Then she went back to work. That was the thing about survival. It kept giving you something to do. The snow came early that year. Not the polite kind of early, the kind that dusts the ground and melts by afternoon and lets you pretend winter is still a few weeks away.
It came the way serious Montana snow came sideways with purpose overnight, so that you woke up and the world had been rearranged while you were sleeping, and the rearrangement was not negotiable. 3 in by sunrise, 8 by midday, the sky, a flat white ceiling that gave no indication of when it planned to stop. Miriam stood at the kitchen window with her second cup of coffee and watched it come down and made a list in her head of everything that needed to happen before the cold settled in hard. And the list got longer the longer she looked. She'd been at Red Spur Ranch for 5 weeks.
5 weeks was long enough to understand how the place ran. Long enough to know which of the ranch hands liked their coffee strong, and which couldn't eat anything with onion in it, and which would help without being asked, and which needed to be told directly. Long enough to know that the root cellar was well stocked but not as organized as it needed to be. That the smokehouse had been used haphazardly, that there was a method to the supply ordering that had worked well enough in previous years, but could be significantly improved if someone sat down with the ledger and actually thought about it. She had sat down with the ledger on her third day.
Bramwell had come into the kitchen that evening and found her at the table with his house spread in front of her and a list of corrections and suggestions written in her handwriting on a separate sheet. And he'd stood in the doorway for a moment looking at her the way people looked at someone doing something they hadn't been asked to do. I found three billing errors, she said without looking up. The feed supplier has been overcharging you on oats since April. You're also paying for a repair on the north fence that was done in the same week as two other repairs, and I think you were charged uh twice for the same materials.
Silence. That's He came into the kitchen and looked at the paper over her shoulder. That's a significant amount. Yes, she said. You should write to both suppliers.
I can draft the letters if you want. He was quiet for a moment. She could feel him deciding something. Go ahead, he said. She drafted the letters.
He signed them. Three weeks later, two repayments arrived, and Bramwell folded the bank drafts and put them in the household account without saying much about it. But Denny mentioned to Miriam that Mr. Concaid had been in a noticeably better mood for about 4 days after the letters came. She didn't say anything to Bramwell about it, but she started looking at the rest of the accounts more carefully. Now watching the snow pile up against the fence posts, she finished her coffee and set the cup down and went to find Bramwell before he disappeared into the morning.
She found him in the barn, already in his coat, talking to August in the low urgent tones of men calculating how bad something was going to get. The north pasture herd needs to come in closer. August was saying, "If this keeps up through tomorrow, the far cattle aren't going to find their way to the feed. " I know, Bramwell said. Take Denny and Calhoun and bring them in before noon.