Hutchins was standing at the barn door. He hadn't been assigned a position. Caleb hadn't had time to include him in the deployment, and Hutchins had made his own decision about where to be. He'd been covering the barn from inside, which was exactly the right call.
He had his rifle. He looked at Caleb and said nothing. Caleb looked at him. "Good call," Caleb said. "Being in the barn."
Hutchins nodded once. "Cattle were the target," he said. "Made sense." "Yes, it did," Caleb said. Something passed between them.
Not friendship, not yet, and maybe not ever exactly, but something that was the foundation that friendship might be built on, given time and enough shared cold nights standing guard over cattle neither of them could afford to lose. They went inside. The weeks that followed had a quality to them that Caleb had not expected and could not entirely account for. He had anticipated that the consolidated arrangement would be functional. He had not anticipated that it would be in its odd, crowded, imperfect way good.
Not good in the sense of easy. The disagreements continued over labor allocation, over how to handle a sick cow that two families had different opinions about, over whose fence repair came first when there wasn't enough wire for all of them in the same week. Hutchins was difficult in ways that were consistent with being Hutchins. The Birch husband was a worrier in ways that required regular management. The Kellerman wife and the Perrin wife had a friction between them whose origin Caleb never fully tracked down, but that required occasional navigation.
But they fed everyone. The cattle came through. The wolves circled but didn't breach. The barn wall at the Hutchins place got rebuilt in three days of combined labor that would have taken Hutchins alone three weeks. And the thing that surprised Caleb most, the thing he turned over in his head in the evenings when the house was finally quiet enough to think, was the children.
Not just his children, the ones he'd stopped thinking of as Mara's children and started thinking of as his own in a way he'd never made a deliberate decision about, but all the children. Owen had taken to following the Birch family's 6-year-old with the same loyal shadow energy he'd once reserved exclusively for Caleb, and the two of them had constructed some kind of elaborate ongoing game in the hayloft that nobody fully understood, but that seemed to generate more genuine joy per square foot than anything else on the property. Lucy had appointed herself as a kind of unofficial teacher to the younger Kellerman boy, who was behind in his reading, delivering instruction with the same precise gravity she brought to everything, and the boy was actually learning. Evan had worked out something with Carl Kellerman that had started as mutual tolerance and become by February something that looked a lot like real friendship. They worked together without talking much, which was exactly how Evan preferred things, and Carl had apparently figured that out.
Mara watched all of this from the kitchen with the expression of someone who has seen something she'd hoped for but hadn't let herself expect. Caleb watched her watching it and thought about what hope looked like when it turned out to have been right. On a Saturday in mid-February, two things happened that pulled the season toward its end. The first was that the road to town opened partially, not fully passable. A man on horseback could make it, but a wagon would have trouble.
But open enough that Reuter rode in on a Thursday and came back with news and mail and the information that Doc Riley said the worst of it was over, that the supply lines from Laramie were moving again, that the world outside the valley was still there and operational. The second thing was what Hutchins said at supper. He'd been eating his meals at Caleb's table since the second week by default, his own kitchen arrangements being impractical with the Kellerman family in his guest room. He'd been quiet at most of these meals, which was not his natural state and which everyone noticed but nobody commented on. He ate.