By the middle of January, his belt was two notches tighter than it had been at Christmas. His clothes hung loose on his frame, and when he caught his reflection in the water bucket, he barely recognized the hollow cheicked man who looked back at him. By the 1st of February, he was eating half of what a working man needed to keep his strength, and he was feeling it in every bone and muscle of his body. The cold seemed sharper when there was nothing in the belly to burn for warmth. The work seemed heavier when the muscles had no fuel to drive them.
He woke some mornings with a pain in his gut that had nothing to do with sickness and everything to do with emptiness. But the Apache did not complain, and he could see the difference his grain was making in them. The children stopped crying at night, their bellies full enough to let them sleep through the cold hours. The old women stopped coughing in the mornings, their bodies strong enough now to fight off the sickness that had been creeping into their lungs. The men stood straighter and walked without the shuffle of the truly starving.
And when they moved around the ranch doing the work they had taken on without being asked, there was a steadiness in them that had not been there the night they stumbled into his yard. They did what they could to help, mending fences that had been on Elijah's list for two winters, caring for the animals with a gentleness that surprised him, bringing in firewood and clearing snow. Kusen told him one night by the fire that his people did not take gifts without giving something back. That it was not their way to let a debt stand unpaid no matter how long it took to balance. Elijah said he was not keeping a ledger and did not expect anything in return.
But Kusen only smiled and said nothing, and there was something in that smile that Elijah did not understand, but was too tired and too hungry to puzzle out. February came and went in a blur of white and gray, and the endless small tasks of keeping alive. The stores dwindled down to almost nothing. The sacks that had once filled a whole corner of the barn, now counting less than a man could carry on one shoulder. By the first week of March, Elijah had given away the last of his grain, scraped the bins clean, and divided the final portion between the Apache children who needed it most.
And he was living on strips of jerked beef that tasted like old leather and the memory of meals he had eaten in better times. He did not tell the Apache how bad it had gotten for him. He did not tell anyone. He just kept working, kept tending his animals, kept putting one foot in front of the other because that was what a man did when there was nothing else to do. Some nights he lay awake and wondered if he would see the grass turn green again.