Reuter said all of this with the careful understated delivery of someone who is describing things that are bad without wanting to be seen asking for help directly. And Caleb heard both the information and the thing underneath the information. "How much hay do you need to see your cattle through?" Caleb said. Reuter named a number.
Caleb did math. "I can give you half that from the south store set," he said. "It'll put me short, but not critical." Reuter looked at the table. "I don't have anything to pay you with right now.
I'm not asking for payment, Caleb said. Reuter looked up. Spring, Caleb said. You help me with the north fence expansion.
That's it. Reuter nodded, the nod of a man who is relieved and ashamed of being relieved in equal measure. After Reuter left, with Evan having helped him load the hay onto the handcart the man had dragged 3 miles through the snow, Mara came and stood next to Caleb at the barn door, and they both watched Reuter working his way back down the road. The Perrins, Mara said.
I know, he said. She was one of the ones who I know, he said. She was quiet. Does that change things?
He looked at her. No, he said simply. It doesn't. She nodded slowly, and something in her face settled.
Not surprise, because he didn't think she'd actually expected a different answer, but the confirmation of something she'd been wanting to be true and hadn't been entirely certain of. I'll put together what they can use from the kitchen stores, she said. Take Evan with the sled, he said. I'll go to the birch place first.
They spent 3 days working the valley. It was not organized, not at first. It was Caleb going from one struggling property to the next, assessing what was needed and delivering what he could from what he had, and then coming home and going out again. Mara managed the home resources with the precision of someone who understood exactly where every edge was, extending the stores in ways that should not have been mathematically possible, but were, because she understood things about cooking under constraint that weren't in any book, and couldn't be explained as anything other than hard-won knowledge.
On the second day of this, he came back to find that two families had come to him. The Kellermans, who he thought had left for Laramie, had turned back. They'd made it only 8 miles before conditions made the road impassable, and they'd waited out the worst of it in a cold camp and come back because going forward was impossible and staying in the road was dying. They were at his gate when he got home, a husband and wife and two teenage boys, all of them white-faced with cold and saying almost nothing.