Later, after she had tucked both boys into the narrow feather bed beneath three layers of patched quilts and David’s old buffalo robe, she blew out the tallow candle to save the wick.
She sat in the dark by the dying stove. Her stomach burned with the acid of its own emptiness. She rested her forehead against the rough pine of the table and closed her eyes, listening to the wind tear at the eaves. She did not pray for prosperity. She prayed only that the frost would take her before it took her children, so that she would not have to watch them stop breathing.
A mile to the north, perched high on the crest of a cedar-lined limestone bench, sat the Crowley homestead. Unlike Eleanor’s sod-roofed cabin, the main house of the Crowley Ranch was built of hand-hewn lodgepole pine, broad-shouldered and banked deep with cedar shavings against the foundations.
In the high, drafty barn, a solitary kerosene lantern hung from an iron rafter, casting a circle of amber light across the straw-strewn floor. Nathan Crowley stood over a workbench, his sleeves rolled past his forearms despite the bitter zero-degree air inside the stable.
Nathan was thirty-two, built like an anvil, with broad, heavy shoulders and thick wrists that spoke of fifteen years breaking mustangs and splitting tamarack posts. His face was severe—a straight, blade-like nose, high cheekbones inherited from an upland mother, and a square jaw perpetually shaded by dark stubble. His gray eyes were usually narrowed, accustomed to squinting through prairie dust and blinding glare. Around Wind River, men walked lightly around Nathan Crowley. He was not a bully, but he was a man who seemed to have buried his softer words alongside his parents in the cemetery behind the Methodist church.
Between his calloused fingers, Nathan held a block of white pine no larger than a man's fist. With a small, curved whittling knife, he took shaving after shaving from the wood. Curled ribbons of pine fell like golden feathers onto the shavings at his boots.
Gradually, out of the blank block, the shape emerged: the arched neck of a pony, its small ears pricked forward, its legs sturdy and square, capable of standing upright on an uneven table.
Nathan stopped. He blew the sawdust from the toy's carved mane. His breath plumed white in the freezing stable air.
He had not meant to look through her window three nights ago.
He had been riding the fence line along the southern boundary of his range, searching for a dozen heifers that had drifted before the gale. The snow had been driving horizontally, stinging his eyes beneath the brim of his slouch hat. As his gelding struggled through the drifts near the creek bottom, he had seen the faint yellow glow of the Pierce cabin.
He had dismounted to ensure the roof had not collapsed under the drift. Standing by the corner of the sod wall, his gloved hand resting against the iced cedar logs, he had glanced through the small square window.
He had seen Eleanor Pierce standing over that table.
He had seen the single crust of bread.
He had seen her divide it, smiling that terrifying, brittle smile, and he had watched her swallow her own saliva while her boys ate. He had seen the tremble in her fingers as she gathered the microscopic crumbs from the wood. Nathan had lived on the frontier his entire life. He had seen men die of gangrene, seen horses slip off icy ledges, seen winter turn whole herds into frozen statues. None of it had turned his stomach. But watching that woman pretend she was full while her ribs pressed against her calico dress had hit him like an iron punch below the heart.
Nathan reached down, closed his knife with a clean snap, and set the wooden horse upon the workbench.
Beside it lay a woven willow basket.
Nathan pulled a heavy gunny sack toward him. Into the basket, he packed a twenty-pound sack of white flour, six pounds of salt-cured bacon wrapped in brown butcher paper, a wheel of hard yellow cheddar, a sack of dried navy beans, and two dozen eggs individually cushioned in cups of dry oats. On top of the food, he laid the small wooden horse.
He covered the entire basket with a length of clean gray wool.
He blew out the lantern. The barn plunged into darkness save for the ghostly blue light filtering through the cracks in the double doors. Nathan saddled his big bay gelding, tied the heavy basket securely across the cantle, and led the horse out into the roaring white teeth of the storm.
The hour between four and five in the morning is the cruelest of a winter night. It is the hour when the earth has radiated away its last memory of the previous day's sun, when the fire dies down to gray dust, and when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.