High Country

The food ran low in the high country the way she had always known it would, the buckets down to a skin of gray powder in the bottom and the macaroni long gone and the salt she guarded like the last of a fortune, and she understood one cold morning, doing the arithmetic she never stopped doing, that they were going to have to eat the mountains or the mountains were going to eat them.

She had not hunted a big animal since the doe, that bad winter at the camp when she had killed a thing she could not carry and lost half of it to the coyotes and learned the lesson of her own smallness. But she was not at the camp now, and the arithmetic was different, and the biggest piece of what was different was walking beside her naming the hawks. Henry was ten and getting stronger on the road every week, hardening the way she had hardened, and the cold up here was a friend for once instead of an enemy, because the cold would keep meat, would freeze it hard and hold it, so that a thing you killed did not have to be eaten in a race against the rot but could be cached and carried and drawn down over weeks. She could take a big animal now. She had the cold to keep it and a second pair of hands to work it and a cart to haul it. What she had lacked at the camp she had gained on the road, and what she had gained was the difference between starving and not.