Caleb set the box of nails on a stump, shrugged out of his jacket, and climbed the hill to keep working.
He was thirty-two years old and built the way men got built when life made them lift more than they talked. He had a face the sun had worked on for years—weathered, angular, usually unreadable—and eyes gray enough to vanish into cloud light. Three years before, he had been framing houses outside Bozeman with a small crew and sending money to his father in Tennessee. Then a misjudged scaffolding plank and a fall had left him with a crushed ankle, a stack of hospital bills, and a foreman who replaced him within a week. He’d healed enough to walk, enough to work, but not enough to trust slick ladders and long rooftops for twelve hours a day.
His father died that same winter. Caleb sold what little was left, drifted north, and bought the Elk Ridge property cheap because nobody else wanted it. Since then he had survived on odd jobs, fence repairs, snow plowing, firewood, and whatever his garden and small livestock could add to the table. It wasn’t the life he had imagined at twenty. But it was a life that belonged to him.
And if the old county weather records were right, the coming winter was going to be brutal.
Old Earl Danvers at the diner had said it first in September, jabbing one nicotine-stained finger at the window. “Hard winter coming. Woolly bears got thick bands. Geese flying early. Air feels wrong.”
