The Hands Laughed at Her 20 Barrels of Sour Cabbage — By March, They Needed What She Saved

Katarina Oberh Holtz climbed down from the freight wagon at Harrow’s winter camp with 20 oak barrels roped behind her and 30 men walked out into the snow to see what the new cook had spent her wages on. Somebody pried a lid. Cabbage, he said. 20 barrels of rotten cabbage. The laugh went down the line of them like wind through dry grass.

 The smell had come up out of the open barrel, sharp and sour, and it hung in the cold over the wagon bed. Katarina stood in the snow with her carpet bag and did not laugh. Behind the freight wagon, the high-sided trade wagon had pulled in. A heavy man in a buffalo coat climbed down from it, gray beard, trimmed square, gold chain across his vest.

 He bent over the open barrel and made a face and the men roared. Then he knocked the lid off a crate on his own tailboard and held up a tin. So the low sun caught the painted peach on the label. “Peaches,” he said. “Put up in heavy syrup in Baltimore. Instead of that Dutch rot, boys, you can have peaches with your supper.

” They crowded his tailboard with their hands out. Katarina walked to the open barrel, took the lid from the logger with the pry bar, and pressed it back down with both palms. Her hands were shaking. She kept them flat on the wood until they stopped. Miss Oberolds. A tall, lean man in a sheepkin coat had come down from the log house, frost in his beard.

 Eli Harrow, who had sent for her. His eyes went over the barrels and then over her. I hired a cook, he said. Not a pickle works. One barrel can stay. The rest go back on that wagon in the morning. At your cost. The freighter on the high seat called down that he pulled out at first light and would not wait. Katarina looked at the sky already orange over the pines, the cold coming down out of it onto the back of her neck. One night. She had one night.

“Where is your kitchen?” she said. The man laughed again, though not so loud this time. The man with the gold chain did not laugh. He watched her go toward the cookhouse with a tin of peaches in his hand, turning it over and over, and his mouth under the square beard had gone thin.

 The cookhouse stood long and low, built of peeled logs with a stove pipe through the roof and a lean-to- sto. She put her shoulder to it and it gave. And she stood in the doorway breathing in the smell of cold grease and old coffee and mice. There was a range at the far end, a big black six-hole range with the fire out. There were two long tables of split logs with benches down each side.

 Tin plates hung on nails in rows. The windows were small and the light through them was the color of weak tea. She went through to the store room and lit the lamp that hung there, and she stood still with the match burning down toward her fingers. The store room was full. Salt pork in barrels, the brine gone yellow at the top.

 Flour in 50 lb sacks stacked to the rafters, beans, coffee, molasses in a keg with a wooden spigot, hard tack in crates, a side of bacon on a hook, and another. and another. And along one whole wall, shelf overshelf, tins, peaches, tomatoes, condensed milk, oysters, every one of them with that same name on a paper slip pasted to the shelf edge. Petty bone.

 There was not one potato, not one onion, not one apple, not one turnip, not one thing in the whole room that had grown in the ground that year and still remembered it. She blew out the match before it burned her. She stood in the lamp light among all that food and felt her heart pounding under her apron, slow and hard, like somebody knocking at a door a long way off.

It was the second week of October. The men outside were big, red-faced men, loud with health, and they would be loud with health all the way to Christmas. She had seen what came after Christmas on a larder like this one. She had seen it on her uncle’s timber crew when she was 20. She had seen it once more.

 A boarding house on the Missouri where the cook was a drinking man and the seller was all salt meat. The legs went first, then the gums. She took off her coat. She hung it on a nail. Then she went out to the yard where the barrels still stood roped on the freight wagon and she found the one with the pride lid.

 “I need this carried in,” she said to the nearest man. He was an old man, short and thick, with a gray mustache and a face like a walnut. He had kept out of the laughing. He had stood at the back with his hands in his pockets and watched. “That’s the one you get to keep,” he said. That’s the one I get to cook.

 He looked at her a long moment. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and set his shoulder to the barrel and walked it off the tailboard, rolling it on its rim the way a man does who has rolled a thousand barrels. He was 61, he told her later. And he had been rolling barrels since he was a boy on the Clyde. he said when the barrel was inside by the range.

will do. Katarina. I said I heard. She built up the fire first. She split kindling from a pine round with the camp hatchet and fed the range until the iron ticked, and the kettle on the back began to hiss. She found the bacon and cut a pound of it into squares and set them to sizzle in the biggest spider she could find.

 And the smell of it went out through the cracks in the walls. And one by one, the men began to drift toward the cookhouse, pretending they had business near it. She pried the lid off the barrel. She pushed back the plank and the round stone she had packed on top in the hotel yard in Mile City. The brine came up clear and gold around her fingers, cold enough to ache.

 under it. The crout was pale and fine and packed down hard, and she forked out a great heap of it, and squeezed it in her fists over the barrel and dropped it into the bacon grease, where it spat and steamed. Carowway from the tin in her carpet bag, a spoon of brown sugar, a grated apple, the last one she had from her own pocket.

She turned it over and over with the fork until the edges went brown and sweet and the whole cookhouse smelled of it. Then she made dumplings, flour and lard and salt and water from the kettle rolled between her palms and dropped onto the top of the kraut and lid it down to steam and bread because bread was what they would judge her by.

She had brought a croc of sponge wrapped in a quilt, and it had survived the freight road, and she set the loaves to rise on the warming shelf, and prayed. The men came in at dark. They came in stamping snow off their boots and blowing on their hands, and they sat down at the long tables and looked at the iron pot in the middle, and did not reach for it.

 The tall logger who had pried the lid was the loudest of them. His name was Neils and he was 34 and he had a beard like a bail of yellow hay. “I’ll have the salt pork,” he said, “boiled the way Gared’s cook did it.” The man he meant sat at the head of the far table. He was a broad squareheaded Irishman of 47 with a clay pipe in his breast pocket, and he was the foreman she learned, and the old cook had been his cousin. There’s pork, Katarina said.

It’s in there under the cabbage. Then I’ll go hungry, said Gity, and pushed his plate away from him with one finger.  reached past him and pulled the pot over. He filled his plate. He sat down with it. The whole room watched him lift the first forkful, and she stood by the range with her hands in her apron and felt them trembling.

 and she could not have told you then whether she was more afraid he would spit it out or that he would not. He chewed. He swallowed. He took another forkful bigger with a dumpling on it. My mother’s people put carowway in theirs, he said to nobody. In paisley, he cleaned the plate. Then he got up and filled it again.

 The laughter that went round the room then was a different kind. It was quieter. It had a question in it. Nobody else touched the pot. They ate hardac and salt pork she boiled for them. And they ate every crumb of her bread and asked for more. And when they had gone out into the dark, she stood at the long table and looked at the iron pot.

had eaten two plates. The rest of it had gone cold, pale and shining in its grease. She had one night and one old man. She was scraping the pot into a croc when the door opened and the cold came in and Eli Harrow came in with it. He shut the door behind him and stood by it with his hat in his hands.

 He was 44, she guessed then and was later right. There were lines at the corners of his eyes from squinting at snow and gray in his beard that the frost had hidden in the yard. “Neils tells me your bread is good,” he said. Neils is right. He says the cabbage smells like a dead man’s boots. Neils is wrong about that.

 She wiped her hands. Sit down, Mr. Harrow. He looked at the bench as if he had never seen it. Then he sat. She filled a plate from the croc, still warm where it sat by the stove pipe, and put a heel of bread beside it and a fork and set it in front of him. He looked at it a long time. Is this how you keep your barrels? He said, “This is how I asked.

” He picked up the fork. He ate a bite and then another. He didn’t say it was good. He ate the plate empty and wiped it with the bread and ate the bread. And then he sat with his hands flat on the table on either side of it. “Why?” he said. She had a whole speech ready. She’d been making it in her head all the way up the freight road from Mile City through three days of cold and jolting.

 And it had grandmothers in it and ships and a Lutheran pastor who read medicine. She looked at his tired face and did not make it. Because there’s nothing in your store room that grew this year, she said. And by February, your men will need something that did. They’ll have peaches. They’ll have peaches, she said, at a price.

He sat back. He regarded her the way a buyer eyes a horse he has been told is sound, trying to see the thing he hasn’t been told. I’ll make you a bargain, Katarina said. Keep the barrels in the cellar. I’ll make no man eat it. It sits at the table in a pot and whoever wants it takes it. And if one man in this camp is worse for it by the time the ice goes out, I’ll pay the freight on all 20 barrels there and back and I’ll walk to Miles City.

Walk, Eli said. Walk. His eyes dropped to the empty plate. He turned the fork over. You spent your wages on them, he said. It was not a question. every dollar of the summer. Something moved in his face. She did not know him well enough to read it. Then he stood up and put his hat on. The cellar doors on the north side under the snow.

He said, “Mongo will show you. They stay, Miss Overhalt. All of them.” He stopped at the door. Nobody’s made to eat it. Nobody, she said. When the door had shut behind him, she sat down on the bench where he had sat because her knees had gone to water and she put her face in her hands and breathed. The range ticked.

Outside, somebody in the bunk house was playing a mouth organ badly. In the morning, the freighter pulled out at first light with an empty bed, and she watched from the cookhouse door as he went and did not wave. The trade wagon was still in the yard. Its owner came across to the cook house at breakfast with the sun just up behind him, stamping his boots at the door.

 He did not take his hat off. Amos Pedabone, he said, and did not offer his hand. I keep the store for the camps on this creek, arrows and mados over the ridge and the tie camps up the gulch. Anything a man needs in winter, he buys through me. Then I expect we’ll be seeing a good deal of each other.

 Katarina said, “Coffee?” He took the coffee. He drank it standing, looking at the pot of kraut on the table. And he waited until the men were all in and seated, and the room was full of the noise of spoons. Then he said loud enough for all of them, “You boys ever been in the Dakota camps in a hard winter?” A few of them had.

 They said so. Then you’ll have seen it. Petty bone said sour cabbage in the cellar and the man go down with fever by candlemiss. It breeds in it. Something in the rot. I’ve seen whole crews laid out in their bunks with it. He set his cup down on the table very gently. I’m only telling you what I saw. He went out.

 The door swung shut behind him. The spoons had stopped. Neils, who had been reaching toward the pot with a curious look on his face, drew back his hand and put it in his lap. Down the long table, one man after another looked at the pot and then did not look at it. Only reached over and helped himself with a loud scrape of the spoon and ate.

 Katarina stood at the range with the coffee pot in her hand and her face burning. fever. She had heard a hundred things said about kraut, but she had never heard that. And she knew by the stillness in the room that it had gone in deep the way a splinter does. If you want to know whether those 20 barrels see the spring and whether Katarina does, tap subscribe so her winter reaches you.

 And tell me in the comments what corner of the world you’re hearing it from. Outside, Petty Bones trade wagon went creaking out of the yard onto the creek road. On the nail by the cookhouse door, where the camp’s orders were hung, he had left a long list in his careful hand, and at the top of it were the words, “Harrow camp, winter order,” and at the bottom 40 cases of tinned goods.

 The cellar was dug into the north bank behind the cookhouse, a low log door under a hood of sod, and by noon, had shoveled the drift away from it and propped it open with a stick. It went back into the hill farther than she had hoped. It was dark and dry and smelled of cold earth and old roots, and the walls were shored with pine poles gone gray.

Somebody, some summer, had kept potatoes there. There were still a few withered sprouts on the dirt floor, white and blind as worms. “Old Cook kept nothing down here but the whiskey,” said “And not for long.” They rolled the barrels down one at a time. He went first backward down the ramp, taking the weight on his chest, and she came behind with her hands on the upper rim, and they set each barrel on two poles laid across the floor so the bottoms would not sit in the damp. 19 trips.

 It took them the rest of the day. By the end of it, her arms shook so hard she could not lift the lantern. At each barrel, she knelt and pried the lid and checked it. The brine had to cover the plank. The stone had to sit square. Three of them had sloshed on the freight road, and the crowd at the top had gone dry and brown where the air had touched it, and she skimmed that off with a wooden spoon into a bucket and threw it on the snow outside where the ravens came for it.

Neil saw her do it from the wood pile. He was splitting stove wood with his shirt off in the cold. The way the young loggers did to show they could. Told you, he called. Rotten. The top of anything’s rotten, she called back. If you leave it out long enough, put your shirt on. The man at the wood pile laughed at that.

 And some of it was at nails.  lowered himself down onto an upturned bucket in the cellar door to get his breath. He pushed his sleeve up to scratch his forearm and she saw the scar that ran down the back of it from the elbow almost to the wrist. White and puckered and old. Bull, he said seeing her look.

 Rio Grande long time since it healed well. It did. He pulled the sleeve down again and looked at her sidelong under his gray brows. Then he told her in his slow way about a trail crew one winter up by the muscle shell, living on what these men were living on. Salt pork and biscuit and coffee to wash it down. Come March, he said, that scar had opened again like a mouth.

 No knife, no bull. It had opened by itself and bled, and his teeth had gone loose in his head. He tapped his jaw. I don’t know what’s in your barrels, but I know I’ve never had that happen on a farm. She stood very still. No, she said it doesn’t happen on a farm. That’s why I ate it, said and got up off the bucket.

 The bread failed on the third morning. She had set the sponge at night the way she always did, a big croc of flour and water, and her mother’s yeast at the rear of the range with a cloth over it. But the fire had died down in the small hours, and the cold had come through the log walls like water through a sie.

 And when she lifted the cloth at 4 in the morning, the sponge lay flat and gray in the croc with a skin of frost on it. She made the bread anyway. She had to. 30 men would be at the table at 6. She worked the dough until her shoulders burned and set it to rise on the warming shelf. And it did not rise. It sat there in the pans like mud.

 She baked it anyway. It came out of the oven heavy and pale and tight as a fist. Neils picked up a slice at breakfast and knocked it on the table. It made a sound like wood. Is this more of your sour cooking? He said, “Does it come in a barrel, too?” She took the slice out of his hand and put a fresh plate of fried salt pork down in front of him instead and said nothing.

 and went back to the range. Her face was hot. Gity at the head of the far table did not say anything either. He did not need to. He dipped a slice of her bread in his coffee and let it sit there. And when he lifted it out, it was still hard, and the men nearest him grinned. That night, she did not trust the fire. She got up every 2 hours by the tin alarm clock she had brought from Mile City and fed the range.

And she took the sponge croc off the shelf and wrapped it in her own wool shawl and then in the quilt off her cot and set it in the warming oven with the door cracked and slept on the bench beside it with her coat over her. By morning the sponge had risen up over the lip of the croc and was pushing at the quilt.

 It smelled of beer and warm fields. She laughed out loud in the empty cook house. The bread that morning was high and brown and cracked across the top, and when she cut it, the steam came up out of it. Neils ate five slices. She counted. It was at the end of that week at 5 in the morning with the lamp lit and the coffee boiling that Eli Harrow came in by himself for the first time.

He came in quietly. He did not stamp his boots. He stood inside the door and looked at her as if he had forgotten what he came for. “Coffee’s hot,” she said. “I smelled it from the house.” She poured him a cup. He sat down at the end of the near table with it where the lamp was and drank.

 And she went on with the biscuits, cutting them out with an old tin cup turned upside down and setting them in rows on the black pan. You’re up early, Mr. Harrow. I’m always up. He turned the cup in his hands. I’d lie awake and count cows. How many? 900 head. He said it like the name of somebody he owed money to. Down on the creek bottoms, he said, under the snow.

 There was hay in the stacks, a good deal of it. He had put it up all summer. But there was no grass under that snow, not till April. And everything those cows ate from now till spring. His men had to pitch to them by hand. Every day at 20 below or 40 below. He drank. If the men can pitch hay in February, the herd comes through.

 If they can’t, the herd starves by March. That’s the whole of it. She stopped cutting biscuits. And if the herd starves, he looked into his cup. Then it’s all gone. He said, “Everything I’ve done out here since I was 20, and some I’ve borrowed on besides.” She did not say anything to that.

 “She did not have anything to say that would help.” She took the first pan of biscuits out of the oven and put two of them on a plate with butter and set it before him, and his gaze went from the plate to her. “You didn’t come out here to hear about my cows,” he said. “I came out here to feed the men who feed them,” Gatina said. “That’s near enough the same.

” He ate the biscuits. He did not hurry. When he had finished, he sat looking at the croc at the back of the range, the small one beside the sponge croc with a cloth tied over the top. What’s in that one? She went and lifted the cloth for him. Inside was a layer of dried white beans, soaked and drained and spread on damp flannel.

 And here and there among them a tiny pale tail had split the skin and come curling out. sprouts. She said my mother did it every winter when there’s nothing green anywhere. You make it green in a croc. She called it green for the dark months. You eat those in soup or with vinegar and a little bacon. She put the cloth back. 3 days and they’re ready.

 They taste like peas out of the garden like June. He studied the croc a good while outside. The first of the men were coming out of the bunk house and she heard them cough in the cold and the scrape of the door. Like June, Eli said, and got up and took his cup to the wash pan himself, which no man in that camp had done since she came.

 Pedabone came back in the first week of November with the first of the winter order. He brought it in two wagons, and his driver unloaded it. A silent man in his 40s with a split ear and a sheepkin cap. Crate after crate of tins went into the store room. Salt pork, heart attack, condensed milk, and peaches. Katarina stood in the store room door and watched the peaches go in.

 There were 10 cases of them. You’ll want to count those, Miss Oberholds, Petty Bone said pleasantly. I’d hate for the cook to say she’d been shorted. Where are the potatoes? Potatoes on the order. Four sacks and onions. She had written them in herself under his list on the nail the day he left. And dried apples. Ah. He smiled at her.

He had very even teeth, very white, and he showed all of them. Potatoes freeze on the road, miss. They go black and soft. I’d be cheating Mr. Harrow if I sold him frozen potatoes. As for onions, there’s none to be had between here and Bismar at any price. He tapped the stack of tins with a gloved knuckle, but you’ll find these keep beautifully.

He had his book open on a crate lid and was writing in it. She came and stood at his elbow and read it upside down the way she had read the hotel accounts all summer in Mile City over the manager’s shoulder. Peaches tinned 10 cases at 75 cents the tin. She read it twice. Her hands had gone cold and she felt them trembling and hid them in her apron at the McQueen house in Mile City where she had cooked from April to September.

 Peaches came up the river from Bismar by the case and the manager paid two bits of tin for them and complained about the price. Six bits, three times what they cost in town, and charged to Harrow’s account, not to the men who ate them. Petty Bone closed his book. Something troubling, you miss. No, said Katarina. Nothing that we’ll keep.

 She found Eli that afternoon at the hay stacks down on the creek bottom. He was on top of a stack with a pitchfork, throwing hay down to a line of cattle that stood in the trampled snow below him, steam coming off their backs. The cold was bitter. The whole bottom smelled of hay and dung and frost. She stood at the foot of the stack with her shawl over her head and told him, “The price in town, the price on the page, 10 cases.

” She did not raise her voice. She didn’t have to. He stopped pitching. He leaned on the fork and looked down at her. You’re sure? I bought them for the McQueen house all summer. Two bits. He was quiet a long time. The cattle balled and shoved below him. He brings everything, Eli said at last. Everything for three camps.

 There’s nobody else comes up this creek in winter. If I send him off, I have nothing but what I can haul myself from Mile City, and that’s 4 days each way through the drifts. He dug the fork into the hay. He knows that. He knows that, Katarina said. I’ll speak to him. He did speak to him. She heard about it from Neils, who heard it from the teamster, who heard it standing by the wagon.

 Petty Bone had listened and nodded and taken the peaches off Harrow’s account and put them on a separate slip for the men to buy from their own wages at the same price. And then he had said loud enough for the teamster that it was a strange thing when a cow outfit took its orders from a hired cook.

 “He’s a snake,” said Neils as if it had just occurred to him. He was drying plates for her, which he had started doing without being asked and pretended he had not. But he’s not wrong about the cabbage, Miss Uber holds. It does breed fever. My cousin in Minnesota told me, “Did your cousin eat kraut?” “No,” Neil said. He’s Swedish.

 In the middle of November, Eli bought two hogs from a homesteader in the settlement down the creek. a man with a sod house and more pigs than cents. And Katarina made sausage. She made it the way her father had on the farm in Lancaster County on the coldest day there was. She had the hogs scalded and scraped and hung by and two of the cow hands who knew the work from their own boyhoods and did it clean and quick behind the smokehouse.

 And then the rest was hers. She ground the meat by hand in the cookhouse in the big iron grinder she borrowed from Eli’s own kitchen until her arm burned. She seasoned it with salt and black pepper and sage from her carpet bag and a little mace and she worked it with her fists in a wash tub until it was sticky. And then she stuffed it into the clean casings through a tin horn.

 By dark, there were coils of it hanging in the smokehouse over a smudge of green applewood that one of the loggers had brought her from an abandoned homestead orchard up the gulch. The smell came out of that smokehouse for 4 days. It came into the bunk house through the chinks. It came into the barn. It went down the creek bottom on the wind.

 and the cow hands pitching hay down there said they could smell it a mile off and it was killing them. On the fifth day she took the sausages down dark and glossy and wrinkled from the smoke and she fried them in the big spider for supper and she set them on the table in a heap on a bed of kraut steaming. The men looked at the heap.

 Sausage comes with its kraut, Katarina said. Or not at all. For a while, nothing happened. Then  reached over and took two sausages and a fork full of kraut. And then one of the cow hands, who had helped with the hogs, did the same. And then the man beside him, grumbling, holding the kraut away from the sausage on his plate with the edge of his knife as if it might bite.

By the end of supper, the heap was gone. Sausage and kraut together down to the grease on the platter. Guity had eaten salt pork. He sat in the foreman’s place with his arms folded and watched the platter go by him three times and did not reach for it once. After supper, when the men had gone out, Katarina took a school slate she had found in the storoom, an old school slate and a wooden frame left over from some other cook’s other life, and hung it on a nail by the cookhouse door.

 down the left side in chalk. She wrote the name of every man in the camp. 30 names.  came back in for his pipe and stopped and read it. What’s that for? Every bowl of crowd a man eats, she said. He makes a mark. And what’s that prove? I don’t know yet, Katarina said. Ask me in March. took the chalk out of her hand and made two strokes beside his own name.

 Then he thought about it and made two more for the first night. In the morning there were 11 names on the slate with marks beside them. And beside Neil’s the logger who had pried the lid, there was one mark, small and crooked and pressed very hard as though he had fought himself over it and made it anyway. The real cold came down the second week of December.

It came in the night without any wind, and at daybreak the air was so still and so sharp that the smoke from the cookhouse stove pipe went straight up in a gray column and stood there as if somebody had nailed it to the sky. The thermometer on the bunk house porch said 38 below. Neil said the mercury had gone down into the bulb to keep warm.

The men went out to the haystacks anyway because the cattle did not stop being hungry at 38 below. They went out with their faces wrapped to the eyes in wool mufflers and their hands in two pairs of mittens, and they came back at noon with frost in their eyebrows and their breath frozen white on the mufflers.

 And they ate like wolves. Katarina fed them bacon, beans, biscuits, bread, pork, coffee by the gallon, and the pot of kraut, always in the middle of each table, hot or cold, with a ladle standing in it. The slate by the door had filled up in the 3 weeks since the sausages. 16 names had marks now. Some had one or two.

 had so many he had begun to make them in bundles of five. the way men tally cattle. Neils had 11. He would not say how they got there. He made them late after the others had gone out. Ged’s line was bare. So were 13 others. On the 15th of December, Pedibone came up the creek with the second load of the winter order. Katarina was in the storoom counting beans when she heard Pettibone’s voice in the yard and then Eli’s.

 and she went to the storeroom window and rubbed a hole in the frost on the glass. They stood by the wagon with their breath going up between them. Petty Bone had his book open. Eli had his hands in his coat pockets. No more peaches, she heard Eli say. Not on my account and not on the men’s. Bring me potatoes. Bring me onions if you have to go clear down the river for them. Bring me dried apples.

or bring me nothing but flour and salt. Potatoes freeze, Mr. Harrow. Then wrap them in straw and hot rocks the way the freigherss do. Or don’t bring them. But the tins go back on that wagon. Pettibone closed his book. He was smiling. It was a good smile, broad and warm, the smile of a man at a church supper.

40 cases, he said. ordered in October on your word and hauled up this creek in weather that would kill a mule. And you’ll send them back because a hired cook with a barrel of cabbage told you to. I’ll send them back because you charge three prices for them. I charge what it costs to bring them, Petty Bone said.

 To a camp that nobody else will come to. He looked past Eli at the cook house at the window with the hole rubbed in the frost. Katarina did not move away from it. You’re a cattleman, Harrow. I’d think about your cattle. That woman is going to cost you your herd. He got back up on the seat. The driver with the split ear turned the wagon, and the crates of tin peaches went back down the creek road the way they had come, rocking on the ruts.

Katarina stepped back from the window. Her mouth had gone dry. She found that she was holding a handful of beans so tightly they had printed themselves on her palm that night. The story was in the bunk house before the lamps were lit. It came from the Thai camp up the gulch where Pettibone had stopped on his way down.

 “A man there had a fever,” Pettyone said. “A big strong man, a sawyer, gone down in his bunk, shaking and burning. And do you know what that man had eaten the week before? He had eaten sauerkraut. A German in the camp had brought it up in a croc from Mile City.  brought it to her in the cook house with his cap in his hands and his face said.

 Half of them believe it, he said. The other half are frightened they might. Is it true? There’s a man down with a fever up there. That’s true. I talked to the teamster.  scratched his jaw. Whether he ate any cabbage, only God and Petty Bone know, and I’d not trust the one to tell the other. In the morning, there were only nine new marks on the slate.

Katarina worked the day through with dread, sitting tight behind her breastbone. She served the crowd. She did not speak of it. When a man passed the pot without looking at it, she did not look at him either, but she felt each one of them go by like a small cold draft across her neck. That night, Eli came to the cellar.

 She was down there alone with the lantern on her knees at the fourth barrel from the ramp. It had frozen. They were all freezing now from the top down, and she had to chop the crowd out of them with the camp hatchet into pale, glittering chunks and carry it up in a bucket to thaw by the range. She heard the door creek up above the ramp, and her heart jumped into her throat, frightened, because the cellar was dark and a long way from the house, and she thought of Petty Bone’s smile at the wagon. “It’s me,” Eli said.

 “Only me.” He came down the ramp, stooping under the poles. He had a second lantern, and he hooked it over a pole, and the cellar filled with a warmer, yellowower light than hers. “Mongo said you’d be here.” His eyes ran along the barrels, the two long rows of them on their poles, each one with its plank and its stone. “Give me that.

” He took the hatchet out of her hand. He did not ask. He knelt beside her in the dirt in his good coat and began chopping carefully the way she had been doing it, driving the blade down into the frozen crout and prying the chunks free and dropping them into the bucket. You’ll ruin your coat, she said.

 It’s an old coat. She watched him work. He was careful with the hatchet. He kept the blade away from the staves. She had not expected that. You sent back the peaches,” she said. “I did.” He said, “I’ll cost you your herd.” Eli stopped chopping. He sat back on his heels and met her eyes in the lantern light. There was frost on the top of his hat from the cellar door.

 He said, “A lot of things,” he said. I’ve been sitting in the house all evening, thinking about which of them, I believe. He picked a chunk of frozen kraut from the bucket and rolled it between finger and thumb. It glittered. My mother kept a croc of this. I’d forgotten that until tonight in Ohio when I was small. There was a German woman on the next place who showed her how.

 I used to steal it out of the croc with my fingers and she’d smack them. Did it make you sick? Never had a sick day that winter. He put the chunk back. Never had a sick day in my life that I remember. Until I came out here and started living on beans, he began to chop again. “Tell me about your mother,” he said without looking up.

 “So she told him down there in the cold on her knees with the lanterns throwing their shadows huge up the pole walls.” She told him about the farm in Lancaster County and the kitchen with the two stoves and the long cellar under the bank barn where the crocs and the barrels stood in rows the way they did here.

 How in October the whole family shredded cabbage for 3 days on a slicer as long as a door and her mother salted it and she and her sisters stamped it down in the barrels with a wooden stomper until the brine came up. How it was sour and cold and good all winter. And how on New Year’s Day they ate it with pork, every soul on the place for luck.

And then Eli said, “And then my mother died and the farm went to my brother. My brother’s wife had her own kitchen.” She said it plainly. I was 30. I went west to cook for other people. And you’ve done it since. I’ve done it since. He was quiet for a time. The hatchet rose and fell. 30 men, he said at last.

 900 head and 20 barrels of your mother’s cabbage between us in the spring. He looked up. I don’t know if you’re right, Miss Oberholtz. I’ll tell you that plain. But I know Petty Bone’s not right. I know that much. So, I’ll bet on you. We’ll see it through. We, Katarina said. We, said Eli. He picked up the full bucket and stood up, stooping with his head against the poles.

 Now, let’s get this up to the stove before it freezes to the bucket. New Year’s Day came in gray and still, and the snow lay a foot deep in the yard, and Katarina was up at 3. She’d been saving the best of the sausage since November, hanging in the cold smokehouse. She had saved a whole pork loin too from the second hog, rubbed with salt and pepper and carowway and wrapped in cloth.

 Now she set the loin in the biggest roasting pan in the camp on a bed of kraut 3 in deep with sliced apples from a sack Eli had holed up himself on his last trip to town and brown sugar and a little of the brine poured over and she slid it into the oven and closed the door. By 9, the smell had come out through the walls. By 11, the men had begun to find reasons to be near the cookhouse.

 One came to fetch water. One came to ask whether there was coffee. Two of the loggers came to split kindling nobody needed and split it slowly with their noses up like hounds. At noon, she opened the door and rang the iron triangle, and they came in off the snow. On each table there was a long platter.

 On each platter was pork sliced thick with its crackling edge and sausages laid alongside it in rows. And under all of it soft and brown and sweet from the roasting the kraut. There were mashed potatoes too, the first they had seen since summer from the same sack as the apples. There was bread. There were two pies. The men stood over the tables and did not sit.

on my mother’s farm. Gatina said, “Everybody eats pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day. Everybody for luck.” She set the last of the bread down. I’ve never known it to fail. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Eli came in from the house. He had shaved. He took off his hat and hung it on the peg and walked down the room and sat down on the near bench and pulled a platter toward him and filled his plate.

Pork, sausage, kraut, potatoes. He looked at no one. He began to eat. sat down beside him. Neil sat down across from him. And then the whole camp sat down all at once with a scrape of benches like a clap of thunder and reached She stood by the range with a dish towel over her shoulder and watched them eat. 30 men, less one. They ate everything.

They ate the crowd off the bottom of the platters with bread. They asked for more, and there was more, and they ate that. An old Frenchman from Quebec, one of the timber crew with a gray pigtail, wept a little into his plate and said that his wife used to make it the same way, near enough, and that it was the first time since she passed that he had been able to eat it.

Nobody laughed at him, only Ged in his foreman’s place kept to a plate of salt, pork, and beans and ate that and looked at nobody. After the pies, the men lined up at the door on their way out. She did not tell them to. They did it on their own. One after another, they picked up the chalk from the ledge under the slate and made their marks and passed out into the cold.

 By the time the last one had gone, there were 29 names on the slate with marks beside them. Only one line was empty. She stood looking at the slate with the chalk dust on her fingers. Behind her at the long table, Eli was helping stack plates, and neither of them said anything, and she didn’t turn around because her eyes were stinging.

 2 days after New Year’s, the boss of the camp over the ridge rode in. His name was Makadoo, and he was 50 and red-faced and loud with a fur cap and a big laugh that filled the cookhouse the moment he was through the door. He ran 200 head of his own on the far side of the ridge and 26 men cutting ties for the railroad and he bought everything they ate from Pedibone.

 He had come over to borrow a harness and to see he said the famous cabbage cook. I’ve been hearing about you all the way over the ridge. Mcadoo said and laughed. Pedibone says you’re poisoning Harrow’s men with rotten cabbage. Are you? Sit down and find out. Katarina said. He sat down and found out. He ate a plate of sausage and kraut with every sign of enjoyment and wiped the plate with bread.

 Then he got up to go and stopped at the door and read the slate and laughed until he had to lean against the door frame. “Harrow,” he said to Eli. “Your cook’s keeping score on you.” “She is.” “What’s the prize?” Eli looked at Katarina across the room. “Spring,” he said. McAdoo laughed again and clapped Eli on the shoulder and went out to his horse.

 But at the door, he turned back and his glance went to the slate once more, and something passed over his big red face that was not a laugh. “My boys are eating peaches,” he said. “Petty Bone sends them up by the case.” He pulled his cap down. They like them fine. Halfway through January, Pedabone drove over the ridge from McAdoo’s camp in his cutter, a light sleigh with red runners, and he did not stop at Harrows at all.

He drove straight past the yard on the creek road, slow with his buffalo robe up to his chin, and watched the cook house the whole way by. Neils, who was at the woodpile, lifted his ax to him in a way that was not quite a greeting. Pedibone lifted his whip. Then he was gone around the bend toward the tie camps, and the sound of his sleigh bells went away down the frozen creek, thin and bright until there was nothing.

“He’s been at Mcadoo’s 3 days,” said at dinner. “Selling and talking.” “Talking about what?” nodded at the crowd on the table. Guess it was Mongo’s idea that she take a barrel over. Just the one, he said. A present. Makadoo liked it well enough when he ate it here. His cook might take to it if he’s shown.

 And if his men start eating it, then Petty Bone can say what he likes, and it’ll be 26 more men that know him for a liar. Katarina thought about it all that night, lying on her cot in the leanto off the cook house with the range ticking through the wall. In the morning, she asked Eli. “I’ll take you,” he said at once.

 “But not today. There’s weather coming. There’s always weather coming.” “This is real weather,” he squinted at the sky over the ridge, which had gone the color of an old bruise. tomorrow if it clears. It didn’t clear the next day or the next. On the third day it did. And they went, Eli and Katarina and with the smallest of the barrels roped onto a hay sled behind the two gray workh horses and the snow squeaking under the runners like something alive.

 The road over the ridge went up through the pines in long switchbacks. At the top, the trees fell away, and the whole valley on the far side opened out below them, white and blue and very still, with McAdoo’s camp in the bottom of it by the creek, a long bunk house, a cookhouse, a barn, the smoke going up.

 Katarina had never been so cold in her life. The wind on the crest came through her shawl and her coat and her two wool pettic coats as if they were paper. Her face went numb, her fingers went numb inside her mittens, and then her feet. And she sat on the sled with her back against the barrel and felt her whole body shaking in long, hard waves that she could not stop.

 Eli looked back at her from the driving seat and pulled off his own muffler and threw it to her. “Around your face,” he said. “Now don’t argue.” She did not argue. Makadoo met them in the yard. He was not laughing this time. He came out of the cook house with his cook behind him, a stooped man of 50 or so with a stained apron, and behind the cook, standing in the doorway with his hat on and a mug of coffee in his hand as if he owned the place was Amos Pedabone. “Harrow,” Makadoo said.

 “What have you got there?” “A present from my cook,” Eli said. a barrel of kraut. She thought your men might like it with their pork. McAdoo looked at the barrel on the sled. He did not come any closer. Katarina, still wrapped to the eyes in Eli’s muffler, saw his eyes slide sideways to petty bone in the doorway and back.

“That’s kind of her,” Makadoo said slowly. “That’s kind, but I don’t think we’ll want it. You ate it at my table,” said Eli. You ate two plates. I did. I did. And I thank her. Mcadoo’s red face had gone redder. But there’s a man sick at the Thai camps. You’ll have heard. Laid up with fever.

 And my boys have heard it, too. And they’ve heard he ate cabbage the week before. I’m not saying it’s so. I’m saying I’ve got 26 men who won’t eat it if I’ve put it on the table and a camp full of talk if I try. He shook his head. Take it home, Harrow. I’m obliged to her. In the doorway, Petty Bone lifted his mug a little toward Katarina.

 The way a man lifts a glass. “Good of you to come all this way, Miss Oberholtz,” he called. “But these men are wellfed. I see to that.” Katarina pulled the muffler down off her face. Her lips were so cold that it was hard to make words with them. “How are their gums?” she said. Pedabone’s smile stayed exactly where it was.

 Makadoo frowned. Their what? Their gums, Mr. Mcadoo. Look at their gums. And the backs of their legs every morning. If the gums go soft and dark and bleed when they eat. If there are little red spots coming on their shins, send over the ridge to me. Day or night. The cook behind McAdoo moved a little. He put his hand up to his mouth quickly and then took it down again. Petty Bone laughed.

It was a big warm laugh and it went all around the yard. Gums, he said. Mr. Mcadoo, the woman wants you to look in your men’s mouths like a horse trader. Makadoo did not laugh with him, but he did not take the barrel either. They drove back over the ridge in the long blue shadows with the barrel still rope behind them. Nobody said much.

At the top, where the wind was worst, Katarina sat on the sled with her back against the barrel and shook and could not stop shaking and did not know any longer how much of it was cold. Eli stopped the team. He climbed down, came back, and without a word, he climbed up onto the sled beside her and put his arm around her and pulled her against the sheepkin of his coat.

 He smelled of hay and horse and pipe smoke. on the driving seat looked straight ahead at the road with enormous attention and clucked to the grays and the sled moved on. “I’m not cold,” Katarina said into his coat. “I know,” said Eli. “Neither am I.” They went down the long switchbacks into their own valley like that.

 and neither of them moved, and the lights of the cookhouse came up at them through the trees. Neils turned up at the cookhouse at 4 the next morning with a lantern and a clean shirt on. Katarina was on her knees at the range, raking out yesterday’s ash. She sat back on her heels and looked at him. He stood in the doorway with his big yellow beard and his red hands and did not seem to know what to do with any of them.

 Is something wrong? No, miss. He cleared his throat. I want to learn the bread. She stared at him. My mother baked every day of her life, Neil said very fast, like a speech he had practiced in Vermland. Rye mostly in rounds with a hole in the middle. And she hung them on a pole under the roof. I never learned.

I was the boy that carried the wood. And then I came over and I’ve eaten camp bread 11 years and it’s all been like the bread you made that third morning. Before the quilt, he studied his boots. I’d like to know how it’s done. Right. In case. In case of what? Neils turned as red as his hands.

 In case I have a kitchen someday, he said. So she taught him. She set him on the near bench with the sponge croc, still warm from its quilt, and showed him how to feel when it was ready, the way it smelled of beer, and the way it sprang back under a flowered finger. She showed him how much flour to work in, not by the cup, but by the feel of it in his hands, and how to knead with the heels of his palms, and fold and turn, and fold and turn until the dough was smooth as a riverstone, and warm as a hen.

 His hands were too big for it at first, and too strong. He tore it. She made him start again. The second batch, he did not tear. He kneaded it with his tongue between his teeth and his eyes screwed up. And when she said that was enough, he didn’t believe her and needed it another quarter hour anyway. It rose. He stood over it and watched it rise as though it might escape.

When she put the loaves in the oven, he pulled up a bench in front of the oven door and sat there. And when she took them out, high and brown and hollow when you knocked on the bottom, he picked one up in both hands, hot as it was, and lifted it into the lamplight. “Look at that,” Neil said softly. “Would you look at that?” He ate the heel of it, standing up with butter, and said nothing else for a good spell.

 Then he went to the slate by the door and made his mark beside his name and another and headed for the wood pile without a word. Every morning after that until the spring, Neils made the second batch. The rest of January was the coldest that anybody in the camp could remember. The creek froze to the bottom in the shallows.

 The men had to cut the stock water hole open with axes every morning below the ford, where the water ran deep and dark under the ice, and by noon it had skinned over again. The cattle stood in the creek bottom in long hump lines with frost on their backs, balling at the hay stacks, and every day the men went out and fed them.

 Every day, 40 below or 30 below, the hay went down off the stacks by the forkful, and the herd ate it, and the stacks got smaller. Katarina fed the men. The kraut went on every table and was emptied every day. 29 lines on the slate had so many marks by now that the slate was white with chalk, and she had to wipe it clean every Sunday and start the marks fresh and write the total small in the corner.

Gar’s line stayed empty. She watched him. She did not want to, and she could not help it. She watched him at every meal with the pork and the beans and the hard attack and nothing else. and she watched his face across the long room in the lamplight. And by the last days of January, she thought that it had gone a little gray, just a little, like the face of a man who has not been sleeping.

She said nothing. It was not hers to say, but she began to save a little of the crut brine in a jar on the shelf over the range, and she did not know herself why.  came in off the ridge road on the last day of January, stamping snow with his mustache frozen stiff. He had been over to Macados with the borrowed harness.

 He dropped onto the bench nearest the door without taking off his coat and cuped the coffee she gave him in both hands and did not drink it. “You’d best sit, lass,” he said. She sat. Six of Makadoo’s men didn’t go out to the stacks today. said they’re in their bunks, not fever. They just can’t say their legs ache like the devil and they’re that tired they can’t lift a fork. McAdoo’s in a rage.

 He thinks they’re sherking. He turned the cup. I looked at one of them. Young fellow, a big Norwegian, 25 maybe. His gums were puffed up and purple like a bad plum. There was blood on his teeth. Katarina closed her eyes. And the cook said  “Macadoo’s cook. He had a burn on his hand from the stove back in the fall. Healed over clean.

 I saw it in November. It’s open again.” He drank his coffee at last, all of it, and put the cup down. No knife, no stove. It just opened. For a while, the only sound in the cook house was the fire. Did you tell McAdoo? Katarina said. I told him. I told him to send to you. And  looked at her. Pedibone was there. He said Pedibone said it was the camp fever starting the same as at the Thai camps. He’s selling them bidters for it.

A dollar the bottle. Eli came in as finished from the house with the cold coming in around him and he stood inside the door and heard the rest of it and kept silent. He crossed to the slate and stood in front of it reading the names. He read them all top to bottom. He stopped at the bottom where Geredes was.

 Then he turned and looked at Katarina and she saw that he was afraid and that he did not hide it from her. The first week of February, Makadoo came over the ridge himself. He came on foot. He had left his horse up on the crest, where the drifts had blown over the road, and walked the last two miles down through the snow to his thighs, and he came into Harrow’s yard, gray-faced and blowing, with his fur cap in his hand.

 He did not come to the cook house. He went straight up to the house, but he came out again a quarter hour later with Eli beside him, and they walked down to the cook house together, and McAdoo stopped just inside, looking at the tables where Harrow’s men were at their noon dinner, eating and talking and passing the crowd from hand to hand.

“1 of mine are down now,” Makadoo said. He said it to Eli, but he was looking at the men at the tables. 11 of 26. The rest can barely stand. There’s been no hod down to my cattle in two days, he swallowed. 200 head harrow standing in the snowballing. I can hear them from the bunk house at night. Eli nodded slowly.

I need men, Makadoo said. I need men that can pitch hay. I’ll pay what you ask. The whole cookhouse had gone quiet. Katarina stood at the range with the coffee pot in her hand. “You’ll not pay me,” said Eli. He turned to the room. “Who’ll go over the ridge with Mr. McDow tomorrow and feed his stock?” Neils stood up first, then four of the loggers, and then half the cow hands, and then who was 61 and had no business going anywhere, and was told so and stood up anyway.

 In the end, Eli picked 10 and sent them over the ridge the next morning with their pitchforks on their shoulders and a sack of Katarina’s biscuits and a croc of kraut in case. They were gone 3 days. When they came back, they came back loud and red cheicked and hungry. And every one of them had worked from light to dark on McAdoo’s stacks and walked two miles each way over the ridge in the snow to do it. “Macado’s cattle had been fed.

” His own man had lain in their bunks and watched them go out. “They looked at us,” said Neils that night at supper. He had stopped eating to say it, which in Neils was a sign of great seriousness. Coming in at dark, McAdoo’s men looked at us from the bunk house door like we were ghosts, like they couldn’t believe we were still walking around.

He looked down the long table at all of them eating, then at the pot, then at Katarina by the range. We’re all still standing, Neil said. Every one of us, 30 men,” he picked up his spoon again and dug it into the crowd. “Hars are,” he said and nodded at her and ate. Two nights after the man came back from the ridge, somebody knocked at the cookhouse door after dark.

 Katarina was alone. She had banked the range and was sitting by it with her feet on the fender and a lamp turned low, darning a sock of that had more hold than sock. The knock came soft twice and then once more. The way a person knocks who does not want to be heard by anybody but the one inside.

 She took up the lamp and went to the door and opened it a crack. It was McAdoo’s cook. He stood in the snow with a lantern held low against his coat so it would not show from the yard, and his breath came out of him in short white puffs. He had walked the ridge road by night. She could see it in the way he stood as if his legs did not quite belong to him.

“Miss,” he said. “Miss Oberholtz, I know it’s late. Come in out of that.” He came in. He would not sit. He hunched over the range with his hands held out to it. And she saw that the burn across his right hand, the one had told her about was open and raw and weeping under a rag he had tied around it.

 “I’m 53 years old,” he said. “I’ve cooked in camps since the war. I never saw the like of what’s in our bunk house.” He stopped. He put his good hand up to his mouth the way he had in Makadoo’s yard. My teeth are going, miss. Two of them loose. I can’t eat the hard attack no more. I soak it.

 And petty bones bitters don’t do nothing but make a man drunk. No, said Katarina. They wouldn’t. I come for some of your cabbage. He said for me. Just for me. I won’t tell McAdoo. I can’t. He’s took Petty Bone’s word so far. He can’t go back on it now in front of the men. His eyes were miserable. But I’ll eat it.

 I’ll eat anything, miss. I’m that tired. She didn’t make him ask twice. She went down to the cellar with the lantern while he waited by the stove, and she chopped a croc full of frozen kraut out of the nearest barrel, and she came back up and packed the croc in a flower sack with straw around it. Then she went to the shelf over the range and took down the small croc with the cloth tied over it and spooned half of what was in it into a jar.

Beans, she said, sprouted. Eat a handful raw every day or put them in your soup at the very end. Don’t boil them to death. And the cabbage the same, cold or just warmed through, not cooked for hours. and drink the juice from the bottom of the croc. All of it. Juice. All of it. She said it’s sour. Drink it anyway.

He held the sack against his chest with both arms. His eyes had gone wet in the lamplight. God bless you, missed, he said. God bless you. I don’t know how I’ll pay. Come back in a week, Katrina said. And show me your hand. That’s the pay. He went out into the dark with the lantern held low.

 And she waited on the step and watched the small light go away across the yard and up the ridge road and in among the black pines, climbing until it went out behind the shoulder of the hill. Eli had seen it, too. He came down from the house a little after, and she told him, “He came alone? He came alone? Nobody’s to know.

” She dropped onto the bench, suddenly tired all the way through. Eli his hand. It was a burn from October. It was healed. And now it’s open like a mouth. The way Mongo’s scar opened on the muscle shell and his teeth. She pressed her hands together hard in her lap. It’s coming. It’s all coming exactly the way I was afraid it would.

 and there’s a man over that ridge telling them it’s fever and selling them whiskey for it. Eli sat down beside her on the bench. He did not touch her. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging and watched the fire through the draft door of the range and was quiet a long time. “You call me Eli,” he said. She had not noticed.

 She felt her face go hot. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harrow. No. He turned his head toward her. No, I’d sooner. She looked back at him. The fire ticked in the range. After a time, he reached over and took one of her hands out of her lap, the right one, red and rough from the brine, and the lie soap and the cold, and held it between both of his, and turned it over and studied the palm as though something were written there.

When the ice goes out, he said, and the herds through and there’s grass, what will you do? Go back to Mile City, I suppose. Find a hotel that wants a cook. And if one doesn’t, one always does, Katrina said. People always want to eat. He nodded slowly. He did not let go of her hand.

 I’ve been out here 24 years, Eli said. I came out with a string of horses and a rifle and nothing else. And I’ve built all this. And I’ve never once in all those years had anybody set a plate in front of me that was made for me. Not for the crew. For me. He turned her hand over again. You did that the first night with the barrels on the wagon.

 I’ve been thinking about it ever since. She could not speak. Her throat had closed up. “I’m not asking anything,” he said. “Not now. Not with McAdoo’s men lying in their bunks and my own herd not through.” “It wouldn’t be right. I only wanted you to know.” He let go of her hand and stood up. Good night, Katarina. Good night, she said. Eli. He went out.

She sat on the bench a long time afterward with her hand in her lap where he had put it down and the lamp burned lower and lower and she left it so. Gity went down on the 9th of February. He went down in the hay. He was up on the big stack nearest the creek with a fork throwing hay down to the cattle the way he had every day that winter.

 And then he was not. Neils on the next stack saw him sit down all at once like somebody sitting on a step when his legs have simply quit and then roll slowly over the edge of the stack and come down the side of it in a slide of hay and land in the trampled snow among the cattle. They carried him up to the bunk house on a door.

 Four men, one at each corner, and nails running ahead to open the way. Katarina met them in the yard with her apron flying because had come for her at a run. He was not hurt from the fall. The hay and the snow had caught him, but he could not stand. When they set him down on his bunk, he lay there with his eyes open, gray-faced, breathing through his mouth.

 And when she bent over him, she saw what she had been afraid of seeing for a month. His gums had gone dark and swollen, puffed up around his teeth, and there was blood at the corner of his mouth. On his left hand, across the knuckles, there was a long red cut, open and oozing. He had got it in the fall, she thought, and then saw the old wide edges of it.

 The way the new skin had split along a scar. Christmas, Gity said. His voice was a thread. cut it on a tin. Christmas. It was healed. I know, said Katarina. I know it was. She sent Neil’s running for hot water and for blankets. She pulled Ged’s boots off herself and his wool socks. and she saw the backs of his legs, the calves speckled all over with small dark red spots like a spatter of paint, and a great yellow purple bruise on the shin where he had knocked it on nothing she could see.

 The man stood around the bunk in the half dark of the bunk house and looked at his legs. Nobody said the word fever. Nobody had to say anything. They had all been to the Thai camps and to Madus and they had all heard. Katarina stood up. she said, the jar on the shelf over my range, the brine. Bring it. And a spoon. Neils.

 Go down to the cellar and bring me up the potatoes. The sack and the straw at the back behind the last barrel. All of it. Neil stared at her. There’s potatoes. I’ve been keeping them, she said. For this, go. He went. She sat by Gared’s bunk that night and the next and the one after. She spooned the brine into him first, a spoonful at a time, cold and sour, from the jar she’d been saving without knowing why.

 He choked on it the first time and swore at her in Irish, weakly, and she wiped his chin and gave him another. After the brine, she made potato broth. She boiled the potatoes whole in their jackets in a small pot on the bunk house stove and mashed them into their own water with a little salt and a little butter and fed him that a spoonful at a time because he could not chew.

On the second day, when he could swallow better, she brought the sprouted beans from her croc and cooked them for the space of a few breaths in the broth, just enough to soften them and fed him the soup and the kraut. On the third day, when he could sit up against the wall with a blanket around his shoulders, she brought him a bowl of it, cold, chopped fine, with the juice poured over.

Ged eyed the bowl, then her. That’s Dutch rot, he said. That’s right, said Katarina. And you’ll eat it. He ate it. He ate it slowly with his mouth sore, making a face at every spoonful. When he had finished, he put the bowl down on the blanket and lay back against the logs and closed his eyes. “If that doesn’t kill me,” he said.

“Nothing will.” Eli sat the night watches with her. He came down from the house when the rest of the camp was asleep and sat on the upturned crate on the other side of Gat’s bunk with the lamp between them on the floor and kept the stove fed so she would not have to get up. Sometimes they talked very low so as not to wake the men in the bunks around them.

 Sometimes they did not talk at all. Once near morning, she woke with a start and found that she had fallen asleep sitting up with her head against the wall and that he had put his coat over her. On the fourth morning, Gar’s color had changed. It was a small thing. The gray had gone out from under his skin, and when she looked in his mouth, the swelling in his gums had gone down, and they didn’t bleed when she pressed on them with her thumb.

 He ate a whole bowl of potato soup and asked for bread. “Ask me tomorrow,” said Katarina. “Your teeth aren’t ready for my bread.” “They’d best get ready,” Gity said. “I’ve watched 30 men eat it for 4 months.” On the fifth day, the 13th of February, came in from the ridge road again. “Macadoo sent for you,” he said. “Now his own self.

He’s waiting up on the crest with a sleigh.” He paused. 14 of his men are down lass. And he says, “Tell her to bring the barrels.” They took three barrels over the ridge that afternoon, roped onto the hay sled, and the jar of sprouted beans wrapped in a shawl inside Katarina’s coat to keep it from freezing. And the last of the potatoes.

Makadoo met them at the top with his sleigh. He said nothing about gums or fever or petty bone. He shook Eli’s hand without a word and then awkwardly took off his fur cap and shook Katarina’s and held on to it a moment too long. “My cook’s on his feet,” he said. “Did you know that?” “The only one of the lot.

” “He’s been eating something out of a croc by himself in the pantry for a week, and he won’t say what.” Madoo’s red face worked. “I’m not a fool, miss. I can count.” Makadoo’s bunk house was long and low and dark and smelled of sickness and tobacco and wet wool. The men lay in two tiers of bunks along both walls, and when Katarina came in with the lantern, the ones who could turn their heads, turn them to look at her.

 They were big men, most of them, tie cutters and sawers, with shoulders like oxen. And they lay in their blankets as weak as old women, gray-faced, with their mouths sore and their legs aching. And some of them had old wounds opened up on their hands and arms that they held against their chests under the blankets as if they wanted them hidden.

The Norwegian had told her of lay in the bunk nearest the door. He was 25, he told her when she asked. He said it proudly as if it were something he had done. Will I lose my teeth? He said, not if you do what I say. I’ll do it, he said. I’ll do anything. I’m so tired, miss. I never was tired in my life.

 She did the same for them that she had done for Gity. The brine first from the bottoms of the barrels, a spoonful to each man, going down the rows of bunks with the jar and the spoon like a pasttor with the cup. Then potato broth, as long as the potatoes lasted. And after that, bean sprouts in thin soup cooked no longer than it took to say a prayer over it.

 And the kraut cold, chopped fine, a bowl to each man morning and evening, whether he wanted it or not. Some of them did not want it. One of the sawyers turned his face to the wall and said he would sooner die of the fever than eat that sour rot. “You haven’t got a fever,” Katherina said. Feel your own forehead. Cool as a stone.

What you’ve got, the cure for it is in this bowl. Petty bone says, “Mr. Pedabone,” said Katarina. “Sells peaches.” The Sawyer looked at her. Then slowly he turned back from the wall and held out his hand for the bowl. McAdoo’s cook helped her. He was steady on his feet now, and his hand, when he pulled the rag off it to show her, had a clean pink edge all around the burn where it had begun to close.

 He made no speech of it. He showed it to her, and she nodded, and he tied the rag back on and went to fetch the water. Eli worked beside her. He carried water and split wood and fed the stove, and he held men up in their bunks so she could spoon broth into them. and he did not complain once. And when she looked up deep in the second night and saw him in the lamplight holding a big Sawyer’s head against his shoulder like a brother’s, while the man drank, her eyes stung so that she had to look away.

 On the first night at Mcadoo’s, a little before midnight, when the last man had been fed and the stove had been banked, Katarina went outside to breathe. The cold hit her like a hand. The sky over the valley was black and enormous and full of stars, more stars than she had ever seen over Lancaster County. And all down the eastern side of it, the northern lights were moving.

 Long pale curtains of green and white, folding and unfolding without a sound. The snow in the yard gave back their light. Everything was faintly green. the bunk house roof, the pines, her own hands. She leaned on the log wall with her shawl pulled tight and watched them. She had thought she would cry out here where nobody could see. She did not.

 She was too tired even for that. She only stood and breathed the cold air, which smelled of snow and pine and wood smoke, and let it go all the way down. The door opened beside her and Eli came out and pulled it shut behind him and stood beside her against the wall. He was quiet. He looked up at the lights.

 “My father used to say those were the old ones,” Katarina said at last dancing. His grandmother told him back in the old country. “What old ones?” He never said. I think he didn’t know. She pulled the shawl tighter. I used to lie in the bank barn on winter nights when I was small and watch them through the hay door, and I was frightened to death of them.

 I thought they’d come down. And now, now I’m too tired to be frightened of anything. He laughed under his breath. Then he was quiet a while. You were right, Eli said. From the first day, about all of it. You stood in my yard with 30 men laughing at you and you were right. And I sent you to the cellar. He kept his eyes on the sky.

 I’ve been thinking all night while I was holding those men up so you could feed them. That if it had been my camp, if you’d listened to me and sent the barrels back on the wagon. My men would be in those bunks. My herd would be balling at the stacks. He stopped. I’d have lost everything and I’d never have known why.

 You didn’t send them back. No. He turned his head and his eyes found hers in the green light. No, I didn’t. I’ll thank God for that as long as I live. She never knew who moved first. Perhaps neither of them did. His arm went round her shoulders and her head went down against the sheep skin of his coat.

 And they stood like that against the log wall of Madoo’s bunk house with the lights moving over them, not speaking until the coal drove them in. They stayed at Mcadoo’s two nights. On the morning of the third day, came over the ridge on foot through the drifts alone. He was out of breath, and he had lost his cap, and his gray hair stood up in the wind.

 He came to the bunk house and stopped on the threshold and came no farther. Las, he said, “You’d best come home.” The cellar door stood open on the north bank. It had been pried. The hasp was bent, and the staple had been levered out of the log, and the wood around it was splintered white. The snow in front of it was trampled flat.

 There were tracks down the ramp and tracks back up. the deep double ruts of something heavy being rolled inside. In the long double row of barrels on their poles, there were two gaps. Katherina stood above the ramp and stared at the gaps. She did not go down. Her legs would not take her. Sleigh bells, said quietly beside her. Last night about 2:00 in the morning, I heard them go by on the creek road and thought nothing. Then I heard them stop.

Then a good while after start again. He swallowed. I’m an old fool. [snorts] I should have got up. The tracks went from the cellar door across the yard and down the bank toward the creek. Two barrels rolled. You could see where they had gone. the wide flattened path of each one through the snow side by side and the bootprints of the men who had pushed them down the bank over the lip of the cutbank to the stock water hole below the ford.

The men had cut the hole open that morning as they did every morning. Neils had cut it. He stood by it now with his axe. And when he saw Katarina coming down the bank, he turned his face away. In the black water under the ice, turning slowly in the current, there were barrel staves, loose, sprung, floating.

 The hoops had burst when the barrels hit the ice. Around the edge of the hole, frozen into the new ice in a pale, glittering scum, was the kraut. It had spilled out of the stave barrels and gone into the water and frozen there. All of it, a winter’s worth of it, ground into the ice and the mud by the hooves of the cattle that had come down to drink in the night and trampled through it.

 Two barrels gone into the creek. Katarina sank onto the bank in the snow. She did not decide to. Her knees went and she sat. The cold came up through her skirts, and she never felt it. She looked at the black water with the staves turning in it, and the spilled crout frozen at the edge, and she thought of the October day in the hotel yard in Miles City when she had stamped it down, barrel after barrel, with her sleeves rolled up and the salt stinging in every crack of her hands.

She thought of her mother. She thought of the young man in Makadoo’s bunk house, asking if he would lose his teeth. She did not cry. She could not. It was too big for crying.  came and stood beside her. After a while, he bent down, grunting, and picked something out of the snow beside the trampled path and held it out to her.

 It was a pry bar, a short, heavy iron bar with a flattened claw at one end, the kind storekeepers use to open crates. On the handle, burned into a wrapping of leather, were two letters, a P. He dropped it, said or his man did in the dark. Katarina looked at the letters for a long time. Then she took the bar out of Mongo’s hand and held it in her lap in both of hers, and the iron was so cold it burned.

 Pedibone came up the creek road that same afternoon in his cutter with the red runners. He never came near the cookhouse. He stopped in the yard by the bunk house where the men were coming in from the stacks, and he stood up in his sleigh with his buffalo robe around him like a preacher in a pulpit, and he talked. Katarina heard it from the cook house door. Everybody did.

 Boys, said Petty Bone. Boys, it grieves me your trouble here. I heard your foreman’s down. I heard it on the road. He shook his head. I told you. I told you in October. I’ve seen it before. And now I hear your cooks been two nights at Mcados in that fever house with a bunk house full of sick men. and she’s coming back here tonight to cook your suppers with the same hands. He let that sit.

 I’m only saying you’re grown men. You’ll do as you think, right? He sat down again and gathered up his res and clucked to his horse. “Oh,” he said as though it had just come to him. “I hear some of her cabbage went into the creek last night. I’d call that a mercy.” He smiled at the bunk house door. Good day to you boys and he drove away.

 For a moment the men in the yard stood without moving, looking at one another. Then one after another. Slowly they turned toward the cookhouse. Toward Katarina standing in the door with the pry bar still in her hand. She saw it in their faces. Not all of them, but enough. She saw a big logger she had fed four times a day since October, take one step back from her threshold, and then another and look at his own hands.

 Her heart was pounding, a hard, slow drum up under her collarbone. She went inside and closed the door. Eli came down from mados at dusk riding one of the grays bear back through the drifts and he heard it all from in the barn before he ever reached the house. Katarina saw him cross the yard. She saw him stop at the bunk house.

 She saw the man come out to him, a nod of them in the blue snowlight and stand around him talking. and she saw him take his hat off and put it back on again, as men do when their hands want something to do. She set out the supper anyway. Bread, beans, bacon, coffee, the kraut in its pot. She lit the lamps.

 Nine men came in to eat. Nine of 30, and Neils, and seven others who would not look at the rest through the window. They sat together at the near end of the near table and ate in silence. And the crowd went round among them and came back empty. And got up and chocked his mark hard enough to snap the chalk. The others ate in the bunk house.

Somebody had lit a fire in the bunk house stove and was frying salt pork on it. She could smell it across the yard. Eli came in when the nine had gone. He shut the door and stood by it as on the first night with his hat in his hands. They’ve been talking, he said. I heard some of it. They’re afraid.

 He stayed where he was. Not of you. Of the fever. Pedabones got them believing there’s a fever in Mcadoo’s camp. And you’ve carried it back here on your clothes. And with Gity down, he stopped. Katarina. Half of them say that if you cook tomorrow, they’ll draw their time and walk out to Mile City. Half my crew in February with 900 to head on the creek and the hay to go down to them every day. She put down the dishcloth.

And what do you say? He stared at the floor, then at the slate, white with chalk, then at her, and his face was gray and tired and older than it had been in October. And she knew before he opened his mouth what he was going to say. I say I can’t lose the crew, Eli said. Not now. Not this month. If they walk, the herd’s gone and everything with it.

 and every man on this creek who’s ever worked for me. He turned his hat around once in his hands. There’s a freight wagon due up from Mile City on Saturday if the roads open. I want you on it. I’ll pay your wages to the end of the season and your fair and the barrels. I’ll pay for the barrels. His voice cracked. I’m sorry. God help me.

I’m sorry. She stood very still. For a moment, she could not feel anything at all. Then she felt everything at once, like cold water poured over her, and her hands began to shake so that she had to press them flat against her apron. “All right,” she said. Katarina. “All right, Mr. Harrow.

” She turned back to the wash pan. “Saturday.” He stood there a long time behind her. She did not turn around. She washed the same plate three times. At last she heard the door open and the cold come in and close and his boots go away across the yard, squeaking in the snow. Slower and slower until she could not hear them. She finished the plates.

 She scoured the pots. She wiped down the long tables and banked the range and filled the kettle for the morning because there would be breakfast to make in the morning whoever ate it. Then she went into the lean two and took her carpet bag out from under the cot and began to pack it. It did not take long. Two dresses, two aprons, a night gown, her mother’s carowway tin, the tin alarm clock.

 She stood holding the clock in both hands and listened to it tick, and the tears came at last, all at once, hot and silent, and ran down her face. had dripped off her chin onto the clock face and she let them across the yard in the bunk house. Gity was sitting up. He had been awake through all of it. He had laying on his bunk in the corner with a blanket around him and his bowl of kraut on the ledge above his head and listened to the men come in and fry their pork and talk.

 He had listened to them talk about fever and about the cabbage woman and about Miles City, and he had said nothing because it had been all he could do for 5 days to lift a spoon. Now he put his feet on the floor. Neils saw him first and got up. “Gedity, lie down, you fool.” “Give me your arm,” said Gity. Neils gave it. Ged stood.

 He stood swaying, gray-faced, with the blanket falling off his shoulders, holding on to the Swed’s arm with both hands. And the bunk house went quiet around him the way it always had when the foreman stood up. I’ll say this once, said Gity, because I haven’t the wind to say it twice. He looked around the room at them at each face in the lamplight. Fever.

 You heard him. Petty bone. Fever from the cabbage. He breathed. I’m the only man in this camp that never ate one bite of that cabbage. Not one. Not since October. You’ve all watched me not eat it. 4 months. He lifted his left hand, the knuckles still bound up in the rag she had put on them.

 And I’m the one man here that went down. Nobody said anything. I lay here 5 days, Ged said. She sat by me three nights. She never went to bed. She spooned that sour juice into me like I was a baby and I cursed her for it. And look at me now. I’m standing. He was swaying so hard that Neil’s had to put an arm around his back. You want to walk to Mile City in February? You go ahead.

But you’ll not say it’s her cabbage that sickened you. You’ll not say it in front of me. He dropped back onto his bunk hard and put his head in his hands. For a long time, nobody moved. Then who had been standing by the stove with his pipe, knocked it out on the stove lid and put it in his pocket. “Well,”  said, “I’m away to tell the boss and went out.

” Katarina had the carpet bag closed and was sitting on the cot with her hands in her lap looking at nothing when the knock came at the leanto door. It was Eli. He had not got his coat on. He had run across the yard in his shirt and there was snow in his hair. He didn’t wait for her to say come in.

 He came in and he went down on his knees on the plank floor before the cot before her and caught her two hands in his. His were freezing. told me he said what Gity said. Every word. He bent his head over her hands. I was wrong. I was a coward. I let that man talk my crew into a panic and then I let the panic talk me into putting you on a wagon.

 And you the only one on this whole creek who saw any of it coming? I’m ashamed of it. I’ll be ashamed of it as long as I live. Eli, you’re not going anywhere on Saturday. He looked up at her. His eyes were wet. Unless you want to go. And if you do, I’ll understand it and I’ll drive you myself. But I’m asking you not to. She searched his face.

 Then she pulled one hand free and put it on his cold wet hair. “Get up off the floor,” she said. “You’ll catch your death in your shirt.” He laughed, a short broken sound. He did not get up. There’s one thing more, he said. “Half my crew believes Pedabone. Half of Mcadus does. And there’s a man up the gulch who may have a fever and may not. And nobody knows what he ate.

As long as it’s petty bones word against yours, it’ll go on all winter. Every time a man coughs, he stood up at last. So, I’m going for somebody whose word they’ll take. Who? The army surgeon at Fort Kio, said Eli. They have scurvy at the forts every winter. They’ve had it since the army came into this country.

 If anybody in this territory knows what it looks like and what cures it, he does. He picked his hat up off the floor where it had fallen. I’ll leave at first light. 4 days down if the road’s open. Four back. Can you hold the camp that long? Katarina stood up. She took her carpet bag off the cot and opened it and took out her mother’s carowway tin and put it back on its shelf above the cot where it had been since October.

I can hold it, she said. He left in the dark before dawn on the bigger of the two grays with a sack of biscuits and sausage over the saddle horn and a jar of kraut buttoned inside his coat. She held the lamp up in the cook house door and watched him ride down the creek road until the dark swallowed him.

 When she turned around, the crew was crossing the yard to breakfast. Not nine of them. All of them. They came in stamping snow and blowing into their mittens and took their places on the benches without looking at her and without looking at one another. And when she set the kraut down on the near table, the big logger who had stepped back from her door the evening before took the ladle first.

 He filled his plate. He ate. Then he rose and chocked his mark on the slate and stood there a moment with the chalk in his hand. Miss Uber Holds, he said, not turning around. About yesterday. Eat your breakfast, said Katarina. It’s getting cold. He sat down and ate his breakfast. She held the camp for 9 days. Nine days of cold and snow and wind off the ridge.

 She fed 30 men three times a day and sent a sled of kraut and sprouted beans over the ridge to Macados every second morning with meals driving and perched on the barrel behind him. She rationed the barrels. She went down the cellar every night with the lantern and counted them the long row on their poles with the two dark gaps in it and counted what was left in each and did the sums in pencil on a flower sack by lamplight and made them come out.

Harrow’s camp and Mcadoo’s camp. 56 men on what was left of 20 barrels until the grass. It could be done if nothing else went into the creek. Nothing else did. After the second night, Neils moved his blankets into the cellar and slept there across the foot of the ramp with his axe beside him and would not hear a word against it.

 On the fifth morning, McAdoo’s cook rode back with kneels to fetch the sprouted beans himself and brought word. The young tie cutter was sitting up. The sawyer, who had turned his face to the wall, was eating two bowls a day and asking for pepper. Nine of the 14 were on their feet. On the seventh day, Gity walked from the bunk house to the cook house on his own legs and lowered himself onto the bench at the far table in his old place and held out his plate.

 Katarina filled it with sausage and kraut. She kept quiet. She set it down before him and turned to go back to the range. “Miss Oberholtz,” said Gity behind her. She turned. He had got up again. He was holding on to the table edge. He went across the room slowly, the whole length of it, with every man in the cook house watching him to the slate.

 He took up the chalk, and on the empty line beside his name, where there had never been a mark since October, he made one, then another for the bowl he had eaten on his bunk. Then another, and another, until he had made one for every day she had sat by him. He put the chalk down and came back and sat down in front of his plate. “I’ll thank you to stop looking at me,” Gity said to the room. “And eat.

” Eli Harrow reached the Tongue River on the fourth evening, half frozen with the gray lame in the offleg, and the sack of biscuits long gone. The fort stood on its bench above the river with its flags stiff in the wind and its long rows of officer’s houses lit up yellow along the parade ground and the smoke from a 100 chimneys going up straight into the cold.

He had not seen so many lit windows in one place since the fall. He sat the tired horse beside the parade ground and gazed at them, and for a moment he could not think why he had come. Then he thought of her on the cot with the carpet bag in her lap. He got down. The post hospital was a long frame building at the far corner of the row.

 The orderly at the door told him the surgeon was at supper and could not be disturbed. Eli said he would wait. He waited two hours on a bench in the cold hallway with his hat on his knees, smelling carbolic and boiled coffee, listening to a soldier cough somewhere behind a door until a thin gray spectacled man in shirt sleeves came down the hall with a lamp and stopped beside the bench.

 “You’re the cattleman,” the man said. “They tell me you won’t go away.” “No, sir. Cahill.” He didn’t offer his hand. He looked Eli up and down. The frost on his coat, the beard, the eyes. “Well, who’s sick?” Eli told him. He told it badly. Standing up in the hallway, turning his hat, the cook and her 20 barrels, the men laughing, petty bones, peaches, and petty bones fever, the chalk marks, the sawyers in Macadoo’s bunks with their gums gone purple and their old scars opening.

Gity falling off the haystack, the barrels in the creek. He told it all out of order and went back and started again. Cahill did not interrupt him once. Afterward, the surgeon stood a long moment with the lamp in his hand. Old scars opening, he said. You saw that yourself? I saw it on my own foreman, a cut from Christmas.

 And the men who ate the cabbage? None of them. Not one, said Eli. Not one in four months. Cahill set the lamp down on the window sill. He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. Do you know how many men I had in this hospital last February with scurvy, Mr. Harrow? 41 soldiers on army rations with the anti-scorbutics coming up the river in barrels from St. Louis.

 Half of them rotten when they got here and the other half poured out on the ground by men who’d sooner eat their boots. He put his spectacles back on. And you’re telling me a hired cook in a cow camp up some creek kept 30 men sound all winter on her own sauerkraut. And a trader up there is telling them it’s poison. Yes, sir.

 10 days leave, said Cahill half to himself. I’m owed it. I’ll need a mule. I’m not riding anything that’s walked 4 days through the drifts. He lifted the lamp. Go and get something to eat, Mr. Harrow. You look worse than my patience. We leave at first light. Eli went out of the hospital into the dark and stood on the step in the cold, hat in hand, and found that his legs were shaking and sank down on the step.

 He sat there a long while under the stars amid the army’s fort with the bugle blowing tattoo over the snow and he thought of her in the cook house door with the lamp and he could not stop smiling. On the ninth day in the afternoon Neils came running up from the creek road with his coat flapping. Riders he shouted two riders and a mule. It’s the boss.

 And there’s a soldier with him. The soldier was not a soldier. He was a doctor. He climbed down off a tall army mule in the yard stiffly like a man who has been 4 days in the saddle and is 56 years old and feels every one of both. He wore a blue army great coat with a cape and a fur cap with the flaps down and steel spectacles that had frosted over.

 And he took them off and wiped them on his muffler and put them back on and looked around the yard at the men who had come out of every door to stare at him. Cahill, he said to Katarina when Eli brought him to the cookhouse door. He pulled off a glove and shook her hand. His hand was cold and hard and very clean.

 “Acting assistant surgeon, Fort Ko.” “Mr. Harrow tells me you’ve been treating scurvy with sauerkraut, Miss Oberholtz.” “I’ve been feeding men,” said Katarina. “The kraut was part of it.” “H,” said Dr. Cahill. He looked past her into the cook house at the benches and the range and the crowd pot, and his nose moved a little, the way a cooks does over another cook’s pot.

Is that coffee I smell? Mr. Harrow has not let me stop for coffee since the Tongue River. She gave him coffee and a plate of sausage and kraut and bread. He ate it all, standing by the range in his great coat, and said nothing about it. and held out the plate for more. Eli had sent Neil’s over the ridge the moment the riders were cited.

 By the next morning, they were all there in Harrow’s yard under a hard blue sky, the snow throwing the sun back so fiercely that men squinted. Makadoo brought his men across, every man of his who could walk, and three more on a hay sled, wrapped in buffalo robes propped up against each other. The young tie cutter from the first bunk was one of them, sitting up now, grinning weakly at everybody.

 Makadoo’s cook drove the sled, and Petty Bone came. Eli had sent word to him up the gulch. Tell him the army’s come up the creek, Eli had said, to see about his fever. Tell him to bring his bidters. And Pedabone had come in his cutter with the red runners with his driver beside him and three cases of bidters in the back and a smile on his face like a man invited to dinner.

 He had heard there was an army doctor. He thought he knew what an army doctor would say. He climbed down and shook hands with Cahill warmly and called him major. Surgeon said Cahill. Not major. I’m a civilian Mr. Pedibone. The army pays me by the month. Then you’ll know fever when you see it, doctor, said Petty Bone. You’ll have seen enough of it.

 He waved a gloved hand toward Makadoo’s sled. There’s your fever. Camp fever. I’ve been telling these men since October. So I hear, said Cahill. He left it there. He shrugged out of his great coat and gave it to Eli to hold and rolled up his sleeves to the elbow in the cold and walked over to where Harrow’s men stood in a long line by the cookhouse.

 The way Eli had asked them to stand. 30 men shouldertosh shoulder in the snow in their mufflers and their fur caps with their breath going up. “Open your mouth,” Cahill said to the first man. It was He opened his mouth. Cahill took hold of his chin in one hand and pressed the gums over his teeth with the ball of his thumb hard top and bottom and looked.

 Then he bent and pulled up the leg of Mongo’s trousers and examined the old man’s shin and pressed that too and let the cloth fall. Sound, said Cahill. He moved to the next man. Sound, he said, and the next sound. He went down the whole line. Every man. He pressed every man’s gums and looked at every man’s legs and at their hands and their old scars.

 And at everyone, he said the same word in the same flat, dry voice, and moved on. Neils, the big logger, the old logger with the pigtail, the cow hands who had helped with the hogs. Sound, sound, sound. The word went down the line like a man counting fence posts. Last in the line stood Gity. He was thinner than he had been in the autumn and paler, and he held himself very straight.

 Cahill studied his gums a good while, then the bandaged hand, which he unwrapped, and the cut across the knuckles, which had closed now into a clean pink line. This man has had scurvy, said Cahill recently and fairly hard. He wrapped the hand up again. He’s mending. He’ll be sound in another fortnight if he keeps on as he’s going.

 He stepped back and took in the whole line of them. 29 sound, he said, and one mendon out of 30. Then he went over to Makadoo’s sled. He did the same there. He climbed up onto the sled and bent over the three men in their robes and pressed their gums and pulled back the robes to look at their legs gently and covered them again.

 Then he got down and went along McAdoo’s men standing by the sled, 23 of them one by one as he had gone along Harrows. It went differently there. Mending, said Cahill. and mending. And this one’s still bad. Mending, though. And mending. He did not say sound once. When he was done, he stood out in the open yard in his shirt sleeves between the two crews and turned to Makadoo.

 How long have your men been eating this woman’s sauerkraut? 9 days, said Makadoo. His big red face was very still. Near enough. since she brought it across. Before that, nothing. Pedabones tins. And before that, they were sick. 14 down of 26. The rest could barely lift a fork. Cahill nodded. He looked at Petty Bone.

 There’s no fever in that camp, Mr. Pedabone, he said. There never was. Feel their foreheads. There’s no fever in the Thai camps either. I stopped there on the way up. Your Sawyer has a bad chest from sleeping by a drafty wall. And he’s getting better. He turned back to the yard to all of them. What those men had is scurvy. Land scurvy.

 It’s what a man gets when he eats nothing all winter but salt meat and flour and beans and things out of tins. His gums go and his legs and every old wound on his body opens up. I see it at the fort every February. I’ve seen it at every post on the Yellowstone. And the cure for it is fresh food. Green food, potatoes, onions, and sauerkraut.

He walked to the cookhouse door. By the door, on its end in the snow, stood an open barrel. Katarina had brought it up from the cellar that morning because Eli had asked her to. Cahill lifted the lid off it. He pushed back the plank and the stone with one hand. He reached in with his bare fingers into the cold gold brine and took out a pinch of kraut and ate it.

 He chewed it slowly, standing there in the sun with both crews watching him. Then he turned around with the lid in one hand and said it loud and plain in front of everyone. This is what the army ships to its forts against the scurvy by the barrel. Every winter this he tapped the rim of the barrel with his knuckle.

 Arrow’s men ate it all winter and every man who ate it is standing in this yard. Mcadoo’s men ate peaches and they went down and they’re getting up again on this woman’s cabbage. The single man on this place who fell sick was the one who wouldn’t eat it. He looked at Gity. Then he looked at Petty Bone. These barrels hold no fever, Mr.

 Pedabone, nor anywhere in this valley. There’s only what you sold them and what you didn’t. Nobody spoke. In all that yard, among 50 odd men, there was no sound at all but the wind in the pines on the ridge. And somewhere below among the willows, the cattle balling for hay. Then stepped out of the line. He had something in his hand.

 He walked across the trampled snow to Dr. Cahill and held it out and Cahill took it and weighed it in his palm. It was a pryar short and heavy with a claw at one end. “On the leather wrapped around the handle, two letters were burned.” “Pound it by the cellar door,” said in his slow Scott’s voice so that everybody could hear him.

 The morning after two of her barrels were rolled to the water, tracks from the cellar to the water hole. Sleigh bells on the road at 2 in the morning, he looked at Pedabone’s cutter and those tracks the next day heading off toward town. Same runners, same horse. Everyone turned and looked at Petty Bone.

 He stood by his cutter with his hand on the rail. The smile had gone off his face at last. under the square gray beard when his mouth looked small. “That’s a common enough bar,” he said. “There’s a hundred of them in this territory with your letters on it,” said Makadoo. “Anybody could burn two letters on a bar.” “I said anybody could.

” Pedibone’s driver had got down off the cutter. He was standing a little behind it, the silent man in the sheepkin cap with his split ear red in the cold. His eyes went to the pry bar in the doctor’s hand. Then to Petty Bone, then to the crowd in the yard, all of them looking at him now and at McAdoo’s sick men on their sled. He told me to, the driver said, not loud, but it carried.

 He said nobody’d know. said it’d be a mercy. Get rid of it before it poisoned anybody. He swallowed. I never knew about any scurvy. I swear it. I’d not have done it. Pettibone never glanced his way. Get in the cutter, he said. The driver did not move. Makadoo, said Pedibone, turning. His voice had gone higher. You’ve done business with me three winners. I have, said Madoo.

 and I’ll not do it a fourth. He pulled off his fur cap and turned it around in his big red hands. You sold my boys peaches at three prices and told them the cure was poison and sold them whiskey for the sickness you gave them. I stood in my own yard and let you. I’ll carry that. He put his cap back on.

 Take your bids, Petty Bone, and get off Harrow’s land. Petty Bone looked around the yard once from face to face. Nobody moved. He got up into his cutter alone and took the res. He turned it in a tight circle in the snow, runners hissing, and drove out of the yard onto the creek road, and the sound of the sleigh bells went away down the valley, thin and bright, and nobody went after it.

 His driver stayed where he had been left, capping his fist. After a while, Mcadoo went over and said something to him. Lo. The man nodded. He went and perched on the side of Madoo’s sled among the sick men and put his face in his hands. Eli came across the yard. Then he came to the barrel where Katarina stood.

 He had a leather purse in his hand, and he opened it, and he counted money out of it into her palm. Gold and paper. in front of both crews the way wages are paid. “Katarina Oberholtz,” he said loud, “So the whole yard would hear it. For 20 barrels of sauerkraut and the salt and the freight, the whole of your summer’s wages back with my thanks and the thanks of every man on this creek.

” She looked at the money in her hand. She could not see it. It had gone blurred. “I don’t want it,” she said. I know you don’t, said Eli. That’s why you’re getting it. Somebody in the line began to clap. It was Neil’s. He clapped his big mittened hands together alone at first, a hollow woolly sound, and then did. And then the old man with the pigtail, and then the whole line of Harrows men and all of mados that could stand.

 And the three on the sled beat their hands on the buffalo robes, and the noise of it went up into the hard blue sky, and the cattle among the willows stopped balling to listen. Dr. Cahill put the lid back on the barrel. He rolled down his sleeves. Miss Oberholtz, he said, I’ve been 4 days on a mule.

 Is there any more of that sausage? That evening, she cooked for both camps. She cooked sausage, all that was left in the smokehouse, and pork and kraut, a whole barrel of it, heated through in the big copper wash boiler with the sausages laid in it, and brown sugar and carowway and apple until the cookhouse was so thick with steam and smell that the windows ran with water.

There was no pot in the camp big enough to serve from. So she had Neils and  scaldled out an empty barrel with boiling water and roll it to the open door, and she tipped the copper into it, steaming, and stood over it with the biggest wooden ladle in the camp. The sun had dropped low over the ridge. Its light came in through the open cookhouse door, low and gold and slanting across the snow, and lit up the steam coming off the barrel, so it hung in the doorway like gold smoke.

 Outside, in the yard, in the snow, the men of both camps were crowding up to the door with their bowls held out. Big men in fur caps and buffalo coats, dusted white, laughing, pushing each other, more than 50 of them, and more barrels emptied through the winter stood stacked along the cookhouse wall behind her in the lamplight.

Eli was first in line. He had not meant to be. The men had pushed him to the front. He stood in front of her in his sheep-skin coat with the fur collar turned up and frost in his beard, holding out his tin bowl. And she dipped the ladle deep into the barrel and brought it up heaped, crout and sausage together, dripping and steaming in the gold light.

 and she smiled at him, the whole of her round, freckled face smiling, and poured it into his bowl and dipped again and heaped it higher. He stared at her. His mouth was open. He gazed down at the bowl in his hands, overflowing and up at her like a man who had never in his life seen anything like her. “That’s not a portion,” Eli said.

“That’s half a barrel. That’s what you get, said Katarina, for sending back the peaches. Behind him, both crews laughed, and it was not the laugh from the October day when she climbed down from the freight wagon. It was nothing like it at all. Dr. Cahill stayed two days. He spent most of the first one in Makadoo’s bunk house over the ridge, going from bunk to bunk with his sleeves rolled, and most of the second in Katarina’s cookhouse, sitting by the window with a cup of coffee going cold at his elbow, asking

her questions and writing the answers in a small black book with a pencil he kept licking. How much salt to the cabbage? How long in the barrel before it was ready, whether it would keep if it froze, whether it would keep if it thawed and froze again. What she did with the brine, why she served it cold, what the beans were in the croc and how long they took to sprout and whether she had ever tried it with peas.

“My mother did peas,” Katherina said, in the spring when the beans ran out. He wrote it down. We ship it to the forts in barrels. He said, “You’d think it was gold. The trouble it takes to get it there. And half the time it comes up the river spoiled or frozen and thawed so often it’s gone to slime.

 And the men won’t eat it anyway because it smells like the rind in August.” He put his pencil down. You got 30 men to eat it all winter, Miss Oberholtz. voluntarily in a cow camp. How? She thought about it. Sausage, she said at last. It comes with its kraut or not at all. Cahill peered at her over his spectacles.

 Then he laughed a short surprised bark of a laugh, the first she had heard from him. He picked up his pencil again and wrote that down, too, and underlined it. When he rode off along the creek on his tall army mule on the third morning, he had a croc of kraut buttoned inside his great coat and a jar of sprouted beans in each pocket.

 And he turned in the saddle at the bend and lifted his fur cap to her and to the cookhouse and to the 30 men standing in the yard. The worst of the winter came after that. It came in the last week of February, a blizzard that blew for three days out of the northwest and buried the fences and the hay stacks and filled the creek bottom to the tops of the willows.

 When it stopped, the cold came down behind it, colder than anything in January. The cattle waited in the drifts along the creek, hundreds of them humped and white with frost and bald for hay. And the crew went out. Every morning in the dark, Harrow’s men trudged to the stacks with their forks on their shoulders and dug the stacks out of the drifts and pitched the hay down to the herd.

Every morning, 10 of them went over the ridge, taking turns to do the same for Makadoo’s cattle. Because McAdoo’s men were still mending and could only work half days. They came home at dark with their faces burned raw by the wind and their eyelashes frozen together and ate everything Katarina put in front of them and went to bed and got up in the dark and did it again.

 Not one of them went down. Not one. On the second day of the blizzard, when the men had been out since before light and the wind had not dropped for an hour together, Katarina filled two milk cans with hot kraut soup thick with potato and bacon and what sausage remained and wrapped them in feed sacks and went out after them.

 The stacks were lost from the yard. Everything was lost. The snow came sideways out of the northwest in a wide roar that filled her ears and her mouth and her eyes, and she walked into it bent double with a can in each hand. Following the rope, Eli had strung from the barn to the first stack in November for exactly this.

 Twice she lost her footing and went down on her knees in the drift and got up again. Once the wind took her breath clean out of her body and she stood holding the rope with her eyes squeezed shut and waited for it to give her breath back. The men were at the first stack, six of them black shapes in the white, pitching hay down to cattle she could hear and not see.

When they saw her come out of the snow, they stopped and stared as if she were a ghost. Then Neils dropped his fork and came floundering to take the cans. They drank the soup standing in the lee of the stack out of the lids of the cans, passing them hand to hand with the steam blown sideways off it the moment it came up. Nobody talked.

 There was no talking in that wind, but she saw their faces raw and red and frosted wide at the brows and their hands steady on the tin. and the old logger with the pigtail tip his head back and drain his lid and wipe his mustache on his sleeve and go back to his fork. Over the ridge, she knew McAdoo’s men, still mending, were sitting out the same wind beside their stove.

 Here, in the worst of it, hers were on their feet. She walked back to the cook house along the rope with the empty cans banging against her legs and never once felt the cold. Katarina counted them every night at supper the way her father had counted cattle into the barn. She could not help it.

 30 men on the benches eating 29 at first and then when Ged went back out to the stacks in mid-March against everybody’s advice. 30. She counted them and counted them, and every night there were 30. Every second morning, a sled went over the ridge with a barrel on it. Mcadoo’s cook meted at the top and took the barrel off it himself.

 By the middle of March, he told Neils, there was not a man in Makadoo’s bunk house still in his bunk, and the lad from the first bunk was eating four bowls a day and had begun to sing. The cellar emptied. She went down with the lantern every night and counted the barrels. 17 when Cahill left, then 15, then 12. She rationed them and Neil slept across the ramp’s foot and no more barrels found the water. Then nine, then six.

The Chinook came on the 21st of March. It arrived in the dark. She woke in the leanto to a strange sound. A steady, soft, pattering, dripping sound all around the cookhouse, and she lay a long time in the dark, trying to understand it before she knew it was water. The eaves were running, the icicles were letting go.

 When she opened the door at dawn, the wind in her face was warm, warm as May, and it smelled of wet earth and pine and something green. In 3 days, the snow in the bottomland had sunk into itself and gone gray and full of holes. In a week, the south slopes of the ridge were bare, brown, and steaming in the sun, and the cattle had found them.

 They went up the slopes in long strings, 900 head, and put their heads down and did not come back for hay. Eli came to the cook house at noon on the last day of March. He came in without knocking and stood by the door, and his face was so strange that for a moment she thought something terrible had happened. “They’re through,” he said. Eli, the herd, they’re through.

All of them near enough. I’ve been out since daylight counting. He dropped onto the near bench as though his legs had given out and put his hands over his face. 900 head Katarina. Every cow I own and everyone I owe for. They’re up on the south slope eating grass. She sat beside him. She had no words and did not look for any.

After a time he took his hands down, and he had been crying and did not hide it, and she put her arms around him in the empty cook house, and he put his head down on her shoulder like a tired man coming home. Petty Bone tried the Thai camps in April. Word came by Mcadus’s cook, who had it from the teamsters on the freight road.

 The story had gone down the creek ahead of him, like fire down a fuse. At the first tie camp in the gulch, the boss came out and stood in the road ahead of the red cutter with his arms folded and said he wanted nothing that came off that wagon and never would. At the second, they would not open the gate.

 At the third, the crew filed out and lined the road and spoke never a word to him, only stood there and watched him go by. He tried Miles City. The McQueen house would not buy from him. The hotel on the corner would not. Dr. Cahill had been talking to the officers at the fort, and the officer’s wives had been talking in town.

 And by the time Pedabone came down the river row with his wagon of tins, everybody from the post trader to the Chinese laundryman knew the story of the staved barrels and the bar with his letters on it. He sold the wagon in Mile City, the Teamster said, for less than it was worth. He sold the tins to a freighter bound for the Black Hills.

 And in the last week of April, he took the steamboat down the Yellowstone from the landing at Mile City, the first boat of the season, with two trunks and his buffalo coat, and did not come back. Nobody on the creek ever saw him again. Nobody on the creek ever asked where he had gone. His driver stayed. McAdoo had taken him on at the Thai camp to cut wood, and he worked hard and did not talk much.

 And in May, he walked across on a Sunday and knocked at the cookhouse door, holding his cap. “He had come,” he said, to ask if he could help her plant the cabbages. Katarina studied him a long while. “Can you use a spade?” she said. “Yes, miss. then you can help me plant the cabbages. They planted them in May in the creek bottom below the cellar where the soil was black and deep and had never had a plow in it.

 Eli had it broken for her with the graze. Garity turned the first furrow himself, walking behind the plow with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and the clean pink line across his knuckles. And the men came out on Sunday afternoons when there was no work and hoed. Not because she asked them, because they wanted to. Two acres, said Ged, leaning on his hoe and looking at the long rows of little blue green seedlings in the black earth.

 Two acres of cabbage on a cow ranch. He wagged his head. My cousin would turn in his grave. Your cousin’s alive and cooking in deer lodge, said He’d turn in it anyway, said Gity. Late in May, when the cabbages were planted and the calves were branded and the grass was up to the fetlocks on the south slope, Eli said there ought to be a supper for both camps.

 He said, mcados and ours, one table. There isn’t a table in the territory long enough for both camps. Then I’ll build one, said Eli. He built it in the yard under the cottonwoods by the creek, out of planks from the saw pit laid across saw horses, three lengths of them end to end. So long that you could not hear what was said at one end of it from the other.

 The men of both camps came on the last Saturday in May. Makadoo’s crew walked across on foot in their Sunday shirts singing with McAdoo leading them and his cook driving a wagon behind with three pies and a keg of beer and the lad from Bergen riding the tailboard fat again and grinning. Dr.

 Cahill rode up from the fort on his mule uninvited and claimed to be passing. Nobody believed him. Everybody was glad. Katarina had been cooking for 3 days. She had killed the fatted hog and the one after it or and the driver had behind the smokehouse at dawn clean and quick. And she had made sausage until her arms achd and hung it in the smoke over green applewood for two days.

 She had made bread, 40 loaves, tall and crusty. She had made potato salad with vinegar and bacon from the first new potatoes of the year, no bigger than walnuts. She had made a pan of sprouted beans with onions, the first green onions from a row Garity had planted by the seller on his own. She had made dumplings.

She had made pie. and she had gone down into the cellar on the Friday night with the lantern alone and stood looking at the long double row of poles where the 20 barrels had stood since October. There was one left. It stood by itself at the far end of the row on its two poles with its plank and its stone. She had kept it back.

 She had not said so to anybody. She knelt down beside it on the dirt floor and put her hand flat on the lid as she had done in the yard on the October day with the men laughing and she stayed there a while. Then she got up and went and found and Neil’s and they rolled it up the ramp together into the sunlight for the last time.

They set it at the top end of the planks on its end with the lid off. She heated the crowd in the copper with the sausages with apple and sugar and carowway until the whole creek bottom smelled of it. And then she tipped it steaming back into its own barrel and stood over it with the ladle and served. They came to her one by one, Harrow’s men and McAdoo’s men together, mixed up in one long line, in their clean shirts with their tin plates held out.

 She filled every plate. Sausage and kraut and a dumpling on top. And they went down the table to the bread and the potatoes and the pie. first, then Neil’s, then the old Frenchman with the pigtail who kissed her hand. Then Gity, who did not kiss her hand, but stood a while before her with his plate and said, “Thank you, Miss Oberholes.

” quietly and meant everything by it. Then McAdoo’s cook. Then the tie cutter who asked for extra and got it. Then the driver last of Madoo’s turning his cap. Who would not look at her? And whom she gave the biggest sausage in the barrel. The sun went down behind the ridge. Somebody lit lanterns and hung them in the cottonwoods.

Somebody brought out a fiddle and somebody else a mouth organ. and the two of them did not agree about the tune, but played anyway. The men sat along the planks, eating and drinking and shouting to each other down the length of it, 50 odd of them, and not one of them sick. Dr.

 Cahill got to his feet down the planks with a mug of McAdoo’s beer. “I’ve been in this territory 11 years,” he said. “And I’ve seen strong men go down for one of a cabbage. Not this winter. Not on this creek. He lifted his mug toward the barrel where Katarina stood with her ladle. To the cook. To the cook, said 50 voices, and drank. She could not answer them.

 She waited by the barrel with the ladle in her hand and her face burning. “Eli came last. He had been helping at the fire. He came up the long table in his shirt sleeves with his tin plate. the last man in the line and stopped facing her across the barrel in the lantern light and held out the plate. She looked in the barrel.

 There was a little left at the bottom. Kraut and one last sausage in the gold brine and that was all. 20 barrels and this was all that remained of them. She scraped it all out. She put it on his plate. He glanced down at it, then at the barrel, empty with the lantern light shining on the wet staves inside, and he made no move toward the bread.

“Katarina,” he said. The long table had gone quiet near the head of it. had stopped with his fork in the air. Neils had put down his beer down the planks where they could not hear. The fiddle went on, and the men there went on shouting. Eli put his plate down on the table. On the first day, he said, “When you came up the road with your barrels on the wagon and 30 men laughing at you and petty bone passing out peaches, I stood in that yard and gave you my ruling.

” His eyes went to the empty barrel between them. “One barrel can stay. The rest go back at your cost.” “I remember,” said Katarina. That was the worst thing I’ve ever said to anybody, Eli said. And the stupidest. And I’ve been thinking since February how I’d take it back. He took a breath. So here it is.

 The barrel can stay, Katarina. It’s empty and it can stay. And I’m asking if you’ll stay with it. Not as the cook, as my wife. Just then she could not see him at all. The lanterns in the cottonwoods had gone to gold smears. You’re asking me, she said, over a barrel of sour cabbage. Over the last one, said Eli. Seemed right.

 She put down the ladle. Yes, she said. Yes, Eli, I’ll stay. The shout that went up around the barrel reached the far end and the fiddle stopped. And then everybody was on their feet and shouting without knowing why. And then knowing why and shouting louder, Neils threw his hat into the cottonwoods and it did not come down.

 sat with his fork still in the air and tears running down into his gray mustache and did not wipe them. Ged stood up and began very solemnly to clap. Eli came round the barrel. He took her face in his two hands, the rough red hands of a cattleman who had pitched hay all winter, and he kissed her there beside the empty barrel with both camps watching, and she kissed him back.

They were married in June in Mile City by a Lutheran pastor who had a German wife, and asked afterward if there would be kraut at the wedding supper. There was. The cabbages grew all that summer in the black earth of the creek bottom. By August they were as big as a man’s head, packed in their rose like green cannonballs, blue with bloom in the early morning and shining with dew.

Mcadoo crossed over to look at them and stood beside the patch cap in hand and never once laughed. “I’ll want to share those,” he said. You’ll have to shred them yourself, said Katarina. I’ll send you 10 men, said Madoo in a barrel maker. In October, the whole of both camps shredded cabbage for 3 days at long tables in the yard under the cottonwoods on slicers as long as a door that Eli had made for her out of planks and old scythe blades, the way the slicers had been on her mother’s farm.

The air was full of the smell of cut cabbage, green and peppery and cold. She salted it handful by handful by feel the way her mother had, and the men stamped it down in the barrels with wooden stompers till it swam in its own juice and sang. There were 40 barrels that year. They went down into the cellar on the north bank on the first day of the first snow.

One at a time, walking backward down the ramp with the weight on his chest and kneels behind and Eli behind him. Katarina stood by the cellar door in the falling snow and counted them in. Nobody laughed at a single barrel. And when the last one was on its poles, waited and covered, she went back up to the cook house with her husband and her crew behind her and put the coffee on and fed the men who were still standing.

 All of them.