In mid-January the great snows began. If winter had seemed something of an ordeal in December, it was something else now. The day began with feeding the birds—Christina was ordering a hundred pounds at a time, and sometimes the delivery van trundled up the hill long after dark. It was bitterly cold. The Ark proved less windtight than they had thought, and Nick spent a day lining the cracks of the windows and tacking felt strips under doors. Cornelius waited impatiently for an hour Ed Taggart could spare for cribbage, but Ed was often out plowing all night. Now Christina began to understand why Ellen dreaded the winter and the snow. At first it was all excitement and gaiety, and getting plowed out and movable was a kind of game against the elements. But as more and more snow fell, the old heaps towered along the roads. Getting down to the village, one drove through a labyrinth of white walls six or eight feet high on each side of the road. Every now and then Christina experienced a bad moment of claustrophobia, as if they were being buried alive by inches. She learned to have plenty of food stored away. Twice they were not plowed out for forty-eight hours.

But the rugged weather had one positive element. She and Cornelius felt more vividly than ever what those Civil War years must have been like for the women, old men, and children left behind to meet these hard winters alone. If someone was ill, it meant harnessing up and driving, sometimes through a blizzard, to the doctor down in the village, and hauling him up out of bed. Had there even been a doctor? But Ellen reassured them about that at one coffee hour, for, actually, he had lived in her house, a Dr. Fitzsimmons, known as “Dr. Fitz.” His stable boy lived over the horses, and when Dr. Fitz was called, the boy harnessed up while the old doctor got into pants, boots, and a coat. Dr. Fitz was much loved, but he enjoyed a little nip, and especially on his way to a hard case there was the risk that his sled might turn over en route—as it once had, with all the medicine bottles strewn about on the snow, so the story went, and the horse galloping off in a panic. In those days a doctor had to be prepared to operate or diagnose there and then, without the help of X rays. And perhaps it was not too surprising that Dr. Fitz needed to feel a certain fire in his stomach.