And some nights he was too exhausted to wonder anything at all. The people of Redcliffe kept their distance through the worst of the winter, but they did not forget. Bucker rode by once or twice, not stopping to speak, just looking. Samuel Crew sent his son out with a message saying that any man who fed the enemy could not expect credit at the store come spring, and Elijah sent the boy back with no answer. Old Claraara Hicks came by once, alone on a gray morning when the snow had stopped.
She did not knock or call out. She just walked up to the porch, set down a bundle wrapped in cloth, and walked away again without saying a word. When Elijah opened the bundle, he found dried apples inside, probably the last she had, sweet and brown, and smelling like autumn, even in the depths of winter. He ate them slowly over the next week and thought about what her visit meant. The last week of March came in with a wind that smelled different from all the ones that had come before it.
It was warmer, softer, carrying the first faint hint of the thaw that would come when the sun climbed higher. Elijah woke one morning and heard water dripping from the icicles on his roof. A steady musical sound that seemed like the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. And he knew that the worst was finally over. If he could hold on for another two weeks, maybe three, he would make it through.
The problem was that he had nothing left to hold on with. His stores were gone. Every last handful of grain and every scrap of meat. His animals were thin but alive. His own body felt like a canvas sack with all the grain scooped out, hollow and light and barely able to hold its shape.
He sat on his porch that morning and watched the first patches of brown earth appear in the meadow below, and he wondered if he had made it through the fire only to collapse when the flames were finally behind him. The Apache left on the last day of March. Kusen came to him that morning while the sun was still low and said that the trails would be clear enough now for his people to travel and that they would go south to find the rest of their band in the valleys where the winter had not been so hard. Elijah shook his hand and told him to go in peace and he meant it truly even though he knew that their leaving meant he would face the last stretch of hunger alone. He watched them walk down the meadow toward the treeine, the children running ahead and the old women walking slow but steady on legs that had grown strong again.