"Evan," Evan said from his horse. Hutchins nodded slowly. He was a man who had built his self-conception around being the person other people came to, and he was now standing in his own yard receiving visitors who had arrived not to ask anything of him, but to offer something, and the reconfiguration of that dynamic was visibly costing him something. Caleb had enough experience with pride to recognize what it looked like when someone was fighting it. "East wall of the barn," Caleb said, looking at the collapsed section.
"I see it every morning," Hutchins said. "How much did you lose?" A pause, the kind of pause that is about more than finding the words. "Seven head of cattle," Hutchins said. "Four in the collapse.
Three more after. They were exposed too long. And my winter hay store is at about a third of what I calculated going in." He looked somewhere past Caleb's shoulder at the middle distance where men look when they're delivering information they don't want to be delivering.
"My two ranch hands left the second day of the storm, said they were going to Laramie and they'd come back in spring." He stopped. "I don't know if they'll come back." Caleb let it sit for a moment. You should have come to us, he said.
I know that, Hutchins said. The admission was flat, not apologetic, just the acknowledgment of a fact. I'm not saying it to make a point, Caleb said. I know you're not. Hutchins looked at him directly for the first time since they'd ridden up.
That's not why it's hard to hear. Caleb understood that. He understood it well enough that he didn't push at it. I've got four families at the ranch right now, he said. Reuter, the Kellermans, the Birch family, the Perrins.
We've been pooling what we have. It's working because the combined resources are more than any one of us had separately. He looked at the empty paddocks, the broken barn wall, the wood pile that Hutchins had been attacking with a maul because he needed something to fight. I'm asking you to come in. Hutchins was quiet for a long moment.
A wind moved through the yard and lifted a small spray of snow from the drift against the fence and dispersed it. What does coming in mean? Hutchins said. It means you bring your cattle to the consolidated herd at Blackridge. It means your labor contributes to the group work, and the group work comes to you.
It means the food stores are shared on a needs basis and repaid in kind or in labor come spring. Caleb paused. It means you don't try to ride this out alone, which you're not going to be able to do, and I think you know that. Another silence. Hutchins looked at his yard.