VI
Guy Romaine wore an old-fashioned sheepskin jacket, sheepskin chaps, and elkhide mittens with woolen liners. His horse trotted easily through the decimeter and a half of snow. After the storm and the three days of arctic cold that had followed, it was good to get out of the cabin and move around. The midmorning sun was bright, and the temperature promised to rise above freezing.
He saw cattle grazing near the fence, pawing the snow, and turned his horse in that direction. He made a point of cutting fences to give livestock more freedom of movement. A lot were likely to die before spring, if the winter was at all bad, but if they could wander around freely, moving ahead of the storms, feeding on bared south slopes and taking shelter in canyons, they'd stand a lot better chance. And so would he: the more cattle got through this first winter, the better the hunting would be through the years to come.
Some distance ahead, he saw something hanging on the fence. He trotted over to investigate, and sat looking down at a frozen bundle of snow-covered rags half on the ground, shirt and trousers still held by the barbs, and torn by the weight of the rigid body. He breathed deeply, a breath of emotion that was three parts sadness and one of disgust, and wished he'd come along a few days sooner. A waste, a waste, he thought. There are so few of us. I could have taught him. Leaning down with the wire cutters, he clipped the strands to form a gap, then rode on, the cattle shying as he passed, less concerned at a man on horseback than if he'd been on foot.
He heard distant crows off to the west. The view in that direction was magnificent, the jumbled crest of the Front Range silhouetted sharply white against the clear blue sky. Might as well just cut fences today, he decided. He wasn't going to Denver, even though Mary and Jeanette wanted him to. Whoever might have been left there, after the Plague had run its course, would be gone now, one way or another. When the power went off, they'd either left or died, and if they'd stayed that long, it would have been too late to leave.
He followed a fence transverse to the first, leaning down with the cutters now and then, and rode his horse out of a draw. Ahead, a long gentle slope stretched down to a frozen creek lined with cottonwoods and backed by the first hogback. And empty of humans; that was the norm now. He'd grown up on a Wyoming ranch and had always liked being alone, which was one reason he'd become a wildlife biologist. But now he wanted to find other people, not for company so much as to group together for mutual help and security, and to provide a bigger gene pool.
The sound of a rifle cracked across the snow, startling man and horse, and the crows paused in their cawing, to resume more energetically a moment later. After half a minute there was another shot, and this time his ears assigned a good bearing to the sound. Eyes alert, he thumped the horse's sides with his heels and trotted southwest toward the creek.
* * *
They were in a break in the hogback, a boy and a girl, both riding. A rope was attached with half hitches to the boy's saddlehorn, its other end looped around the heels of a dead calf; the calf left a bright crimson trail in the snow. They didn't see Guy Romaine until he hailed them; then the boy sat watchfully, a trifle sullenly perhaps, the rifle across his horse's withers, not saying anything as the man rode up to them.
"Morning," Romaine said. "Groceries?"
"That's right."
A big thirteen, Romaine decided, or maybe fourteen, no more; his voice hadn't changed yet. The girl he judged at no more than eleven. Surviving alone, by the looks of it. He sensed the boy's distrust. "How'd you two get along through the cold weather?"
"All right. We're getting along," the boy answered.
The girl looked at Guy and decided. "He made a tiny little log cabin," she said, "with dirt piled against it to keep the wind out, and plastic over the roof, with poles to hold it down. We've got kind of a fireplace, too, but the roof leaks when it rains or the snow melts, and the cowhide door lets wind in."
She paused to look at the boy, who was scowling now, his face flushed.
He looked at the boy with different eyes, impressed. That had taken some thought, as well as strength and persistence. The natural tendency would be to hole up in a house somewhere and freeze. "Built your own cabin, eh? Well I'll be darned!"
The boy softened slightly. "Not a very good one, I guess, but I've got ideas now to build a better one. We're learning. Another year and we'll get along good."
"Looks like you're not doing half bad now: a place to hole up through storms, and meat for the table. How'd you like to learn to soften hides and tan leather?"
Despite himself, the boy's interest showed.
"After I built my shack," Romaine went on, "I hauled in a bunch of books from the university library in Boulder. Things like Edible Plants of Colorado, hobby books on tanning and blacksmithing—things like that. If you two would like to live neighbors to us, I'd be glad to help you build a new cabin. Then we could take those books and learn to do a lot of stuff."
While Romaine looked tactfully back down the canyon, the boy gathered his feelings and looked at the girl. Her yearning was obvious. He nodded to her.
"Reckon I'd like that," he answered. "My name is Bill and hers is Celia."
The man reached across and gripped the thin grimy hand that extended toward him. "Glad to know you, Bill, Celia. Mine is Guy. I think we're going to do real well together."
the beginning