Looking at him now, looking at the solid assessment in his face, not bravado, not eagerness, just a practical reading of the situation. Caleb made a decision. "Show me the rope plan," he said. Together they rigged the line, Caleb going first to set the anchor on the shed, coming back along the rope in a wind that was trying sincerely to remove him from the ground.
Then they went together, Caleb in front, Evan behind, hand over hand. The hay in the south store was dry, and they loaded as much as they could carry in two trips, and the cattle had enough feed to see through the rest of the storm. When they got back inside the barn, both of them coated in snow from collar to boot, Evan sat down on a hay bale and said, "That was bad." "Yes," Caleb said.
"Worth it, though." "Yes," Caleb said again. Evan looked at the cattle moving to the hay. "My dad couldn't have done that," he said.
"He wasn't—he wasn't built for this kind of thing." He said it without apology or self-pity, just as a fact he'd arrived at and made his peace with. "I don't mean that badly." "I know," Caleb said.
"I just mean" He stopped, started again. "I'm built for this." "I think." "And I didn't know that until I was here."
Caleb looked at him, at this 12-year-old boy who had figured out his own shape in the world and was reporting it plainly without asking for anything from the information except acknowledgement. "You are." Caleb said, "without a doubt." Evan nodded once, the way he acknowledged things that mattered.
Briefly, without drawing it out. Then he got up and started spreading the hay. Um it was Lucy who found the water. On the fourth day of the storm, with the snow easing but the roads nowhere near passable, they ran up against a problem that Caleb had been tracking with increasing anxiety, the water situation.
The house cistern was getting low. The creek that fed it had frozen solid in the first two days, and the snow around it was too contaminated by proximity to the cattle yard to melt safely for drinking. They had enough water for another day, maybe a day and a half, and after that it became a serious issue. Lucy had been quieter than usual during the storm days, not withdrawn, but as if she was thinking through something she hadn't finished working out.
She'd spent time in the barn, in the house, walking the interior spaces of the property during the brief calmer period of the second afternoon, moving from corner to corner with her hands in her pockets and her eyes on the ground. On the fourth morning, she came into the kitchen and said, "There's water under the creek." Caleb looked up from the stove. "What?"