Cold had infiltrated my bones overnight. In the purple dawn, it wasn’t leaving. Dawn light tickling my eyelids, stirring my circadian stores of serotonin, didn’t wake me. Cold did the waking. My body announced via biological bullhorn: wake up, you might die if you don’t find warmth soon.
Layering helps. In a hall closet next to the bathroom I found a skuzzy sweatshirt someone had clearly used for a smock while house painting, and an old peacoat that fit me well, that and a burnt-orange longhorned scarf and one of those hunting caps with woolen ear flaps. I pulled a smallish jean jacket from the closet and set it next to Nate along with another one of those caps that looked too big.
I covered him up with a blanket I’d found draped over an armrest. I let him sleep. He lay there with his breath pluming out into cartoon dialogue balloons. In each, his hold on me tight and bony: just don’t leave me here.
In my ridiculous city-boy-playing-ranch-hand outfit, Maggie and I quietly exited through the screen door by the kitchen. I needed time away from him to think. Outside, crunching the gravel, keeping a lookout for roving dogs, I thought we could stay here, me and Nate. We could live out the winter here. An entire cold season really could change things.
Cold’s what you apply to an injury, isn’t it? Time heals.
Cold plus time…
What would the world full of children—those at latitudes farther away from the equator, that is—what would they do when the cold came upon them and there they are out in it? Would it change them? Would they, to survive, deign to use old-world warmth, occupy buildings, use machines?
Probably not, I thought. They’d go old old world and build big goddamned fires out in the open. Like they did the burial pits. The good thing was, they’d have to stay near them.
Maggie trotted next to me. I stopped in the middle of the gravel drive and did a three-sixty turn. What a beautiful place. I’d been to Durango, Colorado, and this place was the Texas version. No kidding. Yeah, I could live out the winter here. A good amount of food sat in the pantry. The fridge and freezer have salvageable items that I can keep cool at the stream I crossed on my way in. And there! There’s the huge chicken coop the size of a racquetball court. There they are, clucking and squawking around. The list of things to do in my mind populated fast. I loved the feeling of having things to do other than worry and be afraid, though that’s always the bass line of life’s song. The way it was in the old world, too, just a different set of them, a manufactured set. These were real because they pertained directly to survival—not acceptance, not ambition, not material attainment, not even getting laid—and because this was so, I felt a burgeoning wholesomeness springing from my feverish to-do list.
This is the utopia I’d hoped for. But I’d wanted it with Kodie. How I missed her now. She’d be so into this idea of staying here, just us, for the winter at least.
I let my finger fiddle with the glock trigger so as to push the thoughts of her away. A redheaded turkey vulture glided on a thermal at the mouth of the valley. I aimed and fired at it. The gun’s report echoed and all went quiet. The bird didn’t even so much as dip a wing in response.
The slight wind coming from behind brought me Nate’s cry.
I jogged back and got within earshot, where we could see each other’s faces.
“My truck’s right there,” I’d pointed to the side of the house. “What, you think I’d just walk away from you?”
He leaned over to see it around the corner. “Oh,” he said. His head panned the scene from side to side as I walked up the incline to the wooden wraparound porch where he stood. “Where are the dogs?”
“Dunno. I’ll rattle the feed bins. They’ll come running, I’m sure.”
He took a step back into the shadow of the porch. “Wait until I’m inside, okay?”
“Sure. Maggie’s okay for you, right?”
He paused, nodded, slowly at first, then assertively, trying to please me by being brave. In that moment, Johnny’s features overlay Nate’s, making me pause my ascent. Maggie sat next to him, looked up at Nate, back at me. The dog knew we spoke of her; the dog knew I was experiencing powerful emotion, and that Nate’s fear was not yet quelled just because I said it should be.
As I say this, dear reader, know that I am leaning forward to stroke my dog’s sunbaked fur. The kayak shimmies as I do. She keeps her eyes closed, enjoys the sun, the water’s rock, having felt me do this innumerable times on this river and knowing that when I do so that I always think how her coming into my life when it did was pure providence.
Now that my old world had been forever stripped away, I can say things like that because now I believe it. And I can also say this: that it’s by providence that I’m doing this, telling you this story while heading toward the bay, for what else could it be?
“I’ve been thinking,” I said to Nate.
“Uh huh.” His response came out more circumspect than I thought possible for a ten-year-old. He pushed the too-big hunting cap up his forehead.
“I think we should stay here. For the winter.”
“Really?” His brimming excitement let show through the old world.
“Yep. It’s the best thing, I think.”
“And after that?”
“After what?”
“Winter.”
“Let’s get there when we get there.”
He nodded knowingly, brow furrowed—yes, of course, when we get there.
“You like coffee?”
Nate shook his head, his tongue jumping from his mouth in a grimace.
“I’ll make a fire. Cold cereal is all we got right now. We’re going to need to spend the morning collecting firewood. Then we can get eggs from the coop.”
“Okay.”
“But first, let me feed the dogs. We lose them, and the winter here isn’t as attractive.”
Nate turned on his heel and dashed inside. He stood at the tall single-paned glass door and watched me at an angle as I fed the dogs. The noises I made did indeed make them come, about thirty of them. “Can you feed her in here?” Nate yelled from the cracked door. Maggie sitting next to him, waiting, knowing.
The cereal we ate had held its crunch and the fire I’d conjured filled the room with hope and warmth. Out the window, the sun was a white coin pinned above the ridge. I showed Nate the empty wood rack and said we’d need to go out and collect a bunch of deadfall. The dusty-webby storage room contained all manner of axes and saws, chained and toothed. Nate found clothes that fit better in the closet up in the loft above the great room he’d annexed. He’d claimed the loft with blunt territoriality, running up and down the flight of steps, fleet and noiseless on the jute carpet.
We set out to collect wood with a green wheelbarrow. Plenty of it in the immediate area but the real stuff we could see was beyond the tall industrial barbwire fence. An aluminum ranch ladder straddling the fence didn’t help us wood-gathering-wise. I considered snapping the wire with one of the million sharp objects in the medieval oubliette of a storage room, but a part of me thought it best not to.
Then we saw why. Buffalo. Only twenty-five yards away on the other side of the fence, lying so still I had to blink to make sure. Two of them lying on the slanted meadow in the sun between cedar copses.
“A whole herd of them out there,” Nate said. “Forgot to tell you that.”
“Huh. Buffalo.” I’d heard stories of people out in the boonies having panthers and ocelots and zebras. Never heard of buffalo out here. I muttered, “Well, should the fecal matter really strike against the rotating blades, we could hunt down one of these and eat for a month.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just postulating.”