8. Kirk
KIRK
Iwake up before the light does.
That's normal. That's always been normal, the body dragging itself back to consciousness in the hour before dawn when the cold is at its worst and the fire needs feeding and there's nobody else to do it.
I've woken up this way for years, in tents and forward operating bases and eventually this cabin, always in the same way, fast and complete, no foggy middle ground between sleep and awake.
This morning is different because there is weight on my chest.
I don't move. I take stock the way I was trained to, quiet assessment before action, and what I find is this: Stella Pincot has her cheek pressed against my sternum, her left hand fisted in my shirt, her knees tucked up and her entire small body curled against my side like she grew there.
Sometime in the night my right arm came under her and my left came over and she is wrapped up in both of them and I am holding her the way you hold something you're afraid of losing in the dark.
I don't move for longer than I should.
The fire has dropped to coals behind the wall.
I can feel the temperature difference already, the air in the room going sharp and mean .
The dog is still at the foot of the bed, a warm, solid weight against my feet, and outside the storm is still working, that low, relentless grind of wind against the north face of the ridge, the kind of wind that means the temperature dropped overnight and will keep dropping.
I should get up. I have a list in my head that starts with the woodstove and ends with a structural check of the storage shed roof before the snow load gets critical, and every minute I stay horizontal is a minute I'm behind.
I stay horizontal another two minutes.
Her hair is under my chin. It smells like my soap, pine and woodsmoke, and something underneath that is just hers, something warm and slightly sweet, and her breathing is slow and absolutely untroubled.
She makes a sound, small and low, when I shift my weight experimentally, and tightens her fist in my shirt, and I go still again.
This is a problem.
I know exactly what kind of problem it is.
I knew it was going to be a problem the moment I carried her through the snow and her frozen fingers found my lapel and held on.
A woman like that, all that brightness packed into five feet and two inches, with those hazel eyes that go wide at everything and that mouth that never stops, that never stops even in the dark, that talked me into answering a question I haven't answered for anyone in years.
A woman like that in a man like me's bed is a very specific kind of problem, and I am not equipped for it, and I knew that when I wrapped both arms around her and held on.
Didn't stop me doing it.
I move now because I have to. Slow, careful, the way you move when there's something fragile involved.
I ease my right arm out from under her and she shifts, makes another sound, and I freeze again until her breathing levels back out.
Then I lift my left arm, and she rolls slightly, and I put one of the folded quilts in against her so the warmth doesn't leave all at once, and I sit up on the bed and put my feet on the cold floor.
She doesn't wake up. Good. That's good. I don't know what my face is doing right now and I'd rather she not see it.
I pull on my thermal henley in the dark, find my flannel by feel, get my socks and boots on with the practice of a man who's done it without light more times than he can count.
I look back at her once, just once. She's burrowed into the quilt, her copper hair spread out across the pillow, and she looks completely at peace, and I look at her for three seconds and then I turn around and go feed the woodstove.
The fire comes back fast. Good bone-dry oak that I split in November, the stuff that catches and holds, and I get it going and add two larger pieces and shut the door and stand there with my hands braced against the shelf above it, watching the flicker through the grate.
Barnaby comes and sits on my foot. I reach down without looking and scratch behind his ear.
"Don't," I tell him.
He leans harder into my hand.
"She's leaving when the road opens."
He makes a sound.
"That's not an argument," I say, and go put the kettle on.
By the time I've got the stove heated for cooking and the kettle going and the lantern lit, the sky outside has moved from black to that particular bruised grey that means dawn is somewhere behind the cloud cover.
The snow is still coming. I can see it in the lantern-light through the small window above the kitchen basin, driving sideways off the ridge, piling deeper against the north wall.
Two feet overnight at least. The woodpile outside the east door is going to be buried.
I pull on my outer layers. Heavy wool sweater over the flannel, then the canvas work coat, then my gloves and my hat. I move quietly. The bedroom door is still open and I can hear her breathing, slow and even, and I ease the cabin's rear door open against the wind's resistance and step out into it.
The cold hits like a fist. Twenty below, maybe colder.
The kind of cold that closes your throat for the first breath.
I've been breathing air like this for enough winters that my body knows what to do, pull the scarf up over the nose, breathe shallow until the body adjusts, keep moving.
The path to the woodpile is invisible under a clean foot and a half of new snow.
My boots sink with every step, the snow packing in hard around my shins, and I find the woodpile by memory more than sight, the shape of the tarpaulin under the white bulk of it.
The axe is buried to its handle in the chopping stump. Good. I always leave it there. I pull it free, feel the familiar weight of it settle into my palm, and get to work.
Splitting wood in deep cold is its own particular discipline.
The cold makes the wood brittle and the wood splits cleaner, but the cold also makes the hands slower and the footing treacherous, and the snow has gotten into everything, into the bark and the grain of the uncovered pieces, and you have to account for all of it.
I work with the rhythm I've built over years, set the piece, find the grain, let the axe do the work, use the weight and the arc rather than brute force.
Split, stack. Split, stack. The steam off my shoulders rises and disappears in the driving wind.
I don't think about her.
I think about the supply shed. I think about the roof load and whether the secondary beam I sistered in last March is going to hold another forty pounds of snow.
I think about the ham radio and whether Old Man Miller will have any update on the road schedule.
I think about the fact that my emergency kerosene supply is two months older than I'd like and the seal on one of the cans was not as tight as it should have been.
I split more wood than I need to.
Inside the cabin, Stella is awake.
I don't know this yet. What I know is the cold and the axe and the work.
What she tells me later, in the way she tells me things, fast and sideways and with her hands moving, is that she woke up when the rear door closed and lay there for a moment cataloguing the sounds , the fire, the dog's breathing, the storm, and when she figured out where she was and how she'd gotten here and whose shirt she was wearing and what side of the bed was warm and what side was cold, she did not, she says, spend any meaningful amount of time thinking about why the warm side was warm.
What I know is that from the kitchen window, you can see the woodpile and the chopping area at the east corner of the property. I know this because I built the cabin and I know every line of sight in it.
I find this out later.
Right now I'm working.
The axe is heavy and the morning is brutal and I've built up a sweat under the canvas coat that is simultaneously making me warm and making me cold, and I'm reaching for the next piece of the stack when my right boot comes down on a patch of ground where the new snow over the frozen ground is thinner than it looks, just a skim of powder over solid black ice, and the boot goes out.
It happens fast.
The boot slides, my weight shifts wrong, and I'm already mid-swing, the axe already in motion, and there is a single instant where my body understands exactly what's about to happen and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it.
My left arm comes up in reflex, gets in front of the arc.
The axe blade skates across my left forearm.
I go down hard on one knee. My right hand catches the chopping stump and stops me from going fully flat. The axe hits the snow.
I stay there for a moment with my knee in the snow and my hand on the stump and the wind driving hard into the side of my face.
The arm doesn't hurt yet. That's always how it is.
I know the cut is bad before the pain arrives because I can feel the warm wet at my sleeve, and in this temperature, the fact that I can feel warmth at all means it's significant.
I pull my glove off with my teeth and push the sleeve back and look at it.
Deep. Not the artery, if it were the artery I'd know it, but deep enough, a clean four-inch line across the outside of my forearm opening steadily. The cold will slow it some. I shove my gloved hand against it, get myself up off my knee, collect the axe, and walk back to the cabin.
I leave a trail in the snow. Each footstep, a red punctuation mark in the white.
I open the rear door with my shoulder and step inside and what I find is Stella standing at the kitchen basin in my oversized wool socks and my flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her hair an extraordinary disaster, holding a spatula.
She's found the eggs. She's made a start on something, and the room smells like it, warm and domestic in a way that hits me before I can prepare for it.