The Thaw Will Come

Hannah Coyle had learned to tell the weather by the way the dog wouldn't settle, and tonight the dog would not lie down. She had homesteaded the quarter-section alone for two winters now, since the fever took Tom and the ground was too iron-hard in January to bury him deep. She had broken the sod he'd marked, set the corner stones he'd argued for, and learned the thousand small cruelties of a land that did not care whether a woman lived or died on it. The plains ran flat and pale to every horizon, a country with no wall to lean against, and she had stopped expecting it to be kind. She only expected it to be true. The cold would come. The wolves would come. Men would come, in their season, and you met each the same way — squarely, with the door barred and the rifle oiled. The first flakes had started at noon, fine as flour, and by dark the wind had teeth. Snow does not fall on the high plains so much as it is hurled, sideways, in long howling sheets that erase the world to arm's length. She had brought the cow in close and forked down hay and counted herself ready. Then the dog stood up from the fire with its hackles raised and looked at the door, and a sound came through the storm that was not the storm. A knock. Then a slump, as of something giving up against the wood. She did not open it at once. A woman alone does not open a door at night in a blizzard for the asking.