Ten days, he said, climbing down.
Ten days, she said, and smiled, and took his arm, and they went inside together, where the lamp was lit and the supper was warm, and the ranch, for the first time that winter, felt less like a siege and more like a home.
The final storm came in the last week of February, and it came the way the worst ones always did: not with a warning, but with a change in the air that Elias felt in his teeth when he stepped out of the barn at noon. The sky to the west went the color of iron, the wind began to talk in the pines, and by two o'clock the snow was falling so thick that the far fence line vanished, and the world narrowed to the yard and the barn and the house.
Clara had prepared for this. All winter she had prepared, and now her preparations stood in a line against the storm: the herd moved to the river valley behind the windbreaks of stacked hay and pine boughs, hay stored under cover in the mended barn, the lamps trimmed and filled, the pantry stocked, and the lantern line — her idea from December, planned when the first blizzard taught them how far a man could be from the house and still need to find it — strung along the fence from the house to the far pasture, a string of lanterns in glass housings, spaced a dozen yards apart, waiting for a match. She had walked that fence line herself in December, in the cold, counting the posts and driving the hooks, while Elias watched from the porch and told himself it was a precaution they would probably never need. He had stopped telling himself things like that some time ago.
Elias checked the herd at dusk with Pete and Wiley, and the windbreaks held, and the cattle stood shoulder to shoulder in the lee of the hill, steaming and patient, their backs crusted white, and he felt the cautious pride of a rancher whose preparations are working. Pete shouted something about the hay holding out, and Wiley nodded with his coat iced at the collar, and for a moment, standing there in the lee with the cattle safe around him, Elias allowed himself to believe the worst of the winter was something they had already survived. Then Wiley came running from the far pasture with his coat iced white, shouting that three steers had broken through the far gate in the wind and were out on the open prairie, and Elias did not think, he simply went, because a rancher does not leave his cattle to a blizzard. Pete shouted after him to take a lantern, but Elias was already moving, and the wind took Pete's voice and tore it apart, and the only light left was the grey-white glare of the snow itself.
He found the steers a half mile out, huddled in a hollow, and he turned them, and by the time he had them moving toward the gate the storm had closed over him completely. The snow came sideways, the wind tore his breath away, and the landmarks — the lone pine, the rock outcrop, the fence corner — were gone, swallowed, as if the world had been wiped clean. He rode with his head down, trusting the horse, and the horse trusted nothing, and after a time he realized he no longer knew whether he was riding toward the ranch or away from it.
He stopped the horse and sat in the saddle, snow packing into his collar, his hands going numb inside his gloves, and he thought, with a clarity that frightened him, that this was how men died in February: not dramatically, but quietly, a few hundred yards from their own houses, because the storm had taken the world away and given nothing back. He thought of his father, who had ridden out in weather like this and come home, and of the men in the valley who had ridden out and not come home, and he thought of Clara, who had planned for exactly this day in December while he stood on the porch and called it a precaution, and he felt a shame sharper than the cold: that he had needed her to imagine his death for him before he believed in it himself.
He sat a moment longer, and then he did the only sensible thing left to a man who cannot see: he gave the horse its head and prayed, in the wordless way a man prays when he is past words, that something in the white dark would answer.
And then he saw the first light.
It was small, and yellow, and impossibly steady, hanging in the white dark ahead of him, and then another beyond it, and another, a line of lights going away into the storm like a sentence being written. Clara's lantern line. She had lit them — all of them, down the fence from the house to the far pasture, walking the line in the storm herself, or sending Wiley, he did not know and did not care — and the lights led home.