The wind came down from the peaks like a blade, cutting through coats and walls and anything else that got in its way. The kind of wind that made men and animals huddled together for warmth. And thank God for every scrap of shelter they had managed to build. Elijah brought his horses into the barn where the walls cut the worst of the cold, and he drove his cattle down to the lower pasture where the willows broke the wind. Then he went into his storehouse and counted everything he had with the careful eye of a man who knew that a mistake in November could mean a grave in February.
He had grain enough to last until the end of March if he was careful, if he measured every handful, and did not waste a single kernel to rot or rats or carelessness. He had hay enough for the animals just barely. If the winter did not run longer than it was supposed to. He had jerked beef and beans and a barrel of flour that was maybe half full, enough to keep body and soul together if he did not ask too much of either one. It would be tight.
It would be closer than he liked. But he had seen tight before, and he was still here to remember it. He settled in to wait, to endure, to do the slow, patient work of surviving until the sun remembered that spring was supposed to come. The trouble came in the first week of December, on a night when the snow was falling so thick that a man could not see his own barn from the porch, and the whole world seemed to have shrunk down to whatever the lantern light could reach. Elijah was sitting by the fire, mending a bridal that had snapped in the cold.
The leather stiff and reluctant under his fingers. The cabin was warm enough, the fire crackling, and the wind howling outside like a living thing trying to find its way in. Then he heard a sound that did not belong to the wind or the creek of the cabin settling. It was a thin sound, high and weak, like a coyote pup crying for its mother somewhere out in the darkness. He sat down the bridal and listened with the whole of his attention because a man alone in that country learned to listen for he did not live long.
The sound came again closer now. And this time he knew it was not an animal. No animal made a sound quite like that. A sound that had human desperation in it, even if he could not make out any words. He pulled on his coat, the heavy wool one that his wife had made for him in the first winter of their marriage, and he put on his hat, and took the lantern from its hook by the door.
He picked up his rifle, too, because a man alone in that country did not open his door to the dark without being ready for whatever might come through it. And he stepped out onto the porch with the wind cutting at his face, and the snow swirling so thick