She had prepared for winter. What she had not fully accounted for was a winter that decided to arrive all at once and stay. Gideon was already gone when she came down. She could see his boot tracks in the snow that had drifted onto the back porch, already half filled in, which meant he had been out for a while. That's she made the coffee and the morning porridge and put the bread from last night's batch back in the low oven to warm through.
And when the boys came down, she had something hot waiting, which she had learned was the first requirement of man managing two children in a house sealed shut by weather. Jaime sat down and ate without preamble. EMTT stood at the window for a long moment, looking at the white, nothing the same way she had. "How deep do you think it is? " he asked. 4t in the drifts by the looks of the fence post, she said less in the open.
P went out before light. I know. He turned from the window. His face had that particular expression she had come to read in him not worry exactly because he had decided at some point in his 11 years that worry was something to be managed rather than shown. Controlled concern.
Too old a face for a boy his age. He does this every winter. EMTT said goes out before anyone's awake. The cattle need managing in weather like this, she said. I know he sat down.
I just He doesn't take anyone with him. Not at first. She put his porridge in front of him. Matteo will be out there. Mateo goes when P tells him to go.
First hour, P goes alone. She noted this. She did not comment on it, but she noted it. Gideon came back midm morning with ice in his beard and a look on his face that told her something had already gone wrong before 8:00. He came into the kitchen, which was unusual.
Normally, he'd go to the bunk house and stood at the basin that washing his hands with an urgency that was purely mechanical. The way men wash their hands when they're thinking about something else. How bad? She asked. He looked at her.
Lost three head overnight. North fence has a weak section ice got under the post base. We've got cattle pushing against it. How many men do you have out there? All of them.
Plus Matteo. He dried his hands. His knuckles were cracked from the cold, red along the joints. We need to move the herd south before the temperature drops further tonight. If it goes below what they're saying, it might.
What are they saying? 20 below. Maybe worse by midnight. 20 below. She ran the numbers automatically.
How long an animal could stand that without shelter. How long a man could work in it before his hands stopped being useful. She turned back to the stove. I'll have food ready to carry out at noon, she said. hot enough for everyone. He stopped.
That you don't need to do that. The men have been working in this since before dawn. They need something hot by midday or their bodies are going to start making poor decisions. She pulled the large pot from its hook. How far south are they moving the herd, he told her.
She calculated the distance, the time, what she could make that would stay hot long enough in a sealed kettle. Noon, she said again. Have Matteo send someone back for it. He watched her for a moment. That look, the one she'd stopped trying to decode, and then he put his hat back on and went out.
She worked through the morning with a focus that didn't leave room for anything else, which was exactly what she needed. Bean and beef soup, thick enough to stay warm. Biscuits packed in cloth inside a wooden box that would hold some heat. Coffee in every sealed container she could find. She worked fast, and she worked well.
And Jaime, who had been watching from his usual spot at the edge of the kitchen, started helping without being asel holding things, stirring when she pointed at what needed. Stirring, keeping out of the way when she needed to move quickly. Is P coming back for lunch? He asked at one point. This is lunch, she said.
We're taking it to him. At noon, a young hand named Ellis appeared at the back door, snow covered and moving like someone whose feet had stopped feeling useful. She handed him the kettle, the biscuit box, the coffee. She had packed four times more than she'd calculated because she looked at Ellis's and understood that Ellis Ellis and what whatever she sent out there was not going to be too much. She also sent her largest ladle because men eating from a shared kettle in a snowfield needed something with a long handle.
Ellis looked at the volume of food she was handing him and said, "Ma'am, this is Thank you. Come back for the box when you're done," she said. and tell them to eat fast before it cools. He went back out into the white. She stood in the kitchen and felt the cold from the open door for a moment after it closed, and then Stits windows were dark, and then she went to the pantry and stood in front of the shelves with her inventory list, and did the arithmetic that she'd been doing in the back of her head all morning. They were going to need to ration.