"The creek is frozen on top." She said, "But there's a section about 20 yards upstream from where your pipe draws from. You can hear it under the ice. It's lower than the rest of the bank, and the ice is thinner there, and I think the water's still moving underneath because it's coming from farther uphill where the ground is warmer."
He looked at her. "You went to the creek?" "During the calm part yesterday." She said, "I didn't go far." "Lucy."
He stopped himself because what he wanted to say was the kind of thing that was correct in terms of safety and would also have been exactly wrong for this moment. "Show me where, he said instead. She showed him. She was right. The section she'd identified was a natural spring outflow that came down from the ridge, moving too fast and from deep enough in the hillside that even the 4-day freeze hadn't stopped it.
The surface ice was thin enough to break through with a single strike. The water coming up from below was cold but clear and clean. They set a bucket chain, Caleb breaking the ice, Evan passing buckets, Mara relaying them to the house, Lucy and Owen responsible for the stretch between the shed and the barn door, which was sheltered. It took 2 hours and it was miserable and cold and nobody complained because everyone understood what it was for. That evening, with full water containers in the house and the storm finally genuinely finally, with the particular finality of a thing that has said everything it has to say, beginning to taper off, Caleb sat at the kitchen table and thought about the last 4 days.
He thought about what had been done and who had done it. He thought about Evan on the rope line in the blizzard. He thought about Owen awake in the barn at midnight calling out the direction of wolves with the calm precision of a child who understood that he had a job and was doing it. He thought about Lucy walking the property in the brief calm of the second afternoon, hands in pockets, working something out in her head that she hadn't told anyone yet because she wasn't finished thinking. He thought about Mara at the table at 3:00 in the morning holding his hands between hers, rubbing the cold out with the unselfconscious practicality of someone who saw a thing that needed doing and did it.
He'd been alone for 8 years, not because he wanted solitude exactly, but because he hadn't been able to imagine what the alternative looked like. Because the alternative had a specific shape in his mind, the shape of what he'd had and lost and nothing else could fit the space. He was finding out that spaces weren't as fixed as he thought. The day after the storm broke, the first rider came. It was Jim Reuter from the Reuter spread 3 miles east, which was the second smallest operation in the valley and had always run lean even in good years.
He came on foot because his horse was lame, which told Caleb something about how bad things were at the Reuter place before Reuter said a word. He was a quiet man, 50s, who'd homesteaded the east parcel 20 years ago and had made a go of it through sheer persistence. But he looked now like persistence was running on its last reserves. "Lost two head," he said standing at Caleb's gate. "Got eight more that are going to go the same way if I can't get feed to them.
My hay store didn't make it through the second night. The weight of the snow took the roof." Caleb looked at him for a moment. "Come in," he said.
He fed Reuter at his kitchen table, Mara having put a plate in front of him before the second sentence was out of Reuter's mouth, without discussion, and listened to what Reuter said about conditions east of the ridge. "Bad." The Kellerman family had pulled out on the second day, loaded what they could on a sled, and headed for Laramie. The Birch homestead had lost their entire chicken flock to the cold when their coop wall failed, and the Perrin family, the same Perrins who had apparently stopped speaking to Mara at the trading post, were down to 3 days of food and had a sick child and a husband with a broken leg, sustained before the storm when he'd gone down on the ice.