“Problem?” I asked.

“Just wishing I was home. Dad and Maggie will be having a time getting feed to any stock that got caught out in the fields.”

“The animals won’t come to the barn on their own?”

“They might not be able to,” he said. “It depends on how deep the snow is, where they are, and on how much the cold has sapped their strength.”

“But they’ll survive?”

“Depends,” he said again.

“On how soon they get food?”

“On that, and on when this cold breaks. “When it’s down twenty or thirty below like this, it’s tough on creatures.”

The temperature fell even further Sunday night. Too uncomfortable to sleep, I huddled in my bed and tried to think how I could describe such cold to Beatty.

The best I could come up with was to tell her to think about the difference between a morning just chilly enough for frost to form and a day when heat shimmered above the airport tarmac.

I’d tell her to imagine that same difference, only this time to subtract sixty or seventy degrees from the freezing point instead of adding to it.

Lately I’d been doing that: trying to think how I could explain this or that about Montana to Beatty.

Or, if it was a Texas thing that crossed my thoughts, how I might explain it to Maggie.

I kept the girls in two opposite corners of my mind, where I didn’t have to explain them to each other. It wasn’t the best arrangement, but truth be, I didn’t want either of them to move out.

Which was maybe one reason, anyway, why I still hadn’t written to Beatty.

Monday morning, which was still bitter cold, I was out with a shoveling crew when a bulky figure appeared on the lane into camp. I looked and looked again, because he seemed to be walking on top of the snow.

Then, when he got closer, I saw the long snowshoes that he swung wide with each stride. I’d never seen any before, and immediately I wished I had some.

“Where’s the camp commander?” he asked us, his words muffled by a thick scarf wound around his face.

I explained about the staff being gone. “I’m one of the junior leaders,” I said. “Can I help?”

“Owen Schieling says you’ve a bulldozer out here. We need you boys to open up some of the back roads so folks can get to their livestock.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ve got a dozer for the conservation work we’ll be doing. But I don’t know as anybody knows how to operate it yet.”

“I probably can,” a usually quiet fellow named Swen Amonson volunteered. “My dad does roadwork and has shown me some.”