Maybe more with drifts. You cannot do this alone and EMTT isn't awake yet. I am. What do you need me to do? He looked at her for 3 seconds.
Just three, but they were very full seconds. Get the rope from the east hook, he said. We tie off between the barn and the gate post. If visibility drops to nothing, we need a lineback. And get your scarf over your face.
Everything you can cover, cover it. She got the rope. Warren was awake by the time they were ready to go out. Some noise, some instinct had pulled him from sleep, and he appeared in the kitchen doorway with his boots on and his hair still wrong from the pillow and his face already moving toward the expression of a man doing a rapid and unwelcome assessment. South pasture, Calder said before Warren could ask.
Eight head, Warren's jaw set. How come you stay with Milo? Calder said his arm isn't right yet, and if he wakes up scared in an empty house, he'll do something stupid. He looked at his father. I need you here.
Warren looked at Tessa. She could see him deciding whether to argue about her going, and she could see him decide not to. Whatever calculation he ran in that moment, it came out on the side of trusting what he'd seen from her over the past 7 weeks, and Chief was grateful for that trust in a way she didn't have time to express. "Be careful," Warren said. Calder was already opening the back door.
The cold hit her like a door swung into her face. That was the only comparison that fit not a gradual chill, not slow realization, but an impact. Immediate and total. The wind was coming off the mountain at an angle that found every gap in her clothing simultaneously, and the snow was not the soft falling kind, but the horizontal kind, the kind that doesn't descend so much as attack. She couldn't see the barn.
She could see approximately 6 ft of ground in front of her, and then white, and she understood immediately, and viscerally why Calder had insisted on the rope. They shrung it from the back door hook to the first fence post and from there by feel to the barn gate, working mostly by touch because looking into the wind was physically painful. Her eyes were streaming before they'd gone 20 ft, and the tears froze on her cheeks in the seconds between forming and falling. EMTT met them at the barn, which meant he'd gotten up on his own, heard something or felt something, and had already started saddling. South Pasture, he said.
South pasture called her confirmed. You take the horse. Tessa and I go on foot. EMTT didn't question this. He finished saddling in about 90 seconds, which was faster than Tessa had ever seen anyone saddle a whor and led the animal out into the white.