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.
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.