Chapter 18

Winter came to the New Mexico territory the way it always did — without apology and ahead of schedule.

The first hard frost hit in early November, turning the scrub silver overnight and killing the last of Marie’s kitchen garden with a thoroughness that Marie accepted with the philosophical resignation of someone who had been told this would happen and had planted late anyway on the grounds that it might not. The cattle moved slow and close to the barn. The creek dropped to a trickle and then froze at the edges. The sky went the flat white of a season that had arrived and intended to stay.

Cosay watched it come with the eye of someone who had wintered alone in the hills and understood what the territory was capable of. She had spent October quietly preparing — laying in firewood beyond what Coulter thought necessary, checking the barn roof and the house roof and the integrity of every wall that faced north, putting up stores with a systematic thoroughness that the girls had helped with and learned from.

By the time the first real snow fell they were ready.

It came on a Tuesday, starting before dawn as a thin sifting and building through the morning into something serious, blanketing the yard and the pasture and the hills in a white that made the whole world look simplified, reduced to its essential shapes. The cattle were already in. The horses were already in. The firewood was stacked deep under the overhang where it would stay dry.

Coulter stood at the window with his coffee and watched it come down.

Cosay appeared beside him, her own coffee in hand, and they stood together watching the snow rewrite the landscape.

“How bad?” he said.

“Not bad. Two days, maybe three. Then it will clear.” She drank her coffee. “The real cold comes in January. This is just the territory reminding you it can.”

“You sound like you’ve had this conversation with it before.”

“Many times. We understand each other.”

Behind them the house was waking up. Marie descended the loft ladder with her blanket still around her shoulders and immediately went to the window and pressed her face against the glass.

“Snow,” she announced.

“We see it,” Cosay said.

“Real snow. Not just frost.”

“Also real snow, yes.”

Marie turned from the window with the expression of someone who had just been given an unexpected gift and was trying to decide the best way to use it. “Can we go out?”

“After breakfast,” Coulter said.

“After chores,” Cosay said.

Marie looked between them. “Both?”

“Breakfast, then chores, then outside,” Cosay said. “In that order.”

Emmie came down the ladder with considerably less enthusiasm for the morning, assessed the snow through the window with the pragmatism of someone calculating what it meant for the day’s work rather than its entertainment value, and went to start breakfast without being asked.

This was something that had happened gradually over the winter months — Emmie taking on the kitchen in the mornings with a quiet ownership that nobody had assigned her and nobody questioned. She had learned from Cosay through the fall, absorbing technique and instinct both, and what she produced now was reliably good and occasionally excellent, which she accepted without false modesty and without arrogance, just as a thing she could do.