They stocked thread colors I've never found anywhere else. She paused. The sound of it. Cities have a constant sound underneath everything. I didn't know I'd miss it until it was gone.
What does it sound like? It doesn't sound like anything in particular. It sounds like several hundred people existing at the same time in close proximity, which turns into a kind of low noise you stop hearing after a while. But notice the absence of. He thought about this.
That sounds like something you'd miss. I don't miss it badly, she said. Mostly I noticed the quiet here is a different kind. She pressed the bread dough once, testing it. Your quiet has things in it.
A ranch in winter is never actually quiet. He hadn't thought about it that way. He said so. She smiled briefly, not at him at the bread or at nothing in particular. It was the first time he'd seen her smile without it being at something one of the girls had done.
It looked natural on her face, the way things look when they belong there. He looked away before it became something he'd have to think about later. January turned brutal on the 12th, which was earlier than Harland had predicted. The temperature dropped two nights in a row to places it shouldn't have reached before February, and the third morning brought a wind that drove snow horizontal across the pastures and turned the cattle into miserable suffering shapes pressed against the fence lines and each other for warmth. They lost seven head that first week.
Seven was not survivable math at the scale Garrick was operating on. Not with the bank note coming in April. Not with the hay stores already a third lower than his projections. Because October had been warm enough that he'd miscalculated how fast the cattle would burn feed once the real cold hit. He told Harland the number after the first week, and Harland received it with the face of a man who had expected something bad, and found out it was exactly as bad as expected, which is sometimes worse than a surprise.
"We need to move the east herd to the lower pasture," Harland said. "The lower pasture is marginal shelter. The east fence has a gap we haven't had labor to fix. We lose more out there in this wind, and we're in real trouble." They fixed the gap.
They moved the cattle. They lost three more head in the second week from weather and two from other complications. Garrick stopped counting the way a man stops looking at a wound, not because he'd stopped caring, but because looking kept costing him something he needed for other things. He came inside in the evenings with cold in him that the stove took a long time to pull out. And he ate at the table with his daughters.