His nose and ears felt like Popsicles by the time he made it to the barn. He was wearing gloves, but his hands were stiff, and he had trouble sliding the barn door open enough to get inside. Unfortunately, it wasn’t any warmer than the outside.
“But at least it’s dry and out of the wind,” Cody told himself as he removed his cowboy hat and brushed snow from it on the way to the tack room. Bits of snow sifted under the collar of his mustard yellow work coat and down the back of his neck.
The tack room door was already open, and dry wood was stacked neatly in the corner, which, otherwise, was a mess. He threw the stove door open and shoved several sticks of kindling inside, and then stacked three sticks of firewood on top of it. Everything was ready to start a fire, but he didn’t have a lighter or matches, so he went in search of something to light it. He found rusty screws stored in peanut butter jars, several cans of beans, tuna fish, and chicken, a container of cornmeal and one of flour, but no matches.
“Why on earth would Max have food here when he couldn’t even start a fire to heat it?” Cody muttered.
A cast-iron skillet was sitting on top of an old green rounded-top refrigerator, and because he had left his phone in the fridge one time, he even opened the door to see if there were matches in there. Other than a withered apple and two jars of elderberry jelly, the fridge was empty. In the freezer he found a few packages of meat wrapped in white butcher paper—steaks was written on the outside of a couple of them—so he wouldn’t starve. He was disappointed when he turned on a burner and found there was no gas.
“Propane tank must be empty, so I guess I’ll have to use the woodstove, provided I can ever get a fire going,” he said.
He was about to give up ever being warm again, when he glanced around the room and noticed a rusty old match holder on the wall to the left of the stove. The burlap curtain hanging over the window where the vent pipe went outside covered part of it, but still Cody fussed at himself for not seeing it earlier as he made his way toward it. His mama always kept a container of matches a lot like that on the wall beside the stove at the ranch house.
“Country folks put things where they need them,” he said and reached for a match, and discovered that there were only six left.
He held one of the matches close to the little chips of wood and struck it against the stove. Nothing happened. He tried again, and the head of the match popped off, but there was no flame. The same thing happened with the second one.
His heart had begun to beat fast, and he had visions of busting a bale of hay and covering himself with a layer of the stuff just to get warm. “Four more tries, and then Jesse may find me frozen when he shows up here.” He thought of his brother and the rest of the family, all warm on Sunflower Ranch while the cold was seeping into his bone marrow.
At the thought of his brother, he jerked his phone out of his pocket only to see that the battery was almost dead. He didn’t even try to call but sent a text: I’m fine. Slid off the road not far from Max Hilton’s old barn. Will hole up here until storm blows over. He hit send, and the screen went dark.
He tried the third match. When it flared, he held it carefully next to the kindling until a tiny little blaze started, and then he blew on it to encourage the thing to grow. That tiny blaze meant more to him right then than all the money he had in the bank. When the blaze finally ignited and warmth began to spread out from the stove, he slumped down on the old brown-and-orange-plaid sofa not far away. His eyes slid shut, but he snapped them open and recited the signs of hypothermia out loud, starting with shivering and ending with drowsiness.
Afraid to close his eyes again, he stood and began pacing from one end of the room to the other. On one of his trips, he noticed two little beady eyes peeking out from underneath the sofa and came close to jumping up on the workbench, but then a little gray kitten inched its way toward the stove. In a few seconds, a yellow one and then a black-and-white one did the same. And then a big calico cat came from the tiny bathroom with a dead mouse in her teeth. She dropped it beside the kittens, and they began to growl and fight over their dinner.
“I’m not afraid of mice or spiders, and I’ve seen rats as big as possums and spiders that would cover a dinner plate,” he told the cats, “but snakes are a different matter, and for a second there, I thought for sure you were one of those.”
He went back over the symptoms of hypothermia—fumbling and confusion. He ripped his gloves off and held his hands out. No tremors. That was a good sign, but talking to himself and seeing snakes instead of kittens wasn’t.
The mama cat came right over to him and began to rub around his legs, her purrs so loud that they covered up the crackling sounds of the fire. Cody squatted down and rubbed her fur from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. “Are you depending on mice to raise these kids of yours, or has Max got some dry food hiding somewhere in this room?”
As if she understood him, she went over to a plastic bin shoved up under the worktable and sniffed it. Cody pulled the lid off, and sure enough, it was filled to the brim with dry cat food. He found an empty margarine container and scooped out enough to fill it, then set it beside the stove. “That should keep you for a day or two, but you’re a good mama to give your kids a taste for mice. That will keep the varmints out of the barn.”
His hands and feet finally stopped tingling, so he removed his hat and coat and tossed them on the end of the sofa. The room was warming up nicely, and there was nothing to do but settle in for the duration. He laid his head on the sofa arm and closed his eyes. With all the work going on at the ranch, and his doctoring business, he was usually on the run from daylight until after dark. Jesse would come rescue him by morning, so he might as well take advantage of a free evening.
* * *
Dr. Stephanie O’Dell, Stevie to the folks around Honey Grove, figured when she left her place that morning that the going could get rough. The roads were icy, and noise similar to shotgun blasts filled the air as the tree limbs laden with a thick layer of ice snapped off. But Dale Watson had called with the news that both of his female alpacas had died giving birth that morning. He was able to save one baby, but he had no idea how to care for it.
She had made a call over to the Sunflower Ranch and talked to Sonny before she ever set out on the twenty-mile drive to rescue a tiny little newborn alpaca—a cria. Sonny had alpacas and was more than willing to see if one of his female alpacas—a hembra—would adopt the new baby. She determined that even on slick roads, she should be able to drive to her destination and back in two or three hours, but she hadn’t figured on the blizzard-like wind and snow that hit when she was returning home.
The weatherman on the television that morning had said there was a possibility of an accumulation of two to three inches of snow in the area. But after she had picked up the cria and was on the way home, she caught a report on the radio that said the storm had taken a sudden turn. Residents of the area should be prepared for at least a foot of snow on top of the ice that was already on the ground.
Stevie still thought she could make it to Sunflower Ranch, pass the cria off to Sonny, and head back home by suppertime. She sure didn’t want to get stuck at the ranch, not with Cody Ryan there. They had dated in high school, and she’d fallen head over heels in love with him, but then he went off to college when she still had her senior year to do. He had his heart set on being a doctor, and according to what he told her that last night they were together, he had to devote all his time to study. He had made the decision to help other people, especially those in foreign countries, and to be involved with a girl would get in the way of his dreams.