Cast Out Into the Snow, She Found a Hidden Cave House — The Door She Opened Changed Everything

She was 23 years old. She stood almost 6 feet tall. She weighed nearly 220 lbs on the day she walked into the snow. And she had less than $4 sewn into the hem of her coat. Her name was Harriet Doan. Big Hattie they called her. The men at the last three ranches had said it to her face.

 The boys in the settlement had said it to her back. and her own cousin, a man she had never met, had written it in a letter that turned her out of the only house she had ever lived in. She carried a canvas bundle over one shoulder, a roll of her father’s frier tools over the other, a folding knife in the right pocket of her skirt given to her by a woman who was already 10 years in the ground, and a small tint type photograph in a tin box in her bundle of a mother she barely remembered.

 She was walking north into a valley she had never seen, into a country she had never heard named until three nights before, into the first hard snow of the winter of 1898. She did not know that inside the mountain ahead of her, a woman she had never met had built a house 60 years before and had left it unlocked.

 She did not know that the woman who built it was her own blood. She only knew that if she stopped walking, she would freeze. So, she walked, “Settle in. Tell us where you are watching from tonight and stay close because this story only comes along once. The wind came down from the ridge in long slow runs.

 It carried the smell of frozen ground and pine sap gone hard in the cold. It moved sideways through the timber. It flattened the dry grass along the game trail she was walking. It pushed the small dry snowflakes against her right cheek until her cheek stopped feeling. She kept walking because that was the whole of the plan.

 keep walking until dark, until the country either killed her or gave her something else. Her boots were worn thin at the balls of her feet. She could feel every stone through the leather. Her shoulders under the straps of the bundle had gone past pain into a duller thing that was not exactly numb. Her breath fogged the wool collar of her coat and frozen small pale beads inside it where the fibers had rubbed themselves rough over the years.

 23 years old, nearly 220 lbs of woman on worn leather boots, ripping into a country nobody had ever taken her to. She did not cry because Edna Colbeck had taught her that a woman did her crying alone or not at all. And she was not alone yet. She was almost alone, but not yet. To understand what Harriet Doan carried up into that high valley on the last brittle days of a shortening autumn, you have to know something of where she came from and who had made her.

 because she did not walk like a woman who was giving up and she did not carry herself like a woman who had never been loved. She had been loved. She had simply outlived the people who did the loving one by one until the loving had settled into the objects she still owned and the habits her hands still remembered without asking her permission.

 That was the whole of her fortune at 23. She had been born in a shallow south-facing valley some 80 miles below Pine Hollow on a homestead her father had raised with his own hands in the summer of 1875 which was 7 years after the land she was born on had officially become Wyoming territory and 13 years after the woman she would meet in a cave had built the house that would save her life.

 Her father’s name was a Thaddius Daland. He was a frier by trade, long and lean at the shoulders, thick at the wrists, quiet at the supper table, quieter still at the forge. He had come west at 19 from a hard scrabble farm in the middle border country with a set of used friers’s tools rolled in an oil cloth and almost nothing else.

 By the time Hattie remembered him, he had built a plank house of three rooms, a low barn, a forge shed with a stone chimney at the corner, a corral of stir dripped lodge pole poles he had cut and dragged and set himself. He had also by then gone off a green horse into a rock ledge and had come back to the plank house walking crooked and he never walked straight again.

 His back was the reason Hadtie learned to shoe. Her mother’s name was Karina. Karina Dalanborn Karina Avery and Hattie remembered her only in fragments. A low steady humming while bread was worked on a scarred pine table. The smell of lie soap and dried mint that clung to the folds of an apron hung on a nail by the back door. a pale hand smoothing the crown of her head at bedtime.

 And once, only once, a story told by candlelight about a woman in a high country of pines, above a great cave, who had been hard with her, and had sent her south with a Freigher’s wife when she was 11 years old, because that woman had known she was too hard, and had not softened. Karina Dalan had said the name of the woman only once, and Hadtie, who was five, had not held on to it, because 5-year-olds do not know which names they will need later.

Karina died of a lung fever in the winter. Hadtie turned six. The ground was frozen so deep that Thaddius had to break a hole in it with an iron bar. And after that, the plank house held only the two of them, and the sound of the wind through the corral poles. Thaddius did not remarry. He was not a man who could speak easily of what he had lost.

And he did not try. Instead, he took the small daughter who had been left to him and folded her without particular ceremony into the work of the place. That was how Hattie learned everything she came to know about the world. By seven, she was carrying feed to the hens in a tin bucket and gathering eggs into the pocket of her apron.

 By 9ine, she was milking both cows morning and evening with hands so small she had to lean her forehead against the warm flank of the animal to steady herself. By 10, she was already bigger than any girl in the settlement 40 mi east. By 11, she was bigger than most of the boys. By 12, she was taller than her own father and still growing.

 The other children in the settlement had names for her. Some of them were the names children make up. Some of them were names they had heard grown men use when they thought no children were listening. Big Hattie, Ox Girl, the plow. She heard them, she did not answer them. Because Thaddius Dalan had said one thing to her sitting by the stove on a cold evening in her 10th winter.

 He had said it once slowly in the voice he used for the price of a job of shoeing, and he had never said it again. He had said, “The world will call you names. It does not call other girls. Let them slide off. Your hands are worth twice what theirs are, and they know it. That is why they are calling you names.” Hadtie had folded that sentence into herself.

 In the place where she kept the few good things anyone had ever said to her, and she did not take it out again for years, except in the dark, when the names had been especially loud, and she needed to hear a true thing on top of them. The frier work began in her 10th year because Thaddius’s back would no longer let him bend and hold a hoof between his own knees for a full trim.

He taught her the names of tools the way another father might have taught his daughter the names of flowers. He taught her the difference between a rasp and a file, between a clinch cutter and a pull-off, between a hoof knife dulled by use and one dulled by neglect. He taught her to trim a hoof so the frog sat properly on the ground and the wall bore its share.

 He taught her to hold a horse’s foot between her knees, the way a woman might hold a piece of laundry firmly, but without argument. By 12, she could throw a saddle onto a 15-hand geling by pitching it up from the hip, not because she had to, but because she liked the swing of it. By 14, she could shoe a quiet horse alone from start to finish.

 And Thaddius, who did not praise easily, once told a neighbor over the fence that his girl had a better hand at a hind foot than he did. Had he hearing this from the door of the forge shed tucked the sentence in beside the other one and did not take it out, not for years. The neighbor to whom that sentence had been spoken was Edna Colbeck.

 And Edna was the second great presence of Hadtie’s life. Edna Colbeck was 61 years old when Hattie first began to know her properly. A widow who lived alone on a quarter section 3 mi east of the Dalan place. In a squared log cabin she had helped her husband build in the first year of their marriage. Her husband had been dead nearly two decades by then.

 thrown from a green horse into a rock outcrop, which was the same way Thaddius Dalan had hurt his back. Except Edna’s husband had hit the rock with his head instead of the base of his spine, and so Edna’s husband had not gotten up, Edna had simply gone on running the small holding by herself the way she had run it beside him, keeping a dozen sheep for wool and mutton, a garden of hearty roots and cabbages, a smokehouse where she cured her own bacon, a seller dug into the north slope of a low-rise behind the cabin.

 She was a short, square shouldered woman with iron gray hair worn in a plain knot. Hands the color of tan saddle leather and a voice that never rose above the volume of ordinary conversation even when she was displeased. She wore the same two calico dresses turnout, a canvas work apron with three deep pockets and a pair of men’s work boots she had cut down herself at the tops.

 She had not had children of her own. She had wanted them once and then she had stopped wanting them. and she had made a life instead out of the ordinary daily competence of keeping a place alive by herself. She saw in Hattie from the first something she recognized. It began the summer Hadtie was 10. Thatas had ridden two days south to shoe a full ramuda at a big outfit and he had left Hattie at Edna’s cabin because a girl of 10 could not be left alone on a homestead for the better part of a week.

 Even a girl of 10 who was already taller than her father. Edna had not fussed over her. Edna had handed her a pairing knife the first morning and set her to a bowl of new potatoes. You’ll want to be quick with these, Edna had said. Not neat. Quick. Neat is for tea parties. Yes, ma’am. Don’t call me ma’am. Edna. Yes, Edna. Better.

 By the end of the third day, Hattie had learned to skim cream, to render lard in a wide-on kettle over an outdoor fire, to work a triddle sewing machine Edna had freighted in from a mail order house four years before, and to card raw wool from the fleces piled in the corner of the cabin. Edna spoke rarely, and only when she had something to say, and what she said generally concerned the work at hand.

 But she watched. She watched the way Hattie’s hands moved. The way Hattie did not flinch at a task she had never done before, but studied it once and then took hold of it. The way Hattie finished what she had started, even when no one was in the room to see, she watched too the way Hattie carried her size, which was already the size of a fullg grown farm woman on the frame of a child.

 Some girls of that size folded in on themselves, stooped at the shoulder, kept their eyes on the ground, made themselves smaller in the doorway, apologized for the space they took up. Had he did not, Hadtie walked into a room and looked at what was in it and went to the work. Edna noticed on the last morning when Thaddius came back trailworn and quiet, Edna walked him out to his horse and told him plainly in the same voice she used for the price of eggs that his daughter had a head on her and a pair of hands to match it and that

if he had any sense he would let her be taught properly by any woman near enough to do it. Thaddius, who did not disagree with truthful things, had simply nodded. She’s yours to teach whatever you’ll teach her. Then I’ll take her a day a week. That would be a kindness. It is not a kindness.

 She earns her keep by supper time. Thaddius had almost smiled at that. He had ridden home with Hattie behind him on the mule. And from that summer forward, Hattie spent a day of every week in Edna Colbeck’s kitchen, in Edna’s garden, in Edna’s smokehouse, at Edna’s loom, and beside Edna’s cellar door.

 It was Edna who taught Hattie the things a homestead woman had to know if she meant to live alone. and unafraid of it, she taught her to bake bread in a Dutch oven set in coals, to put up green beans and stewed tomatoes in glass jars sealed with wax and cloth, to make soft soap from ashes and rendered fat, to sharpen a knife on a stone and then finish the edge on the palm of her own hand.

 She taught her to set a rabbit snare, to skin a rabbit without tearing the pelt, to sew a straight seam by hand or by the treddle machine with equal patience. She taught her to read a sky for weather. She taught her to walk into a strange room and count the ex’s before she counted anything else. She taught her that a woman living alone was not to be pied and not to be feared, but to be simply plainly herself, and that a certain kind of quiet was worth more in a hard country than any amount of talking.

 And in the winter, Hattie was 15. Edna gave her without occasion the object that would go with her afterward. Everywhere she went for the rest of her life, it was a folding knife. It was not a fancy thing. It had a bone handle worn smooth at the swells where a thumb had rested against it for 40 years, two brass pins, and a single steel blade 3 and 1/2 in long that had been resharpened so many times the edge had crept back a little from the original line of the spine.

 It had belonged to Edna’s husband, and before that to his father, and Edna had carried it in her apron pocket every day since the man had died. One snow quiet afternoon, while Hattie sat mending a torn shirt at the kitchen table, Edna had simply set the knife down on the wood beside her. Take it, Edna. Take it.

 You’ll get more use out of it than I will now. Hadtie had picked it up, opened it, closed it once, feeling the smooth click of the spring. She had looked at Edna. Edna had looked back, and given a small nod, and neither of them had said anything more about it. Hadtie had carried that knife in her right skirt pocket every day thereafter.

She sharpened it on Edna’s stone once a month. She used it to cut twine, to pair apples, to trim a hangail, to whittle a peg, to open a sack of grain, to slice a piece of jerked beef on the trail, and once at 19 to cut herself free of a stirrup, when a horse she was breaking went over backward into a wash.

 The knife lived in her pocket as steadily as her own hand. Edna Colbeck died in the spring. Hadtie was 18. It was not a hard death. She had walked out one April morning to check on a lamming Uway and had sat down against the sunny south wall of the cabin to rest. And when a neighbor came by 2 hours later, she was still sitting there with her hands folded in her lap and her chin dropped gently against her chest.

 The doctor rode out from the settlement 40 mi east and said it was her heart which had simply chosen to stop the way a good watch chooses to stop. Without warning and without complaint, Hattie helped to lay her out in the front room of the cabin in a plain pine box her father built in a day and a half. She stood by the grave with her hand around the bone handle of the folding knife in her pocket and did not cry.

 Because Edna had taught her that a woman did her crying alone, or not at all. She did most of hers alone. The quarter section went to a distant nephew in a state Edna had never visited, and the nephew sent a man out to sell the sheep and the household goods at auction. By summer, the cabin stood empty with its door hanging open and its garden gone to weeds.

 Hadtie rode past it once and did not ride past it again. Thaddius Dalan lived three more years after Edna died. And then he did not. He had gone out one bright cold morning in Hadtie’s 21st winter to gather a strayed mare from a canyon on the northern edge of the range. A squall had come down off the ridges faster than any sky he had ever read.

 And he had been caught out in it for a full night in part of a day before he made it back to the plank house with his hands frost white to the wrists and a rattling in his chest that never fully went away. He worked through the spring on lungs that would not heal. In the summer, he lay down one afternoon on the bench by the forge shed to rest and did not stand up again.

 Hadtie buried him beside her mother under the cottonwood at the corner of the corral. She dug the hole herself because there was no one closer than a day’s ride to help her. She was strong enough for the work. She had been strong enough for the work since she was 15. She read the plain graveside words from her mother’s small brown Bible with a voice that did not shake.

 She stayed on the homestead alone through the following winter. Doing the work of the place with with her father’s hands as well as her own. But the homestead had been in her father’s name, and the paperwork had never been amended, and a cousin she had never met. A thin, careful man named Wilbur Straoud, who lived in a town 300 m east and had inherited by the operation of a law Hadtie did not fully understand, sent a letter in the second spring after Thaddius’s death, informing her in language that was neither cruel nor kind

that the property had been sold and that she would need to vacate by the end of the following month. She had folded that letter twice, put it in the pocket of her coat, and sat down at the pine table in the plank house. She sat for a long time. She thought about what she owned in the world. It had come to this.

 The clothes she stood up in. A canvas bundle of a second dress in a wool shaw in her mother’s small brown Bible. A set of her father’s smaller frier tools rolled in oil and tied with twine. The folding knife Edna Colbeck had given her and $3.80 in coin she had earned mending harness for a neighbor the previous fall.

 That was the whole of what she had at 22. She rode away from the plank house on a borrowed mule with those things tied behind her saddle. She was already, though she did not yet know it, walking toward Pine Hollow. The mule she rode was borrowed from a man named Osborne Fletch, who had shot horses with her father over a stretch of 15 years, and who was in the plain accounting of the country the only person within a day’s ride who owed the Dalan name anything at all.

 Osborne was 64 years old, thin at the shoulders, thick at the wrists. He lived on a small holding two hollows west of the plank house with a wife who no longer left her chair and a grown son who had gone to work for the railroad and did not come back. When Hadtie rode over to tell him she was leaving, Osborne had listened without interrupting, tapped the ash from his short clay pipe against the top rail of his corral, and said only that she could take the rone mule as far as she needed to go and turn him loose at the first outfit that would take her on. And if

any man asked, the mule had been sold to her for a dollar, and she had a paper to prove it. He wrote the paper out at his kitchen table in a slow, careful hand, dated it, signed it, and gave her a second folded sheet. That’s names. Names of what? Ranches. Three of them up country that might still be hiring a hand who can shoe a horse and mend a fence and keep her own counsel through a winter. Osborne, don’t just take it.

 She took it. She rode out at first light the next morning with the rone mule stepping easy under her and the plank house dropping away behind her shoulder. She did not look back because Edna had taught her that looking back had never yet moved a person one step forward in any country she had lived in. She followed the first name on Osborne’s list to a place called the Sladen outfit and she was turned away there for reasons that were never fully spoken.

But had she understood to do with the fact that she was a young woman traveling alone, and that the foreman did not want the trouble of explaining her to his wife, he looked her up and down at the gate, which was the same look she had been getting from strange men since she was 14. His eyes went to her shoulders first, and then to her hands, and then to her face last, which was the order strange men usually looked at her, in which she had long ago stopped noticing.

 How old are you, girl? 22. You do a man’s work. I do frier work. I mend fence. I cook camp food. That ain’t what I asked. That’s what I answered. He worked his jaw a moment and then he shook his head. My wife will not have it. Right on. She wrote on. She followed the second name to a middling cow outfit run by a man named Owen Bren.

And he looked her up and down at the gate of his home pasture, asked her three short questions about horses, listened to her answers, and hired her on the spot. $8 a month. He was one hand short for the fall work. She could sleep in the small tack room off the barn. She would take her meals in the kitchen with his wife and their two young daughters.

You give me any trouble at all, he said. And you’ll be turned out with a day’s warning and no further reference. That suits me. You look like a woman who’s used to being turned out. She did not answer that. He waited a moment. Then he nodded once and walked her to the barn. She stayed on Owen Brennick’s outfit for 11 months, doing the work of any hand, and rather more of it, shoeing the outfit’s saddle string twice, and the two teams of workh horses once, mending 60 rods of drift fence in a wet spring, gathering strays out of the brakes in

the summer, helping Mrs. Brennick put up two full seasons of garden truck into jars and crocs. She was polite, she was quiet, she did not miss a day of work. By the end of the 11 months, Mrs. Bren, whose name was Prudence Bren, had begun to speak of her as though she were a distant, useful niece, and the two daughters, aged 9 and seven, had taken to following her from the barn to the well and back.

 The older daughter was named Cordelia. The younger was named June. Cordelia was the one who asked questions. How come your hands are so big? I’ve been using them a long time. Longer than my papa? No. About as long as your papa’s been using his. But you’re not as old as my papa. No, then how started earlier? Oh, Cordelia had thought about this for a moment.

 Papa says you shoot better than the man in the settlement. Your papa is being kind. Papa is never kind. Hattie had almost smiled. June, the younger one, did not ask questions. June just watched. She watched Hattie’s hands the way Hattie had once watched Edna’s hands. And Hattie, who had been watched that way, once recognized it and did not mind.

 For 11 months, Hadtie had almost begun to think she had found the shape of a life. Almost. Because in the second summer, Owen Bren’s brother came out from the east to stay on the place. His name was Cornelius Brennick. I was 40 years old. He had been broken by some earlier failure in a town in Illinois, and he had come to the outfit for shelter and had developed for a share of the eventual property.

 He was a heavy, soft-handed, sourmouthed man who did not do much work, but who ate at the kitchen table with his elbows spread wide, and who took the biggest piece of everything on the platter before anyone else had reached. He did not like a woman who could shoe a horse better than he could. He did not like a young hand who was not his kin drawing wages from what he now considered his brother’s holding.

 He did not like a woman who did not look at him when he came into a room, and he did not like a woman who was bigger than he was. especially he did not like that he said as much twice in Hadt’s hearing. The first time was in the barn. He had come in while she was rasping a hoof, and he had leaned on the doorpost, and he had said to no one in particular, but loud enough, “A woman that size ought to be pulling a plow, not fussing with fine work.” Hadtie did not look up.

 The second time was at the supper table on a Sunday evening, when Cordelia was in the room, and June was in the room, and Prudence Bren was in the room, and Owen was in the room. Cornelius had leaned back in his chair and had said around a mouthful of biscuit, “No man’s going to marry a woman looks like that.

 She might as well be a bull calf in a dress.” The room had gone still. Cordelia had opened her mouth, and Prudence Bren had put a hand on Cordelia’s arm without looking at her, and Cordelia had closed her mouth. Owen had looked at his plate and had not looked up. Hadtie had set her fork down beside her plate.

 She had stood up from the table. She had said in the voice her father had once used at the forge for horses that needed studying, “Excuse me.” And she had walked out through the kitchen and out through the yard and down to the tack room. And she had sat on the wedge of her cot for a long time in the dark with her hand around the bone handle of Edna’s folding knife in her right skirt pocket.

 And she had not cried because Edna had taught her. But she had come close. She had come as close as she had come in years. The third time Cornelius said it, he said it to Owen directly. In the tack room in the middle of a Wednesday morning, while Hattie stood not 15 ft away, rasping a hoof, he said, “Either she goes or I go, it’s your outfit, but it won’t be your outfit long.

 If people know you’ve got a woman like that under your roof making the men look small.” Owen was a decent man and not a strong one. And when Cornelius pressed him hard enough on it, and when Cornelius said in the kitchen the following Sunday evening that it was time Owen chose his own blood over a stranger Owen chose his blood, he came out to the tack room the next morning with an envelope in his hand, and his hat held low across his chest, and he did not meet Hattie’s eye.

 Hattie, Owen, I’m sorry. All right, the work has been good. No fault of yours. My brother has made the place difficult. I can’t keep you on. All right. He handed her the envelope. It held $11.40, which was what he owed her in wages in half a month’s severance. Besides, Hattie, don’t don’t say anything to Prudence or the girls until you’ve gone.

It would only make them unhappy and it would not change the outcome. All right. I’m sorry. You said he stood there a moment longer, turning his hat. Hattie Owen, you are a good hand if it counts for anything from a man like me. It did not count for much, but she nodded once because Edna had taught her that shame in a man was not a thing to make heavier if you could help it. He turned.

 He walked out. He did not look back. She rolled her second dress in her wool shawl in her mother’s Bible back into the canvas bundle, wrapped her father’s tools in their oil cloth, tied the bundle in the tools behind the saddle of the ran mule, whom Owen had let her keep the use of, checked that Edna Colbeck’s folding knife was in her right skirt pocket, where it always was, put on her coat.

 She rode out through the home gate before Prudence Bren came down from the upstairs bedroom where she had been folding sheets. The two Bren girls saw her go from the kitchen window. Cordelia, who was nine, ran out onto the porch in stocking feet with her mouth open to call something. Hadtie only touched the brim of her hat and rode on and did not look back because she knew if she looked back, she would remember the girl’s face for a long time, and it would not do either of them any good.

She rode north because there was nothing south for her anymore, except the plank house that was not hers, and the two graves under the cottonwood. The third name on Osborne Fletcher’s list had been a ranch called the BarM run by a widow named Ursulin Gans. But when Hadtie reached the Barm 4 days later after a rain slowed ride up country, she found the gate closed with a bar of new lumber nailed across it and a handlettered sign that said the place had been leased for grazing to an outside outfit, and there was no housework and no barn work to be

had. There was no smoke from the chimney, no horse in the corral, no dog on the porch. Hattie sat on the mule at the closed gate for perhaps a full minute, reading the sign twice, as though a second reading might change it, and then she turned the mule, and wrote on. She had by that afternoon come to the last name on the list, and she had by her own private accounting come to the last of a great many things.

 The last name on the list was not a ranch, but a line camp, a two- room log building set at the mouth of a long timbered valley where a big outfit called the Lumis Cattle Company wintered a handful of men to look after cattle drifted down out of the high country. Osborne had written beside the name that the camp boss, a man named Hollister Ashford, sometimes took on an extra hand through the winter for cooking and for keeping the stove and for mending tac.

And that Hollister was a fair man who would not turn a person out into the snow for no reason. Hadtie rode up to the line camp at the end of a long gray afternoon. With the wind starting to move down out of the ridges, and she found Hollister Ashford standing in the door of the camp in a canvas coat and a wool cap, watching her come, he was a tall, stooped man of perhaps 50, with a face weathered brown from the eyes down and pale white above where a hat brim had shaded it every day of his working life. He waited for her to draw up and

to state her business. She stated it plainly. I am Thaddius Dalan’s daughter out of the country below. I can shoe a horse, men tac, cook camp food, keep a stove going through a night. I am asking for winter work. Hollister Ashford listened without interrupting. When she had finished, he took his cap off, turned it in his hands, looked past her shoulder at the mule, and at the small bundle behind the saddle.

 He said in a slow, careful voice that he was very sorry. But the camp was already staffed for the winner. He had two hands assigned by the company and no authority to take on a third. He could not feed a fourth mouth out of what the company had freighted in for the season. And even if he could, the company had put out a written policy the previous year against hiring on any hand who had not come through the head office.

 And that policy had teeth in it. He said all of this while turning the cap in his hands. And he said when he had finished the administrative part of it that he would give her a hot meal and a place to sleep that night in the tax shed if she wanted them and that in the morning she would need to move on. He said the nearest place she might find any kind of shelter or work was over the ridge to the north in a country he called Pine Hollow.

Though I don’t think there is any settlement there worth speaking of. He said it without much hope in his voice and without meeting her eyes because he was a decent man, saying a thing he knew was very close to a sentence. Had he thanked him, I’ll take the meal and the tax shed and be gone before daylight. Miss Dalan. Yes, Mr. Ashford.

 That’s rough country up there in this weather on foot. Yes, Mr. Ashford. He waited as though he expected her to say something more. She did not. He put his cap back on. Come inside. She unsettled the rone mule, rubbed him down with a piece of sacking, put them in the small pole corral behind the camp with a measure of oats from her own saddle bag.

 She ate a plate of beans and salt pork at Hollister Ashford’s rough plank table without saying more than three words. She slept that night in the tax shed under a horse blanket that smelled of long use and old sweat with her canvas bundle for a pillow and Edna Colbeck’s folding knife in her right hand under the blanket.

 She lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind come down the valley, and press against the shed wall. She did what she had learned to do from her father and from Edna Colbeck both, which was to count what she still had, and to make a plan from that count, and not from what she had lost. She still had the mule, at least until she turned him loose, as Osborne Fletch had asked.

 She still had her father’s tools, her mother’s Bible, Edna’s knife. She still had the $11.40 40 cents Owen Brennick had paid her, less what she had spent on flour and jerky, and a new pair of wool socks on the ride up, which had been about $7 and change, and under all of that sewn into the hem of her coat by her own hand in stitches Edna had taught her to make so tight the coin would not slip. She still had $3.

80 from before the Bren place, which had been the whole of her going away money when she left the plank house. She had almost $4. She had her hands, which were 23 years worth of hands. She had the habit of moving forward when there was nothing else to do. And she had, though it was thinner than it had been a year before, a fair sense of her own worth, which Thaddius Dalan had planted in her at 10, and Edna Kobe had watered every week of her adolescence, and which not even Cornelius Brennic, in a full summer of trying, had been able to burn out of her

entirely, which was more, she suspected, than most 23-year-old women in that country had. She thought this without pride. the way she would have counted rounds of firewood in a crib or eggs in a basket. And having counted what she had, she slept. She woke in the blue black dark of a mountain morning, already tilting toward winter.

 She rolled the horse blanket up, left it folded on top of the tac chest, saddled the mule by feel. She rode out of the Lumis Company line camp without waking Hollister Ashford. Though she left on his plank table a small wooden peg she had wittleled the night before as a kind of thanks and a copy of the mule paper in Osborne Fletcher’s hand because she had decided in the night that she would turn the mule loose at the head of the valley and go on from there on foot.

 She wanted a decent man to know if the mule came wandering back down out of the country that she had not stolen him and would not be blamed for taking him. She rode north into the last of the dark with her bundle behind the saddle and the wind hard against her right cheek. Ahead of her the trail went up into the timber into a country she had never seen.

 Under a sky that was already beginning to shut down into the lowg gray shelf of cloud. Edna Colbeck had once described as a killing sky for anyone caught in it after dark. She was almost 23 and 1/2 years old. She weighed nearly 220 lb on the day she rode into the last of the dark. She less than $4 sewn into the hem of her coat.

 And she did not yet know that inside the mountain ahead of her on a shelf of pale limestone above a creek that ran into stone, a woman she had never met had built a house in the summer of 1863, left it unlocked with a note between two-folded blankets and gone to her rest 25 years before Hattie Dalan was ever turned out of a home.

 [clears throat] She did not know that the woman was her own blood. She only knew that the wind was cold, that the trail was going up, and that if she stopped walking, she would freeze. So she rode. The trail up out of the Lumis line camp was not properly a trail, so much as a track worn by drift cattle, and the occasional company rider going up in the fall to push the last strays down before snow in the blue dark before sunrise.

 It showed only as a faint, paler ribbon between the darker mass of timber on either side. Hattie wrote as much by the feel of the mule’s shoulders under her knees as by anything she could see. The ran mule was a steady animal, 12 years old by Osborne Fletch’s reckoning, sure of foot. Slow to spook, he picked his own line up the grade at a walk that would neither hurry nor tire him.

 Hattie sat easy in the saddle. Her canvas bundle lashed behind her. The oil cloth roll of her father’s tools crossed over the bundle and tied twice with pigging string. She held the rains loose because the mule needed no holding, and she let him take the country at his own pace. While the dark thinned by slow degrees into a gray that was not yet light, the valley the line camp sat in ran up northward between two long timbered ridges.

 The head of it, four or five miles above the camp, pinched down into a narrow saddle where a person on foot or a good mule could cross over into the next drainage. Hadtie had heard the country beyond called Pine Hollow by two men in her life. first by a freigher who had come through the plank house years earlier and once by Hollister Ashford the night before and neither of them had spoken of it as a place where a person lived only as a place that was over there and up.

She had no map of it, no picture of it in her mind beyond the words themselves, and the words themselves gave her only pines and a hollow which was to say nothing much. And yet the words were the last direction anyone had offered her, and she was following them, because a direction offered was better than no direction at all.

 The wind came down off the ridge in long, steady runs as she climbed, and it carried the metal smell of high country in late fall, the smell of frozen ground under a skin of thaw, of pine sap gone hard in the cold, of stone that had not been warm in weeks. Twice a cvy of grouse burst from cover along the trail and clattered off into the timber and the mule flicked his ears at them and did not shy.

 Once a mu deer do stood a h 100red yards up the slope in a clearing and watched Hattie pass and Hattie watched her back without turning her head and the dough did not run. [snorts] Only moved after a while behind a spruce and was gone. The trail rose more steeply as the light came. The mule’s breath began to come in visible plumes.

 Hadtie’s own breath fogged the wool collar of her coat and frozen small pale beads on the inside of it where the fibers had rubbed themselves rough over the years. By full daylight she was into the upper end of the valley. The timber had thinned to scattered stands of lodgepole and higher wind-shaped spruce. Between the stands were long slopes of dry grass gone the color of old straw cured on the stem by frost.

 The wind moved through the grass in slow visible waves. She stopped the mule at a place where the trail crossed a small clear creek running out of the higher ground. She stepped down, let the mule drink, drank herself, kneeling and cupping the water in her palm. The cold of it went straight through her teeth and into the bone behind her eyes, and left her more awake than she had been.

 She refilled the tin canteen Osborne Fletch had given her out of the same creek, and stoppered it with its cork, and tied it back to the saddle. She ate a strip of jerk beef standing beside the mule with the rains over her arm. She gave the mule a handful of oats from the small canvas sack in her saddle bag and stood there long enough for the sun to lift clear of the eastern ridge and put a first week warmth on the right side of her face.

She had told herself in the dark hours of the tax shed at the line camp that she would turn the mule loose at the head of the valley. and she meant to do it because she had promised Osborne Fletch she would turn him loose at the first outfit that would take her on and no outfit had taken her on and she could not in decency drag the animal any further into a country where she could not feed him through a winter and where she herself did not know whether she would eat the saddle and bridal she meant to leave with him since they were

not properly hers either. She reasoned that a saddled mule wandering back down country would find his way to some outfit’s home pasture inside a week and be recognized as Osborne Fletch’s stock by the brand on his left hip and would be sent on home or held until Osborne could come for him.

 She had thought this through carefully in the shed, turning the plan in her mind, the way she had once turned a nail between her fingers before she set it to the wood. It was the best plan she had. at the saddle at the head of the valley. She got down. She unbuckled the girth, lifted the saddle and blanket off together, set them on a flat rock a few yards from the trail.

 She took the bundle and the oilcloth roll of tools off the saddle and set them on the ground beside it. She left the bridal on the mule because a bare-headed mule wandering the back country might be caught by anybody, and a bridled mule was more clearly somebody’s animal. She pulled the res over his head and knotted them short across the base of his neck so they would not catch on brush.

 She stood a moment with her hand on the flat between his eyes. “Go on home now,” she said it aloud in a plain, steady voice. The mule stood there and looked at her. She turned him with her hand, gave his rump one firm slap of her palm, and stepped away. He walked eight or 10 paces down the back trail, stopped, looked around at her once. She did not call him back.

After a moment, he turned again and went on down the trail at his own steady walk and did not stop again. She stood at the saddle of the valley and watched him until he was small among the last of the timber. Then he was gone into the timber, and she was alone. She took up her canvas bundle then, and slung it by its rope over her right shoulder.

 She took up the oil cloth roll of tools, and slung it by its twine over her left shoulder. She checked once that Edna Colbeck’s folding knife was in her right skirt pocket. Once that the coin she had was in the small cloth pouch inside her coat with Osborne Fletch’s papers and Owen Bren’s envelope in Wilbur Straoud’s letter.

 Once that the hem of her coat where $3.80 was sewn in still held its shape. Then she turned north across the saddle and began to walk. The far side of the saddle sloped down into a country she had never seen and had no name for except the one Hollister Ashford had given it the night before. Pine Hollow. From the saddle looked at first like nothing more than another timbered drainage among the many drainages of that high country running away northwest between two long dark ridges.

 But as she walked down into it, she saw that it was longer and deeper than she had expected, and that the ridges on either side of it were higher than the ridges around the line camp, and that the timber ran further up the slopes and thicker, and that a creek showed in glimpses at the bottom of it, silver against dark rock, running north the way the valley ran.

There were no fences, there were no cut stumps, there was no smoke rising anywhere in the length of the country. She could see no sound of an axe or a cow or a dog, only wind in the tops of the pines, and once the far high scree of a hawk turning above the ridge behind her. She walked.

 The trail on the north side of the saddle was less of a trail than the trail on the south side. In places it was only a suggestion of a game path through the grass, but the country was open enough that a person could see her way, and the creek in the bottom was a plain enough line to steer by. She held her, walking to the pace her father had taught her for long ground, which was a pace slower than she wanted to go, and one she could hold from sun up to dark without stopping for more than water.

 Her boots were the same worn leather boots she had left the plank house in more than a year before. The soles of them had gone thin under the balls of her feet by the second hour of walking. She could feel every pebble on the trail through the leather. the straps of the canvas bundle and the twine of the oilcloth roll cut into her shoulders through the wool of her coat.

She stopped once every half hour or so to shift them. By midm morning she had come down into the timber proper and was walking beside the creek. The creek was perhaps 10 ft wide where it ran through the flats and narrower where it pinched between rocks and it ran clean and quick and cold and there were trout shadows in the pools where the water slowed.

 She followed a game trail along the west bank because the game trail was easier walking than the brush on the bank itself. The pines closed over her overhead in places and opened again in places and the light came down through them in slowmoving bars. She walked through the bars and out of them and into them again.

 The dust from the trail rose up in small puffs where her boots came down and settled again behind her. She stopped at noon by a bend in the creek where a flat stone made a sort of table above the water. She ate two strips of jerk beef and a piece of hard bread. She had bought in the last small settlement below the line camp and drank from the creek and refilled her canteen.

She sat for perhaps 20 minutes with her back against a pine and her legs stretched straight in front of her and her eyes closed, though she did not sleep. When she stood up again, the muscles in the backs of her thighs had gone stiff. And it took her a hundred yards of walking to loosen them. Through the afternoon, the valley narrowed.

 The ridges on either side stepped in closer to the creek. The creek ran faster where it was pinched. The timber grew heavier and older. The trail she was following disappeared and reappeared and finally disappeared for good. She went on picking her way along the west bank of the creek through willow brush and windfall and over rounded stones where the bank ran out. Twice she had to wade.

The water at both crossings came only to her shins, but the cold of it stopped her breath for a moment and burned her feet inside her boots. for a long while after she thought once about her father’s face in the forge shed on a cold morning. Red on one side from the coals and pale on the other from the door open to the yard.

 She thought once about Edna Colbeck’s kitchen and the smell of soft soap on the wooden table. Sheep both of those thoughts away because they were not useful thoughts for a person walking north in the last of the good weather with no known place to sleep. Toward evening, the sky began to shut down. Cloud came in over the western ridge in a low gray shelf.

 The wind that had been steady in the tops of the pines dropped for a while and then came back cold and out of the north and the light in the valley dulled by degrees until the stones underfoot showed only an outline. Hadtie did not stop. She knew what the shelf of cloud meant because Edna Colbeck had taught her what such a shelf meant in such a country at such a time of year.

 She knew that by midnight or perhaps sooner there would be snow. She knew that she was still walking down a strange valley without a roof over her head or a fire laid or any certain notion of where either might be found. Her feet by now were beyond hurting into a duller thing that was not exactly numb but was no longer pain.

 Her shoulders under the straps were the same. The whole of her body had settled into the plain forward motion of a person who could not afford to sit down. She went on. It was in the last thin light of that afternoon, with the first small dry flakes of snow just beginning to come slantwise on the wind, that she came around a bend in the creek and saw ahead of her in the base of the west ridge, where the ridge broke down into a wall of pale limestone, the black uneven mouth of a cave, and the creek she had been following ran straight into

it and disappeared under the stone. She stopped where she stood. She stood at the edge of the water and looked at the cave. Because a person raised on open country does not walk into a hole in a mountain without first looking at it. Because Thaddius Dalan had once told her that any dark opening in stone deserve the same slow consideration a person would give a strange dog.

 The mouth of the cave was not tall. Perhaps 15 ft from the surface of the creek to the underside of the arch. And it was wider than it was tall, perhaps 30 ft across at the water, with the creek running out of it in a smooth clear sheet over pale gravel and disappearing into it in the same way going the other direction.

 The stone was limestone, some pale gray, weathered to bone white where the water had touched it for a long time, and darker where it had not. Small toughs of dry grass grew in the cracks near the mouth. A stunted juniper leaned out from a shelf 10 ft above the water, with its trunk bent by wind, and its roots gripping the stone-like fingers.

 Above the arch, the ridge went on up for perhaps another 200 ft of timber and rock into the low gray shelf of cloud. Snow had started in earnest now. The flakes were small and dry and moved sideways more than down, and they were already beginning to catch in the wool of Hattie’s coat, and in the loose ends of the twine on the oilcloth roll of tools.

 She looked once behind her at the valley she had come down and saw nothing there but timber and the fading trail of her own bootprints in the grass. She looked once more at the mouth of the cave. She stepped forward. She did not go straight into the water. She kept to the west bank where a narrow ledge of dry gravel and packed earth ran along the inside of the arch.

 About 2 ft above the surface of the creek. The ledge was worn smooth in places as though feet had used it before her. She ducked her head under the lip of the arch. she went in. The first 10 paces were still lit from the mouth behind her. She could see that the passage did not narrow at once, but rather opened as it went, so that after a short distance, the ceiling lifted, the wall stepped back, and she found herself in a larger chamber than the opening had promised.

 The creek ran along the eastern side of this chamber over a bed of round, pale stones. The ledge she was on continued along the western side and widened into a floor of fine dry sand and gravel that showed no sign of ever having been wet. The air inside was noticeably warmer than the air outside, not warm in any true sense, but held at some steady cave temperature that did not move with the wind.

 It smelled of stone and old water and faintly of something Hadtie could not at first name. Then she recognized it. Woods smoke. Very old them though. the smell that clings to a hearth long after the last fire in it. She stood still where she was and let her eyes work. The light from the mouth reached perhaps 40 feet in and then failed.

 Beyond that the chamber went on into a darkness she could not measure. She reached into her canvas bundle without unsllinging it and worked out by feel the small tin match safe she carried. Screwed off its cap, took two matches, screwed the cap back and returned the safe to the bundle. She had no lantern.

 She had in the oilcloth roll of her father’s a tools a short candle end perhaps two inches of tallow with a black wick that Thaddius had kept in the roll for reading a hoof in a dim barn. She untied the twine, unrolled the oil cloth on the sand carefully so as not to spill the rasp and fel and clinch cutter and pull off and hoof knife out of their places, took the candle, rolled the cloth back over the tools and tied it again.

 She struck the first match on the limestone wall. It flared and caught, and she touched it to the candle wick, and the wick took the flame and steadied. The light was small, no bigger than a man’s fist. But in that chamber, it doubled the distance she could see. She cuped her left hand around the flame against the draft she could feel moving out of the cave toward the mouth.

 A slow, steady breath of air. That meant the cave went on somewhere behind her and had another opening, or a large enough interior to breathe of its own weight. She walked forward on the sand and gravel floor with the candle held out in front of her at the level of her chin. The creek murmured to her right. After perhaps 60 paces, the chamber turned to the west and the creek turned with it and had turned too.

 And when she came around the shoulder of stone, she stopped where she stood. Ahead of her, the chamber opened into a room larger than any barn she had ever been inside. The ceiling lifted into a dark she could not see the top of the walls stepped back on both sides into shadow. The floor of dry sand and gravel spread out flat and wide.

 The creek ran through the middle of it in a shallow braided course between banks of palestones, and standing back against the western wall of that great room, set upon a broad, low shelf of stone that lifted it perhaps 4t above the level of the sand was a house. She did not move for a long moment. She held the candle up and looked at it and did not go closer because a house inside a mountain was not a thing she had prepared her mind to see.

 And she wanted first to be certain her eyes were reading the shapes properly. But the shapes did not change. It was a house. It had four walls of weathered timber and plank boards, a pitched roof of split shakes, a stone chimney rising against the cave wall behind it, a plank door into the front wall, and two small square windows on either side of the door.

 with what looked in the candle light like real glass in them. It was not a large house. She judged it from where she stood to be perhaps 16 feet across the front and 20 ft deep, one story, with the ridge of the roof no more than 10 ft above the shelf it sat on. The shelf itself was natural stone, level as a floor, and someone had laid a short flight of three plank steps up to the door from the sand.

 She walked toward it slowly, holding the candle. As she came closer, details assembled themselves out of the dark. The timber of the walls was old, weathered to a soft silver gray in the places she could see, though nothing here had been weathered by sun or rain in a long time. The planks were sawn, not huneed, jointed with square cut nails whose heads showed as small dark stipples along the edges.

 The corners of the walls were mortised and pegged, not lapjointed as in a hasty cabin, but fitted in the way a careful builder fits a house he means to stand. She stopped at the foot of the plank steps and set the candle down on the top step. Because she wanted both hands free, the steps were solid under her weight, she went up them and stood in front of the door.

 The door was made of three vertical planks joined by two horizontal battens on the inside and hung on two iron strap hinges that had been forged plain. There was no lock. There was a wooden latch, the kind that lifts on the inside by a string through a small hole in the door. And the string she saw was still there, hanging out through its hole, gone gray and stiff with age, but still whole.

Above the door, carved into the headerboard with a knife or a chisel. In plain block letters about an inch high, was a name and a date. The name was Prudence Avery. The date was 1863. She stood a moment in front of the carved letters and did not touch them. Avery, her mother had been Karina Avery before she was Karina Daland.

 Her mother had been raised by a woman in a country of pines above a great cave who had been hard with her and had sent her south at 11. Her mother had said the name of that woman only once in candle light when Hattie was five. Hadtie had not held on to the name because 5-year-olds do not know which names they will need later.

She stared at the carved letters. Prudence. She said the name aloud once in a voice she barely recognized. Prudence Avery. The name did not shake anything loose in her memory because the memory was too old and too thin. But her hands shook. She had not noticed them shaking until now. She took hold of the latch string and pulled it.

 The latch lifted inside with a small dry click. She pushed the door and it opened inward on its iron hinges. With a low sound that was not a creek so much as a long slow breath, as though the house had been holding it, she picked up the candle from the step and went in. The room inside was one room running the full width and depth of the house, and it had been lived in by someone who had known how to live in a small space.

 On the wall to her left stood a wood stove, a small square cast iron box stove on four short legs, with a stove pipe rising through the ceiling. Beside the stove was a wood box built of the same plank boards as the walls, and in the wood box still was a quantity of split pine kindling, and three larger sticks of what looked like fur, dry as bone.

 On the wall to her right was a plank bed frame three feet wide and six feet long with ropes stretched across it in a lattice for a mattress and folded neatly at the foot of the frame, three wool blankets and one canvas ground cloth. Against the back wall was a small plank table with two straight chairs and a set of shelves running from the table up to the ceiling holding tin plates, tin cups, a coffee pot, a covered iron pot, a wooden spoon, a knife, and a row of glass jars with cloth and wax tops.

Above the table was a small square window glazed with a single pane of thick wavy glass that would look, she supposed, out into the darkness of the cave. The floor was plank. The boards laid tight and pegged into sleepers she could feel through her boots. There was almost no dust because the air in the cave did not carry dust as an outside room would.

 There was instead a fine pale grit near the door where feet had once tracked in cave sand and nothing else. The whole room smelled of old wood and of the faint ghost of woods smoke and under that of something dry and clean like cut hay long stored. She set the candle on the plank table. She stood in the middle of the room with her canvas bundle still on her shoulder and the oil cloth roll of tools still on the other.

 She looked at the walls and the stove and the bed and the shelves. After a while, she set the bundle down on the table beside the candle, set the oil cloth roll down beside it, sat on one of the two stray chairs, put her hands flat on the table. Outside, past the door she had left standing open, past the mouth of the cave, 400 paces down the sand.

The snow was falling now in earnest into the valley she had walked, and the wind was working itself up into the kind of night Edna Colbeck had once described as a killing night for anyone caught in it. Inside, in the room of weathered timber and plank boards under a mountain, the flame of the tallow candle stood straight up on its wick, and did not move at all, because there was no wind in that place to move it.

 She sat at the table for a long time before she got up to close the door. When she got up, she moved slowly because her legs had stiffened, and because she did not yet trust that the room was hers to move in. She crossed to the door, closed it inward on its two iron strap hinges. The latch dropped into its keeper with the same dry click it had made when she had opened it.

 The sound of the wind at the cave mouth was cut off entirely. She stood a moment with her hand on the plank and listened. She could hear the creek running low over its stones out there in the larger chamber. She could hear the small tick of the candle wick and nothing else. She had not been in a room that quiet since she had left the plank house.

 She went back to the table, stood over the candle, considered what to do first. Edna Colbeck had taught her that a person coming out of cold and into a strange shelter should sit down and take stock before she did anything at all. Because a tired woman moving fast in a strange place would break something or hurt herself or overlook the thing that mattered most.

 But she had already sat, and now what she needed was warmth. She went to the small cast iron box stove on the left wall and opened its door on its little forged hinge. Inside the firebox was a bed of pale ash, and on top of the ash, a neat handful of dry pine shavings, and a small nest of cedar bark laid ready for a match by a hand that had expected to return, and had not.

 Hadtie looked at that laid fire for a long moment. Then she took her tin match safe, lit the second of her two matches, touched it to the cedar bark, and the fire caught and ran up into the shavings, and from the shavings into the split pine kindling she added from the wood box, and the small stove began to breathe.

 She left the stove door cracked to let it draw, turned to the shelves, held the candle up, read what was there. The row of glass jars behind the tinware held when she leaned close and looked through the wavy glass dried beans of a kind she did not know. Dried corn kernels, coarse salt, rendered a large gone waxy and pale, dried apple slices dark as leather, and in the largest jar a double handful of dried jerked meat cut in strips. She counted seven jars.

 Each was sealed with a round of cloth tied down over the mouth and a poured seal of wax on top of the cloth. And each was labeled in pencil in a plain careful hand. Beans, corn, salt, lard, apple, jerked, and on the seventh only the word seed. With the year 1863 written beneath it, she stood a while longer with the candle raised and looked at the shelves.

The stove was pushing warmth into the air already. She could feel it against the backs of her hands. She took off her wedding boots, set them on the hearthstone in front of the stove to dry, and peeled off her wool socks, and hung them on a peg driven into the wall beside the stove. That seemed to have been put there for that exact purpose.

She stood on the plank floor in her bare feet, and felt the floor was warm. Then she went to the bed. She meant to unfold the top blanket and shake it out and see whether it was fit to sleep under. But when she lifted the first blanket from the neat folded stack at the foot of the bed, she saw that beneath it, tucked between the second and third blankets was a flat parcel wrapped in oil paper and tied with a length of twine.

 She set the top blanket aside, lifted the parcel out. It was about the size of a family Bible and heavier than paper alone would be. On the top of the parcel, written in pencil in the same plain careful hand as the jar labels were three words. for whoever comes.” She stood holding the parcel a moment, then carried it to the table and sat down in the straight chair and set the parcel in front of the candle and looked at it.

 Then she cut the twine with Edna Colbeck’s folding knife, unfolded the oiled paper. Inside were three things. A small cloth bag, gray canvas, tied at the neck with a leather thong, heavy in a way she recognized before she opened it. a folded sheet of paper, cream colored, sealed once long ago with a dab of red wax that had cracked and fallen away in flakes, and a smaller flat packet in brown paper.

 She untied the leather thong on the cloth bag and tipped a little of its contents into her hand. Coins came out, silver and heavy. She set them one by one on the plank table in a line, silver dollars mostly, and a few half dollars and a small handful of gold pieces the size of her thumbnail. She counted what she poured out, then counted what remained in the bag by feel.

 611 silver dollars, 14 silver half dollars, 11 small gold coins she believed to be $5 pieces. If the gold was what she thought it was, the money on the table came to something over $120. She sat and looked at the line of coins in the candle light and did not touch them for a while. Then she opened the smaller brown paper packet. Inside was a lock of dark hair tied at one end with a bit of blue thread and a small tint type photograph no larger than a playing card of a girl of perhaps three years old in a pale dress standing beside a wooden chair with one hand on its seat. The

tint type was dulled and the girl’s face was soft with age, but the eyes were clear and looking straight at whoever had held the camera. On the back of the tint type in pencil was written Karina A31F6. She held the tint type in the flat of her hand. She did not for a moment understand what she was looking at.

 Then she did understand, and she set the tint type carefully on the table beside the line of coins, and put her hand over her mouth and sat that way while the stove ticked in the corner, and the candle flame stood up straight. Karina, her mother’s name had been Karina. Karina Doand, born Karina Avery, who had died of lung fever in the winter had he turned six.

 Thaddius Dalan had never said much about where Karina had come from before he had married her her. He had said only that she had come out from the east with a frighter’s wife after her people were gone, and that she had been raised for a while by an ant in a country of pines above a big cave, and that the aunt had been a hard woman who worked her hard and did not soften with her.

 He had said the aunt’s name once, and Hadtie, who was five, had not remembered it. But she was reading it now, carved above a door, written in pencil at the top of a letter she had not yet opened. Prudence. Prudence Avery. She lowered her hand from her mouth, picked up the folded sheet of paper. The wax seal was already broken by age.

 She unfolded it, laid it flat on the table beside the tint type, and read it by the candle. The letter was not long. To whoever comes into this house and reads this, my name is Prudence Avery. I am 59 years old this year. I built this house with my brother Ephraim Avery in the summer of 1863 inside this cave because he was sick and could not bear the sun or the wind any longer and because I would not put him in a town to die among strangers.

 He died in the winter of that same year and is buried under a car of white stones at the back of this chamber where the wall curves west. I have lived on here alone for these years because I did not know where else to go and because the cave kept me warm and the creek gave me water and the country outside gave me what small game and firewood I needed.

 I have kept a small garden at the mouth in summer and I have sold cured hides once a year at a settlement 2 days east and this is where my money has come from and where it has gone back to. I am writing this letter now because I have felt the last two winters heavier in me than the winters before.

 And I think I will not see another spring past this one. And I would not have this house stand empty and this money go into the stone for no purpose. I raised a girl in this country before I came here. She was my sister’s child and her name was Karina. She was 3 years old when she came to me and 11 when I sent her south with a freigher’s wife because I was hard with her and knew it and knew a hard woman was not what a growing girl needed.

 I never heard where she went or whether she lived to grow. I have thought of her every day of my life since. If you are a woman, come alone into this cave out of some trouble of your own. I ask you to take this house and what is in it and use it as you have need. The money in the bag is $122 and some. The jars on the shelf will keep another year at least.

 The stove draws well if you crack the door for the first minute. The seed in the last jar is corn and beans and squash and turnip and will grow at the mouth of the cave in the flat above the creek where I have broken ground already. There is a good axe in a niche behind the stove and a twoman saw hung on pegs behind the bed.

 That one person can pull alone if she is patient. I hope whoever finds this is a person who needed to find it. I hope she is warm tonight. I hope she stays. Prudence Avery September the 14th 1871. She read the letter through once. Then she read it through a second time slowly. Then she folded it once along its old crease and laid it on the table beside the tint type of a girl of 3 years old named Karina.

 She sat in the straight chair with her bare feet on the warm plank floor and her hands flat on the table on either side of the letter. For the first time since she had ridden away from Owen Brennick’s homegate more than a week earlier. For the first time in truth, since she had stood at her father’s grave under the cottonwood by the corral almost 2 years before that, Hattie Dolan put her face down onto her forearms on the plank table and cried without any sound at all, while the stove ticked in the corner, and the candle flame stood straight up on its wick, and the snow

fell in the valley outside the mountain she could no longer hear. The world had been telling her for 23 years that she was too big, too plain, too rough, too much of everything a woman was not supposed to be too much of. The world had turned her out of a home her father built.

 Out of an outfit she had worked 11 months for, out of every gate she had written up to since. The world had called her big Hattie, an ox girl, and bull calf in a dress. And she had let it because Thaddius had said to let it slide off. But no one in 23 years of the world had ever written her a letter that began.

 If you are a woman come alone into this cave out of some trouble of your own. No one had ever left her a jar of seed with a year written under it in pencil. No one had ever built her a house and laid a fire ready and gone away and left the latch string hanging out through a hole in the door for 60 years until now. until a woman who had been dead 25 years, who had been her own mother’s aunt, whose name her father had said once when Hattie was five, and she had not held on to it, had built the room she was crying in, and meant it for her. She slept that first night on the

rope bed under two of the three wool blankets, with the third folded beneath her as a mattress against the ropes. She woke once in the deep dark to feed the stove, and once more before daylight to feed it again. When full morning came, the small square window above the table showed nothing but the pale limestone of the cave wall on the other side of the glass, and she understood there would be no daylight in the room ever, only fire light and candle light.

 And whatever thin gray came in through the open door from the mouth of the cave 400 paces down the sand. She lay still under the blankets for perhaps a quarter of an hour and made a list in her head of the work in front of her in the order Edna Colbeck would have made it. Wood, water, food, tools, ground, and only after all of that the buried man at the back of the chamber and the woman who had left the letter. She began with wood.

 She went behind the stove and found in the niche prudence Avery had written of a single bit felling axe with the hickory handle worn smooth in two places by two different grips. The blade oiled and wrapped in a scrap of sacking and a small file and a wet stone laid beside it. She took the axe down, touched the edge with her thumb, found it still keen.

 Behind the bed on two forged iron pegs driven into the plank wall, hung a two-man crosscut saw about 5 ft long, one handle removable so a single person could pull it through a small log by bracing the far end in a notch stump. She carried the axe out through the plank door and down the three plank steps to the sand. By the light of the cave mouth, she found at the edge of the flat, a stack of split firewood laid up in a low crib against the wall, three feet high and perhaps 8 feet long, mostly lodgepole and fur, dry, gray, and light in the hand. Prudence had cut and

split it in some earlier summer. It had waited under the mountain for six winters or more. She did not touch that stack. She carried the axe out through the cave mouth into the snowlit morning of the valley, found a windfallen fur on the soap behind the flat above the creek, limmed it, and then bucked it into rounds with the crosscut saw she went back for.

 By the middle of the afternoon, she had eight rounds of fire. By dusk, she had split four of the rounds into stovewood on a flat stump. Using the axe and a wooden wedge she made on the spot from a piece of dry hardwood limb, she carried the split wood in her arms into the cave in six trips. Because her arms were the size of a full grown man’s arms, she laid it in a new crib against Prudence’s old crib, so that her wood and Prudence’s wood stood together against the shelf.

 The next day, she carried water and took stock of food. She broke the wax seal on the jar labeled jerked, took out one strip, smelled it, bit off a corner, found it clean and dry and good, and recealed the jar with a fresh round of cloth and a poured seal of the melted end of her own tallow candle from her canvas bundle she added to the shelf, the small paper of salt she had carried up from below, a half pound of flour, and a paper of coffee she had bought at the last settlement.

 She said her swather’s tools rolled in oil cloth on the plank table where she could see them. Edna Colbeck’s folding knife she kept in her right skirt pocket as always. Karina Dalan’s small brown Bible she set on the shelf beside the coffee pot. And beside the Bible she set the tint type of the girl of three named Karina and the lock of dark hair tied with blue thread so that the two objects stood together on the same shelf.

 What her mother had left her and what her mother had been given at three by a woman who could not keep her. On the third day, she went to the back of the chamber where the wall curved west and she found the Kairen of white stones. It was a low, careful mound about four feet long and 2 ft wide built of pale limestone rounds gathered off the cave floor. No headstone, no marker.

 She stood at the foot of the Kairen with her hands folded and said the words Thaddius Dalan had read at Karina Dalan’s grave. and then at his own mothers. She said them for Ephraim Avery, who had helped build the room where she now slept, and had not lived through the winter of the year he built it.

 She walked once around the Kairen, gathered four white stones that had rolled a little away from the mound over the years, set them back into their places, and she left the Kairen as she had found it, and went back to the house. She did not see any human being for the first 11 days. On the 12th day, in the middle of a bright cold morning, she was cutting shakes from a straight grain cedar log she had dragged down from the so slope behind the flat.

 Using her father’s hoof knife as a fro, for lack of a proper fro, when she heard from somewhere down the creek valley below the cave mouth the ring of a shaw hoof on stone, she set down the hoof knife and the wooden mallet she had cut for herself, stood up, walked to the edge of the flat where she could see down the creek.

 Coming up the West Bank on foot, leading a pack mule loaded with two canvas paniers, was a man in an oil skininned coat and a broad-brimmed hat, perhaps 60 years old, walking slowly, stopping every few paces to look at the ground. He saw her before she called out. He stopped, raised one hand, palm forward, and waited.

 Hadtie raised her hand in the same way. He came up the last 20 paces slowly, and when he reached the edge of the flat, he took off his hat. Ma’am, sir. Didn’t expect anyone up here, nor did I until I got here. He looked at her a long moment, not at her size, which most men looked at first, but at her hands, and then at her face. Name’s Jeremiah Tate, trapper.

Been running a line of martin and beaver sets along the west branch of Pine Hollow Creek for going on 30 winters. Harriet Doan, he nodded slowly. I knew Prudence Avery. She did not answer that. brought her a sack of coffee and a paper of needles once a year for the last 12 years of her life.

 She still did not answer. Found her in the spring of 1873 sitting against the south wall of the cave mouth in the sun, hands folded in her lap, chin against her chest, buried her myself. Second Karen back where the wall curves next to her brothers. Hadtie put her hand over her mouth. Jeremiah Tate watched her a moment.

 I’ve come by once a year every fall since to see whether anyone had found the house. How many years? 25 now. And no one. No one until you. She let her hand drop. He looked past her at the cave mouth and at the wood crib and at the beginnings of the cedar shakes on the flat where she had been working.

 You mean to stay? I mean to stay. You know how to stay? Yes. Show me your hands. She held them out. He looked at them, turned them over, looked at the palms, the calluses at the base of each finger, the old scar across the back of the right one from a rasp that had slipped when she was 14. He nodded once and gave them back.

 You’ll do, she almost smiled. Coffee? Yes, sir. He unloaded a sack of coffee from one of the piurs and a paper of needles and set them on the sand at the foot of the plank steps, just as he had done for Prudence Avery once a year for 12 years. I’ll come by in the spring. Thank you. You’ll want to know one thing before I go.

 What? There’s people down valley who remember Prudence. Not many, but some. Word gets around a country like this. Slow, but it gets. All right. Man will come up here with a horse before long. Or a mule with a bad foot or a piece of harness that needs mending. Just so you know. All right. You charge fair. Take coin if they’ve got it.

 Take goods if they haven’t. Don’t underell yourself. Prudence never did. No sir. He touched the brim of his hat, turned, led the pack mule back down the creek, and was gone around the first bend. She stood on the flat with the sack of coffee at her feet and looked at the empty trail for a long time.

 The first man came up the creek a week later. His name was Anel Dow, 57 years old, a wolfer and sometime meat hunter. He had a bay gelding that had thrown a shoe on the near hind three weeks earlier and gone tender on the frog had he shaw the begelding that afternoon on the flat above the creek in the pale winter sun with the anvil she had carried out from the cave for the light prudence’s small anvil on its oak stump which she had found in a low tin roofed shed at the south end of the flat. The work took her most of 3 hours.

Anel Dow watched from the edge of the flat said nothing. When she was done, he ran his hand down each leg himself, picked each foot up, set it down, stood looking at the horse for perhaps a full minute. That’s good work. Thank you. Better than the smith down at the settlement does. He’s old. He’s lazy. That, too. Anel Dow almost smiled.

 He paid her one silver dollar and a bundle wrapped in oil cloth that turned out to hold 4 lb of dried elk meat, a small sack of coarse ground cornmeal, and a tin of Lucifer matches. I’ll tell others. All right. Some of them won’t come on account of you being a woman alone. That’s their loss. Yes, ma’am. It is.

 He touched his hat, led the bay geling down the creek, and was gone. He told others. In the last week of February, a man named Jonas Aldridge came up the creek with a marin that had been favoring her off for since Christmas. Jonas Aldridge was 39. A small holder from a hollow two ridges east. Then as a fence rail, with a wife and four children, had he trimmed the mayor’s foot, found and drew a splinter of pine sunk two knuckles deep in the frog that Jonas had missed.

 Packed the wound with rendered lard and a handful of clean cave sand mixed with wood ash. By Edna Colbeck’s recipe, Jonas had brought no coin. He had brought a two-gon croc of sauerkraut, a small canvas sack of dried morelss, and the promise of two days labor whenever Hattie called for it. That’s good. Thank you, ma’am. Not ma’am. Hadtie.

 Thank you, Hattie. Your wife’s name, Susanna. Bring her up sometime. I will. And he did. In the last week of March, on a stout gray mare with a packor behind her and Jeremiah Tate riding ahead to show her the way, Deline Kimell came up. Delphine Kimell was 51 years old, widowed twice, mother of three grown sons, all gone to the mines, ran the boarding house at the settlement two days east.

 She was the last person in that settlement who had seen Prudence alive. She brought a bolt of unbleached muslin for curtains and mattress ticking, four pounds of raw cotton batting, a small cast iron kettle, a package of garden seed, carrot, lettuce, radish, and a paper of onion sets and folded flat inside the bolt of muslin a shaw fine wool black that had belonged to Prudence Avery and had been left in Delphine Kimell’s keeping.

 The last time Prudence had come down to the settlement in the fall of 1872, Delphine did not present the Shawl with ceremony. She unfolded the muslin on the plank table, took the shawl out, set it in Hattie’s hands. It has waited long enough. Deline Prudence would rather it were worn. I can’t. You can. I’m too big for it. I’m too big for everything.

Delphi looked at her a long moment. That shawl was cut for a woman 5′ 10 and square at the shoulder. Prudence was as tall as you are and nearly as broad. Put it on, Hattie. Put it on. It fit her as though it had been cut for her. Delphine stayed two nights in the cave house. She slept in Hadtie’s bed, and Hattie slept on a pallet of blankets on the plank floor beside the stove, and neither woman remarked on the arrangement.

During the two days that Fien was there, she and Hattie sewed together a pair of muslin curtains for the two small windows and a mattress bag stuffed with the cotton batting for the rope bed. They walked the flat above the creek together, and Deline pointed out where Prudence had put her onions. She said Prudence had been a hard woman in some ways, and a soft one in others, and that both had been earned.

 She said the girl Prudence had raised and sent away had come to her mind more than once over the years, because Prudence had spoken of her only twice, and once had cried, and Prudence had not been a crier. Had he showed Delphi the tint type of Karina and the lock of dark hair. Delphine looked at the tint type for a long time.

The hair looks to be Prudence’s color as a young woman, which means it was likely her own and not the girls. Prudence kept it in the packet the way a mother keeps such a thing of her own for a daughter she has lost. Had had not thought of it that way and did not answer. Before she rode back down, Delphine told her that if she meant to keep on frier work, she should let it be known.

 Men will come up the creek in the summer. You charge a fair wage. Yes. And one more thing. Yes. The country needs a woman in Pine Hollow again. Prudence held it for a long time by being here. You’ll find if you stay that people will begin to steer by you the way they steered by her. Delphi mounted the grey marare, rode down the creek with Jeremiah Tate in the packor and had [clears throat] stood on the flat in the black shaw and watched them go through April people came.

 Jonas Aldridge brought Susanna Aldridge up on a bright morning and Susanna brought two loaves of bread wrapped in a cloth and a jar of last summer’s wild plum preserves. She stood in the doorway of the cave house with her hand on the jam for a full minute, for she came in because she had heard of the house all her married life and had not believed it until she saw the plank steps and the door with the name carved above it.

Susanna Aldridge was 34, red-haired, plain spoken. [snorts] She embraced Hattie at the door without asking, which was the only embrace Hattie had received from another woman since Edna Colbeck had died 6 years before. Hattie stood very still for a moment and then closed her arms around Susanna slowly as though remembering how you are so much taller than I thought. Everyone says so.

 I like it. It’s the first thing I like about you. Hadtie almost laughed, which was the first laugh out of her since she had left the Bren place. A man named Ezra Whitlock, who was 71 and had known Prudence in her early years in the cave, walked up with a grandson of 15 to see the house one last time before he died.

He sat at the plank table for an hour and told Hattie two stories about prudence that Hadtie wrote down that night. On the inside back cover of Karina’s Bible, Ezra Whitlock’s grandson, whose name was Wilder Whitlock, chopped a full afternoon’s worth of firewood and would not accept coin.

 Jonas Aldridge and a second man from his hollow, a widowerower of 45 named Everett Yates, who kept sheep, came up on the 18th of April, and gave Hattie the two days labor Jonas had promised. In those two days, the three of them turned the flat above the creek with Prudence’s wooden handplow, pulled by Ever Yates’s pair of small mules, broke the crusted turf into workable ground, and laid string lines for four rows of corn, six rows of beans, three hills of squash, and two rows of turnips.

 Hattie planted the seed from Prudence’s jar with her own hands, one seed at a time, spaced by the length of her palm and covered with the back of the hoe. When she came in at dusk, with her hands stained black to the wrists, there was a pot of bean and mutton soup on the stove that Ever Yates had put together.

 The two men and Hattie ate together at the plank table without much talking. By the end of April, people in the country between the line camp and the settlement had begun to say Hadtie’s place. She was 23 years old still until an afternoon in the second week of May when everything changed. The snow had been off the trail for 2 weeks.

 The dogwoods along the creek were putting out white. The corn Hattie had planted was showing in the rose in a thin green line. She was working the anvil on the sand, straightening a piece of tin roofing when she heard from down the creek a sound she did not at first recognize. It was the sound of a woman breathing hard and walking wrong.

 Had he set down the tin snips, walked to the edge of the flat, looked. Coming up the west bank of the creek on foot. Alone in the failing afternoon light was a girl or a young woman, 19 years old at most, small, thin, wearing a torn brown dress that had once been better than it was now.

 6 months gone with child, which showed under the thin dress, she was carrying nothing. She was walking on one boot and one foot wrapped in a bloody rag. Her right eye was swollen shut. Her lip was split. Her cheek was purple from the temple to the jaw. She saw Hattie. She stopped. She put one hand against the pine tree at the edge of the flat and she stood there swaying, looking up.

Are you Hadtie? I am. They said down at the settlement. There’s a woman in a cave who takes people in. Who said a woman named Deline? I asked. I walked two days on that foot. On that foot, come up. I can’t. Then I’ll come down. Hadtie walked down the flat to where the girl stood by the pine. She was a head and a half taller than the girl, and she came up slow so as not to make her flinch.

 What is your name, Adelia? Adilia, what? Adelia Marsh. Who did that to your face? The girl did not answer. Adelia. My husband. How old are you? 19. When’s the baby due? July. Come up to the house. I can’t pay. I did not ask you for pay. I heard about the cave from Deline. She said, “If a woman came in trouble, you would.” Deline was right.

Come up to the house. I’m afraid of what? That I’ll get up there and you’ll see me in the light and you’ll change your mind. Hadtie looked at her a long moment. Then she said in the voice her father had once used for horses that needed studying. “Adilia, look at me.” The girl looked, “I’ve been called every ugly name a woman can be called for 23 years.

 For being the wrong size, for being too tall, for being too heavy, for having a frier’s hands, for everything. I know what it is to walk up to a door and be afraid the person there will see you in the light and change their mind.” The girl started to cry. I am not going to change my mind. Give me your arm. Adilia gave her her arm.

 Hattie put an arm around the girl’s shoulders, took the weight of her off the bad foot, and walked her slowly up the flat, up the three plank steps, through the plank door, into the room that Prudence Avery had built in the summer of 1863 for whoever came. Hadtie shut the door behind them. She sat Adilia on one of the two straight chairs, unwrapped the foot.

 It was cut across the ball in the arch, bleeding still, not deep enough to need stitching, deep enough to need cleaning. She heated water, washed the foot with li soap, put a pus of rendered lard and cave sand mixed with wood ash by Edna Colbeck’s recipe, wrapped it in a strip torn from her second dress. The girl sat with her hands in her lap and her one good eye on Hadtie’s face and did not say anything.

 When the foot was wrapped, Hattie got a tin cup down from the shelf, poured water into it from the kettle, handed it to the girl. Drink, Adilia drank. When did you last eat? 2 days. Hadtie put the covered iron pot on the stove, warmed the last of the bean soup Everett Yates had left in it, filled a tin bowl.

 You do not have to earn this. I do. You do not eat. Adilia ate. Hattie sat in the other straight chair and watched her eat and did not speak. When the bowl was empty, Hattie filled it again. Without asking, Adilia ate the second bowl slower. And then she put her spoon down and she said, looking at the plank table, he said he would kill me if I ran again.

 He said he would kill me and the baby and he would burn the house down and say it was an accident. Where is he now? Settlement 2 days east when I left. I do not know if he is still there. What is his name? Eldridge. Eldridge Marsh. Does he know you came up the creek? He does not know about the cave. He does not know there is anything up here.

 Delphi did not tell. Tell tell him, she told me in her kitchen. When I came into the back door, she gave me bread and a boot for the foot I did not have a boot for. And she pointed north and she said, “Two days up the creek. There is a woman in a cave. She takes people in.” And you walked? I walked. Hadtie was quiet a long moment.

Then she said, “Adilia, yes. This is my house. This house was left to me by a woman I never met who wrote a letter that began, “If you are a woman, come alone into this cave out of some trouble of your own.” I know, Deline told me about the letter. So, you are the second woman to walk into this cave out of trouble.

 In the letter’s meaning, I don’t know what to say to that. You do not have to say anything. You are staying until the baby comes and for as long after as you need to. Adelia put her head down on her arms on the plank table and she cried and had led her. She stayed through May through June. The corn came up, the beans climbed the willow poles.

 The squash threw out its broad rough leaves. The turnips thickened. Hadtie shot horses at the anvil on the sand and Adilia sat in the sun on the flat with her hands on her belly and gained back the weight she had lost on the walk and her hair began to shine again. and the bruises on her face went from purple to yellow to gone. At night in the cave house, Hattie slept on the pallet by the stove, and Adilia slept in the rope bed because Hattie insisted, and Adilia had learned by then not to argue with Hattie on such matters. Susanna Aldridge came up in

June and in July and brought clean cloth and small clothes and a wooden cradle her husband had made 20 years before for their first child. Delphine Kimble came up in July and stayed a week. Karina Avery Marsh was born in the cave house on the 3rd of August 1899. Susanna Aldridge was the midwife. Delphine Kimble held Adelia’s hand.

 Hadtie fed the stove and boiled water. And when the baby came out into Susanna Aldridge’s hands, and Susanna wrapped her in a piece of the muslin Delphine had brought and handed her to Adilia, Adilia looked at Hattie across the small room. What was your mother’s name? Karina. Karina is a good name. It is a good name.

 Then that is her name. Hadtie had to turn her face to the wall so that the two women would not see her cry. Because she had promised Edna Colbeck long ago that she would do her crying alone. But she had learned since the letter that some crying was not alone crying. Eldridge Marsh came up the creek in the first week of September.

 He came on a rented horse from the settlement and he came with a pistol at his belt which he made sure was visible. He rode up to the edge of the flat above the creek at midafter afternoon. And he saw [clears throat] Hattie standing at the anvil in the sun with a horse tied to a juniper. And he saw Adillia sitting on the plank steps with a baby in her arms.

 He stopped his horse. He looked at Hadtie because he had not expected her. He had expected some old woman in a cave. He had not expected 6 ft of woman with shoulders like a plow horse and a frier’s hammer in her right hand. That’s my wife. That is her name. I have come to take her back. You have not. I have papers. You have nothing. I have a pistol. I see it.

He looked around the flat as though to gauge whether there was anyone else. There was no one else, which was what he had counted on, except Hattie did not move from the anvil. She did not raise the hammer. She did not lower it. She simply held it in the hand that had shot six horses that week, and she looked at him.

 The way Thaddius Dalan had once looked at a green horse, deciding whether it needed steadying or breaking. Adilia, go inside. Take the baby. Hattie, go inside. Adilia stood, went up the steps, went in through the plank door, closed it behind her. Hadtie stepped away from the anvil. She walked out onto the sand of the flat. She stopped 10 ft from Eldridge Marsh’s horse.

 She was taller than he was on his horse when she stood square. Get down. I will not get down or ride out. Those are your choices. You do not tell me my choices. I do because this is my ground and you are on it without invitation. That’s my wife. Adilia is not going anywhere with you. Not today. Not any day. I’ll get the sheriff. You do that.

I’ll be back. You do that, too. Eldridge Marsh’s hand went to his belt. Hadtie did not move. She said very quietly. You draw that pistol and I will put this hammer through your skull before your hand clears the leather. I have been swinging this hammer for 14 years on things that fight back. Now ride out.

 He looked at her at her hand on the hammer at the size of her at the flat above the creek and the cave mouth behind her and the smoke rising thin from the chimney inside the mountain. He turned his horse. He rode down the creek and he was gone. Hattie stood on the sand for a long time.

 The hammer was heavy in her hand. She had never actually hit a man with it, and she had not been sure until the moment she said it whether she would. She knew now she would have. She went into the house. Adilia was sitting on the rope bed with the baby against her shoulder, not crying, only holding the baby very tight. Had he set the hammer down on the plank table.

 He’s gone. He’ll come back. He’ll come back with the sheriff. I heard him. Then we send for one first. Adilia looked up. Delphine sent a rider east the next morning to a settlement three days off where the county sheriff lived, a man named Barnaby Ren, who was known through Pine Hollow Country as a man who did his job and did it the same for a poor man as a rich one.

 Barnaby Ren wrote up to the cave the following week. He was 50 years old, gray in the beard, slow of speech, and thorough. He listened to Adilia in the plank house with Susanna Aldridge and Delphine Kimell in the room. He read [clears throat] the letter Prudence had left. He looked at the tint type of Karina. He looked at the bruises, which were yellow now, but still readable.

 He asked Adilia to lift her sleeves. She lifted them. He looked at the old scars on both forearms. That had not come from any walk. He nodded once, he said in a slow, careful voice. Miss Marsh, may I ask where you and your husband came from? Nebraska. What part? Northplat. What was his work there? He worked at the yards. He had a trouble.

He killed his brother. The room went still. You said he killed his brother in a fight over money two years ago. He said it was an accident. The court said manslaughter. He served 18 months. He came out. He said we were leaving. He brought me here. Miss Marsh, are you certain? I was there. I saw it. Barnaby Ren looked at Hattie, at Deline, at Susanna at Adilia.

 Then he said, “There is a warrant out of North Plat on Eldridge Marsh from last October. parole violation and a second charge. I was made aware of it three months ago because a bulletin came through my office. I did not know he was in this county until now. Adilia put her face in her hands. You did not do anything wrong in coming here. I ran.

 You saved yourself and your child. That is what you did. Barnaby Ren rode down the creek the next morning. 3 days later, he came back with two deputies and they rode to the settlement and they found Eldridge Marsh at the boarding house where he had told the owner he was waiting for his wife to come home.

 He reached for the pistol. The deputies had him on the ground before he could raise it. He was taken back to Nebraska in Irons the following week. Adilia stayed in the cave house. Karina Avery Marsh grew up in the flat above the creek. And in the room prudence Avery had built, she learned to walk on the sand of the great chamber.

 Holding on to the plank steps for balance, she learned to read from Karina Dalan’s small brown Bible, which Hadtie kept on the shelf beside the coffee pot. She learned to shoe a horse at the anvil on the sand, standing on a wooden box Hattie built for her when she was tall enough to reach the hoof. She was seven when she asked Hattie whose picture was on the shelf beside the Bible of the girl in the pale dress.

That was my mother. Her name was Karina, like yours. Was she a frier, too? No. Her aunt built this house long before I was born, and her aunt raised her here until she was your age and a little older. And then, and then her aunt sent her south because her aunt thought she was too hard with her.

 Was she? I do not know. I never met her. But she left me this house and this shawl and a jar of seed with a year on it and a letter that began. If you are a woman, come alone into this cave out of some trouble of your own. And you were. I And my mama was. Your mama was. And now no one is. No one is.

 Karina Avery Marsh looked at the tint type for a long time. Someone will be someday, won’t they? Maybe. Then we’ll leave the door open. Hadtie looked at her. 25 years passed. The house grew. Everett Yates and Hadtie added two rooms of plank boards along the shelf. Cut from Cedar. Everett hauled up the creek on his mules.

 In the summers, when the anvil work was slow, Adelia never married again. She kept the garden. She learned to shoe alongside Hattie. Not as well, but well enough. She read every book Deline Kimble sent up the creek, and there were many. Deline died in 1914, sitting in her chair at the boarding house, reading a letter from Hattie that had reached her that morning.

 The letter said, “The corn is in. Karina is 15. She sends her love. Jeremiah Tate died in 1917. Trapping alone on his west branch. Found in the spring by his nephew. Susanna and Jonas Aldridge grew old on their place. Their children scattered. But two came back. Karina Avery Marsh grew tall. Not as tall as Hattie, but tall enough and brought at the shoulder.

 And her hands by 20 were frier’s hands. She married a small holder from a hollow two ridges east. His name was Cashes Aldridge, Jonas and Susanna’s youngest boy. And they built a plank house together half a mile down the creek from the cave so that Karina could walk up to see Hattie every morning. And Adilia lived with them there and rocked Karina’s children, of whom there were three by the time this story sits down.

 On an afternoon in November of 1923, Hattie was 48. Her hair was gray at the temples and silver in one streak above her right ear. She was still tall, still broad, still strong enough to shoe a horse alone, though she took her time now. She was standing at the anvil on the sand of the flat above the creek, fitting a hind shoe on Everett Yates’s oldest mule, who was now nearly 30 and half blind, and whose feet she had trimmed every 8 weeks for 25 years.

 Karina Avery Marsh Aldridge was working the other hind, 24 years old, in a canvas apron with her mother’s hair and her grandmother’s eyes and Hattie’s hands. The first snow of the winter had started to come sideways down the valley. Hadtie heard the sound before Karina did. A footfall on the sand of the great chamber coming towards the mouth.

 Not one of Susanna’s, not one of Adilia’s, not one anyone in Pine Hollow made. She set down the driving hammer, walked to the mouth of the cave. Standing in the pale outside light, at the edge of the gray chamber was a young woman, perhaps 20 years old, tall, thin, but broad at the shoulder, a canvas bundle over one shoulder, boots worn through at the toes.

 The right side of her face was covered by a red birthark that ran from her hairline to her jaw jaw. She had one hand on the wall of the cave as though she was not sure it was safe to come further in. She looked up at Hattie. She did not say anything. Hadtie looked at her a long moment. Then she said quietly in the same voice prudence Avery had once used in a letter written by Candlelight in September of 1871, “Come in, child.

 It is warm inside. I have been waiting.” The young woman put her hand over her mouth. She stepped forward onto the sand, and Hattie Dolan stepped aside from the mouth to let her pass behind her in the flat above the creek the corn was in for the winter. And a candle burned in the westernmost window of the plank house Prudence Avery had built in the summer of 1863.

For whoever should come and whoever should come kept