He had grain enough to last until the end of March if he was careful, if he measured every handful, and did not waste a single kernel to rot or rats or carelessness. He had hay enough for the animals just barely. If the winter did not run longer than it was supposed to. He had jerked beef and beans and a barrel of flour that was maybe half full, enough to keep body and soul together if he did not ask too much of either one. It would be tight.
It would be closer than he liked. But he had seen tight before, and he was still here to remember it. He settled in to wait, to endure, to do the slow, patient work of surviving until the sun remembered that spring was supposed to come. The trouble came in the first week of December, on a night when the snow was falling so thick that a man could not see his own barn from the porch, and the whole world seemed to have shrunk down to whatever the lantern light could reach. Elijah was sitting by the fire, mending a bridal that had snapped in the cold.
The leather stiff and reluctant under his fingers. The cabin was warm enough, the fire crackling, and the wind howling outside like a living thing trying to find its way in. Then he heard a sound that did not belong to the wind or the creek of the cabin settling. It was a thin sound, high and weak, like a coyote pup crying for its mother somewhere out in the darkness. He sat down the bridal and listened with the whole of his attention because a man alone in that country learned to listen for he did not live long.
The sound came again closer now. And this time he knew it was not an animal. No animal made a sound quite like that. A sound that had human desperation in it, even if he could not make out any words. He pulled on his coat, the heavy wool one that his wife had made for him in the first winter of their marriage, and he put on his hat, and took the lantern from its hook by the door.
He picked up his rifle, too, because a man alone in that country did not open his door to the dark without being ready for whatever might come through it. And he stepped out onto the porch with the wind cutting at his face, and the snow swirling so thick he could barely see the steps at his feet. What he saw in the yellow circle of lantern light stopped him where he stood. There were people in his yard, more than a dozen of them, huddled together in the snow, like a herd of cattle, too tired and too cold to move another step. They were Apache.
He could see that at once from their clothing and their features. But they were not the painted warriors of the stories men told in the saloons after too much whiskey. The terrifying figures on horseback that swept down from the hills with death in their hands. They were old women with faces lined by decades of sun and wind and sorrow. They were children so small they could barely stand in the deep snow, their legs buried to the knee, and their tiny hands wrapped in rags that were frozen stiff.
There were a few men, yes, but men so thin that their cheekbones stood out like the edge of an axe, and their arms hung loose at their sides because there was no strength left to hold them any other way. They had no horses. They had no weapons that Elijah could see. They had nothing at all except the blankets wrapped around their shoulders and the snow that clung to them like a shroud waiting to be worn. The sound he had heard was coming from a child in the arms of a woman who looked too weak to hold her.
A small girl maybe four or 5 years old whose cry had gone thin and greedy with exhaustion and cold and hunger. The child was not crying the way children cry when they want something they know they can have. She was crying the way living things cry when they do not know if they will still be living when the sun comes up. It was the sound of a life that had been pushed past every limit and was running on nothing but the simple refusal to stop existing. Elijah stood on his porch and looked at them.
And they looked back at him with eyes that held no hope and no fear. They were past both of those things. They had walked past hope somewhere in the mountains and left fear behind somewhere else. And what remained was just the bare fact of being alive and the question of whether that fact would continue. They had reached the end of something and they knew it.
And they were waiting to see what kind of man stood on this porch and what kind of choice he would make. One of the men, the oldest of the group, a man whose hair was gray and whose face was creased with more years than Elijah could easily count, took a single step forward through the snow. He moved slow and careful. The way a man moves when he wants to show that he is not a threat to anyone. And he spoke in broken English that came slow and careful, too.
Like a man stepping across a frozen river and testing each patch of ice before he trusted his weight to it. "We have walked many days," the old man said. His voice was weak, but steady, the voice of someone who had given up on strength, but not on dignity. "We have walked from the south where the soldiers came, and we have nothing left. We do not ask you to love us.
We do not ask you to trust us. We ask only that our children do not die in your snow. The words hung in the cold air between them, visible as mist, and then gone. Elijah Tanner did not answer right away. He looked at the old man, whose name he did not yet know, and he looked at the woman holding the crying child.
He thought about his stores in the barn, the grain that would last until March if he was careful. He thought about what the people in Redcliffe would say if they knew he had let Apache shelter on his land, how Bucker would ride from ranch to ranch with the news, and how the whispers would start that Elijah Tanner had finally lost his mind. He thought about his father, dead now 12 years, and buried on a hill overlooking the valley. And he heard the old man's voice as clear as if he were standing right beside him. Hunger does not care what language a man speaks.