Thank you for visiting Facebook. We know we left off at a difficult time for us to process. What you're about to read is the full story of what we experienced. The truth behind it all.
Mara moved with the casual efficiency of a woman who knew what the mountain climate could do to the unprepared. She locked the goat barn, dragged a final load of split pine wood onto the porch, checked the shutters, and was about to open the heavy oak door when she heard him.
At first he thought it was a manifestation of the wind.
Then it returned, thin and hoarse beneath the growing howl. A horse. Not the constant snorting of an animal seeking shelter, but the raw, terrified cry of something trapped and frightened. Mara froze, one hand on the latch. Snow was already streaking sideways across the clearing, whitening the ground in violent streaks. Any sensible person would have closed the door. Any sensible person would have told themselves that perhaps they were wrong.
But healers rarely maintain clarity when drawn to darkness.
He grabbed his buffalo hide coat from the coat rack, covered his mouth and nose with a scarf, grabbed a lantern and a coil of rope, and stepped out onto the porch into the storm.
The cold came like a slap.
In seconds, her skirts were soaked to the hem. The wind whipped her shoulders, as if trying to turn her around. She surrendered to the force of the wind and followed the shouts down the slope, toward the path on the ridge. The world had narrowed to a shifting whiteness and the flickering amber circle of her lantern. Pine trees appeared and disappeared. Rocks appeared beneath her boots like whispered threats at the last moment.
When he reached the edge of the ravine, he saw it.
A wagon had gone off the road and crashed halfway down the slope between two boulders. A wheel spun uselessly in the air. The horse, a bay gelding with frozen foam on its neck, was still entangled in the reins, struggling against the broken pieces. Mara tied the rope to a pine tree at the top of the ridge and began the descent, her boots slipping, the branches scraping her coat. By the time she reached the bottom, her fingers were numb, despite her gloves.
“Easy,” he shouted to the horse, though the wind tore the word to pieces.
She cut the ropes with her knife. The gelding staggered free, shaking so hard his sides shook, but he was alive.
Then he turned to the shadow under the overturned wagon and saw the man.
He was leaning against the roots of a pine tree, partially sheltered by the snow. At first she thought he was dead. His face was a pale bluish-white in the lantern light, his dark hair caked with ice, his eyelashes covered in frost. He wore only a soaked cotton shirt. No coat. No hat. No gloves.
Then Mara understood why.
His heavy wool coat was wrapped around two small bodies huddled against his chest.
She knelt down so quickly that the snow soaked her dress to her knees. Lifting the hem of her coat, she saw two little girls staring at her with huge dark eyes. Twins, perhaps five years old. Their cheeks were chapped and red, their curls damp with melted snow, their little hands clutching the frozen shirt of the man who held them, even when they were unconscious.
A child reached out to Mara with trembling fingers.
“Daddy won’t wake up,” she whispered.
For a suspended moment, Mara felt her heart stop with compassion. The man had taken off his coat during a blizzard because hypothermia had tricked him into feeling warm. He had given his last warmth to the girls.
He pressed two fingers to her throat.
A heartbeat responded, weak and irregular, but present.
"Not today," Mara said vehemently, addressing both death and the storm. "You won't have it today."
Bringing them back up the ravine should have been impossible. Mara knew it even before starting. The slope was slippery, the snow was getting deeper, the light was fading. Yet impossibility has little influence on a woman who has determined there will be survivors.
He tore planks from the wrecked wagon, tied them together with rope like a crude sled, and, clenching his teeth, rolled the man onto it. He tucked the girls one at a time under his coat while he fastened the makeshift harness around his waist. The first climb nearly brought her to her knees. The second took her breath away. By the third, she stopped counting. She simply leaned forward, dug her boots into the mountain, and pulled.
The twins didn't cry. Perhaps they were too scared, or too cold, or too exhausted. Once, as Mara dragged the sled a few more meters, one of them asked in a faint voice, "Are we going to die?"
"No," Mara said, though the wind tried to drown out the word. "Not as long as I have hands."
It took over an hour to cover a distance that on a clear day would have taken ten minutes. But finally the cabin appeared from the gloom, the golden glow of the lamp filtering through the shutters like a promise. Mara dragged the sled over the threshold, kicked the door shut behind her, and the sudden silence was so absolute it rang in her ears.
Then the healer in her took over.
