished turning.
Big wet flakes that stuck to everything they touched and piled up in the hollows faster than anyone could remember seeing. By the end of October, the drifts were already waste deep in places, and the old-timers in Redcliffe, the ones who had survived winters that killed horses in the fields and froze children in their beds, said they had not seen weather like it since the winter of 58 that killed half the cattle in the territory. This was going to be the kind of winter that separated those who prepared from those who hoped. And hope was a thin blanket when the temperature dropped below zero and stayed there. The creeks froze solid, ice a foot thick in places where the water usually ran fast enough to stay liquid through anything.