The boy's already saved me half a day's work this week. I'm not asking for your opinion, Dale." Hutchins looked at him for a moment. "It's going to cost you," he said. "Winter comes hard this year, word is.
You start bleeding supplies, and you come up short, don't expect the rest of us to cover what you gave away." "I never have," Caleb said. "Your heifers north." Hutchins rode away.
Caleb stood at the fence and watched him go, and felt something that was not quite anger and not quite contempt, but contained elements of both. He turned back to the ranch and found Evan standing by the fence post he'd been working on, having heard enough of it to understand the shape of the conversation. The boy didn't say anything. He just looked at Caleb, and then looked at his hammer, and went back to work.
Caleb picked up the other side of the fence rail. "You want to set the next post with gravel pack," he said. "Show me how your father did it." Evan showed him.
The weeks moved. October went to November in the way that Wyoming months do. Not gradually, but by sudden decision, as if the season has been waiting until it has enough force behind it to make the change mean something. The temperatures dropped fast.
The sky took on the particular flat gray color of impending serious weather. The kind that experienced ranchers read as a message. Caleb watched the sky and made calculations. He had enough hay for the winter, barely, if the winter was normal. He had enough food for himself, but the arithmetic had changed when four additional people were added to the equation.
He went over the numbers in his head every morning and every night. Not because the number changed, but because it helped him think. Mara, apparently, was doing the same thing. He came into the kitchen one evening to find her at the table with a piece of paper, working in columns. She'd taken the household accounts without his asking, having discovered the ledger in the top kitchen drawer, and apparently found his bookkeeping inadequate, which it was.
She looked up when he came in and then looked back at the paper. "You're short on oats," she said. "I know." "And the salt pork won't last past February at the rate you've been going through it." "I tend to eat the same thing every day," he said.
"It's easier." "It's not cheaper, though." She turned the paper toward him. Her handwriting was the same small, precise hand as the shopping list. Every number exact, nothing crowded, everything in its place.
"If we redistribute the portion sizes and add more starch earlier in the week, we can stretch the meat through March, but it means adjusting what I cook." He looked at the paper. It was better math than he'd been doing. "All right," he said. "And there's another thing."