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 Pa 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, snowcovered 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 its 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. Not drastically, not yet. But the storm was telling her something she needed to hear.
This winter was not going to be cooperative, and the supplies she had thought might carry them comfortably, comfortably to March, were going to need managing with more discipline than she'd planned. She went to the desk in the corner of the kitchen where she kept her ledger, the one she'd started up the week she arrived, logging every item in the pantry and every meal she produced. And she sat down and began making a new kind of list, not what they had, what they needed and when and in what order, and what they could do without if they had to. It was the kind of problem she had a particular aptitude for. And she knew it.
And there was something almost settling about being faced with a problem she was genuinely equipped to solve. She was still at the desk 2 hours later when Emmett appeared at the kitchen door in his coat and boots. I want to help, he said. She looked up. Out there, he gestured toward the yard with the cattle.