Chapter 2 - The Winter in the Earth
The storm raged for four days without pause.
Inside her dugout, Mercy managed her meager survival with meticulous care. Silas had taken the flour, the bacon, and the rifle, but he had left what he considered useless junk: a three-gallon cast-iron Dutch oven, a small box of salt, a hatchet, two spare wagon lanterns, three gallons of kerosene, and a crate of dried apples he had forgotten was stowed beneath the floorboards.
Mercy ate three dried apple slices a day, melting snow in a tin cup over a tiny kerosene flame inside her earth cave.
The earth kept her warm. While the prairie above froze under ten-degree temperatures and howling winds, the earth hollow remained constant—dark, quiet, and protected.
When the storm finally broke on the fifth morning, Mercy pushed aside the snowbound canvas curtain and stepped out into the blinding white sunlight.
The world was entirely transformed.
The prairie was a sea of glittering, knee-deep snow. The broken Conestoga wagon sat twenty feet away, completely buried up to its wheel hubs, looking like a bleached skeleton stranded in an ocean of ice.
Mercy didn't look at the wagon. She looked up at the ridge.
There, trudging through the deep drifts toward the creek bed, was a massive, solitary bull elk—its dark head lowered against the wind, its heavy antlers trailing snow. The animal was exhausted, blown off course by the blizzard, its hind leg favoring a deep gash from a fallen timber fence miles back.
Mercy’s stomach gave a fierce, violent twist.
She had no rifle. Silas had taken the Springfield.
She looked down at her hands. They were raw, calloused, and broad. She looked at the iron wagon axle leaning against the clay wall, then at the heavy hatchet she had tucked into her apron string.
Mercy didn't think about Chillicothe, Ohio. She didn't think about women’s skirts or proper manners. She thought about survival.
She slipped through the deep snow along the creek bed, keeping downwind of the majestic beast, moving with a silent, deliberate patience that her broad, powerful legs now afforded her in the deep drifts.
The elk stopped near the edge of the bank, its foreleg buckling in the soft snow.
Mercy didn't hesitate. She scrambled up the embankment behind the animal, raised the four-foot iron wagon axle high above her head with both hands, and brought it down with all the weight of her body directly behind the elk’s antler crown.
CRACK.
The great beast collapsed into the snowdrift without a sound.
Mercy dropped to her knees beside the fallen animal, her heart pounding against her ribs like a trapped bird. She pulled the hatchet from her belt, her hands shaking, and performed the brutal, necessary work that her father had taught her when she was a twelve-year-old girl in the Ohio timber country.
By nightfall, Mercy had hauled two hundred pounds of fresh, red meat into her earth dugout.
She salted the cuts, hung them from iron pegs driven into the clay ceiling, and rendered the thick fat in her Dutch oven to make tallow candles. She stretched the heavy hide across the floorboards, scraping it clean with the hatchet blade.
When she lay down that night beneath her wool blanket, wrapped in the fresh warmth of the elk skin, her stomach full of roasted venison, Mercy looked up at the clay ceiling of her earthen house.
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Silas had thought her size was a weakness. But it was her muscle, her broad shoulders, and her unyielding stamina that had dragged two hundred pounds of meat through three feet of snow.
"I am not a burden," Mercy whispered into the warm, shadow-filled cave. "I am the wall."
