He stood very still.
"You can't open a door and feel your way past ten heifers with a rifle in your hand, Arne," Albin said, and his voice was not angry, not even tired; it was patient, the way you would say something to a horse. "Leave the gun by the door. You can come get it after if you want it."
He leaned the Winchester against the inside of the door frame. His hands, he noticed, were shaking now. They had not shaken when he loaded it. He put his left hand on the wall and started down the alley.
He went slowly, left palm flat on the boards, right hand out in front of him, sliding each boot before he put weight on it, and every few feet his hand met warm hide, a flank, a hip, and the animal jerked away and snorted and he said, low, "Ho, girl. Easy." The darkness seemed to have weight. He could feel it on his eyes. Snow sifted down through the loft floor onto his hat and the back of his neck, and once a chunk the size of a loaf of bread struck his shoulder and burst, and he stood with his heart going and waited for the rest of it to come, and it did not come.
The water tank at twenty feet. His hand found it, the cold rolled lip of the galvanized steel. The ladder at thirty. Fly was against his legs the whole time, pressed to his left side, moving when he moved and stopping when he stopped, and he understood after a while that she was not leaning on him for comfort. She was keeping him on the wall. Every time he drifted out toward the middle of the alley she pushed, gently, with her shoulder, and put him back.
He passed the calving pens. At the second one his right hand, reaching out, found splintered wood where there should not have been any, the jagged end of a broken board pointing at him out of the dark, and beyond it a smell of kerosene so strong it burned his nose. At the third one he heard the heifer, close now, a deep shuddering groan, and the man breathing behind her, and he said, "Albin," and Albin said, "I'm here. Keep going. Door first."
The post at the end. Under the hook, on its nail, the pry bar. He felt the cold heavy iron and for some reason his throat closed up. He found the latch of the south door and set his shoulder to it, and it moved and stuck against the drift outside, and he pulled backward with everything he had, and his bad knee screamed, and the door went all at once, grinding open four feet, five, and the dark changed. Not light. Only a different texture of dark, a faint gray-white seething in the shape of a doorway.
"It's open."
"Good. Now get out of the way. Get flat against the wall on the hinge side. I'm going to send her."