She could hear it working itself softly against the window corner and cold and persistent thin and persistent like certain things that won't stay out no matter how well you seal against them. She went to bed. She did not sleep for a long time. The snow that came the third week of December was not polite about it. It arrived without the usual warning signs.
No dropping barometric pressure that made the cattle restless. No particular quality to the sky the evening before. It simply began in the night, and by the time Rosalie came downstairs before dawn, the windows were buried to their lower sills, and the wind was making sounds in the eaves that she had not heard before and did not like. She built the fire up and stood at the window, looking at nothing, because there was nothing to see, just white pressing against glasses. and she thought about the pantry inventory she'd done 2 days ago, and the numbers that came from it, and the numbers were not comfortable. She had known winter was coming.
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.