By Nicholas Trandahl

The snow fell in big ponderous flakes over the pine-cloaked mountains. Mabel watched the falling snow from the front porch of her small cabin. She took careful sips of hot black teas from a hardwood mug that had been carved by her late husband, John.

Before he passed two winters before, Mabel and her husband had liked to spend mornings together on the porch of their cabin. She would drink her hot tea, and he would take painful swallows of his scalding black coffee with sugar. He inevitably burnt his mouth each and every time.

Mabel didn’t drink coffee herself, only tea, but she hadn’t stopped buying coffee grounds at the store since John died. And she hadn’t stopped brewing a pot each morning, even though she’d pour it into the sink each evening, cold and untouched. The aroma of the coffee reminded her of her late husband. It made her feel less alone, as though he’d come walking out of their bedroom in fresh clothes, hair still damp from his morning shower and face clean-shaven.

They had been married for thirty years, and Mabel couldn’t fathom day-to-day life without traces of John, receding echoes of him that she knew would in time fade to nothing. Their children, grown now with their own kids, wanted Mabel to move out of the mountains and into town. She had worked in real estate during her twenties and thirties but had since been a housewife. Her children were afraid of her being alone up there in the woods and silence. John had been capable and self-sufficient before his heart attack, and their children didn’t think for a moment that their mother may have also come to acquire some grit and aptitude over the decades. They meant well, and Mabel loved them very much. But they weren’t giving her enough credit. The mountains, death, and solitude had given her enough fortitude to see her through what was left of the ensuing decades of her own life.

Mabel took another drink of hot tea and watched the snowfall descend over the forested mountainside. The wooden cup was warm in her hands. No flakes fell on her, but the shingled porch awning she stood beneath supported a heap of heavy white snow.

The mountain was quiet and still. The dark pines were laden with a thickening shroud of snow. Up the mountainside behind the cabin, the slope and pines were lost in heavy low clouds. Down the mountainside, the narrow dirt driveway that meandered through the pinewoods down to the gravel county road was choked in deepening snow. Just barely discernable down that winding path, Mabel could make out the still silhouette of her truck through the heavy snowfall.

Just before the snowstorm had swept in over the mountains the day before, Mabel had driven the truck down into town to get supplies and groceries. The snow had fallen fast, and the truck had gotten stuck in the slow crawl up the driveway. She would call one of her generous rustic neighbors on the mountain to help her get it out and up to her cabin once the storm had ended.

It had been dark and very cold in the snowy pinewoods when her truck got stuck on the way up the driveway to her home. As she had trudged uphill through the deep snow, her arms laden with bags of groceries, she’d heard the howls of distant wolves through the blowing snow and swaying pines. She knew the wolves were far off, on some other mountain or in some secluded valley that held a frozen lake, but it was the first time in a great many years when Mabel had felt truly frightened and alone. Perhaps she’d never felt that way before.

By the time she had reached her cabin with her groceries, cold and out of breath, she had been in tears. She’d dreamt of John then, during the blizzardy night. He had been walking away from her, into the deep darkness of the pines. The wolves that howled in her dream were much closer than they had been after her truck got stuck in the driveway. In the dream, Mabel had been unable to move, unable to chase after her husband. He hadn’t turned around, even as she cried out his name. She had woken up exceedingly early in the morning, before the day had brightened the storm at all, and she had sat up in bed, held her face in her hands, and wept piteously. Mabel knew she’d keep the dream to herself, especially from her overly concerned children.

It was mid-morning, hours after her dream had awoken her in tears. Mabel finished her cup of tea on the porch. The world was soft, white, and cold, and she acknowledged that it was beautiful despite its sterility and silence. She could smell the woodsmoke that threaded out of her cabin’s little stone chimney in the snowfall.

She had started a good fire in the fireplace with the last of her chopped wood after she’d gotten out of bed. It had been well before sunrise, and in the darkness outside the window, Mabel had just barely been able to make out the big clumps of falling snow and the thick blue heaps of fresh powder that had blanketed the mountainside. The cabin had been cold and dark when she rose from her big empty bed, handmade by her crafty late husband, and it had been made colder and darker because of her dream about John walking away from her, ignoring her as he was lost in the shadows of the wild where she couldn’t follow.

Mabel knew she’d need to chop some more firewood to last through the rest of the winter snowstorm and the isolation that would follow until the county and state plowed the roads. She set her empty wooden cup on the porch’s rail. The cup’s smooth interior was colored with a rusty brown patina given it by years of tea.

Mabel withdrew her gloves from her winter coat’s pockets and slipped her hands into them. The gloves were thick navy-blue wool with leather padding on the palms and undersides of the fingers for grip. She pulled the hood of her coat over her head, hiding the single brown and grey braid she’d put her hair in the day before.

The widow took up the well-used wood axe that leaned against the outer wall of the log cabin, on the porch directly beside the front door. She trudged down the porch stars, axe in hand, into the silent snowfall and hiked through the deep snow in her clunky snow boots. The woodpile was around the side of the cabin, and it was made up of blocks of cut pine. The woodpile grew each autumn, due in part to Mabel’s own diligence and also to the generosity of some of her neighbors on the mountain, particularly Raymond, the hardy widower down the county road that she intended to call in the next couple days to help her get her truck out of the snow and up to her cabin.

Raymond had been a godsend for Mabel since John’s passing. Mabel and John hadn’t gotten to meet Raymond’s late wife, Annie. They’d moved up to the cabin several years after Annie had passed away from cervical cancer.

Raymond seemed to always be in a decent mood, except when talking about the government, and he was always concerned about and generous with the folks he knew. He and John had become as thick as thieves. They had both been in their mid-sixties, about a decade older than Mabel. Both retired and spending the rest of their peaceful years in the mountainous quietude of the backcountry, the two men in their flannel shirts spent many days together fishing, cutting firewood, hunting, or conversing for hours on the porch in an aromatic haze of pipe smoke. John had taken to smoking pipe tobacco because of Raymond’s rustic influence, but he’d never been able to stand growing a beard like their widower neighbor. John had preferred to shave his face each morning.

Mabel had friends of her own, many of them women in town her age that shared her fondness for recipes, literature, and country living, but she also counted Raymond as one of her friends. She had John were both quite close with their neighbor. They’d had him over for dinner countless times, and Raymond had also had them over to his cabin when he cooked wild game or trout he’d harvested.

However, in the two years since John’s death, Raymond had stopped coming over for dinners. Mabel figured that he thought it would be improper, himself a widower, spending time alone with the widow of a recently deceased friend. He still came over now and again to replenish Mabel’s woodpile, to make repairs around her cabin, to sharpen her wood axe and kitchen knives, or to bring her venison, trout, elk, or other wild game he’d caught or hunted when in season, but she missed Raymond’s companionable presence, pipe smoke aroma, and his long conversations. She missed going with him to trout streams or out into wilderness to hunt. Mabel had been surprised to discover that she missed those things about Raymond as much as she missed things about her late husband. It made her feel guilty to think so, but Mabel knew that she had come to miss Raymond as much as she missed John.

The widow grunted as she heaved a sizable chunk of pine onto the broad stump she used as a chopping block. Its surface was scored by innumerable axe cuts. She brushed the snow off the piece of pine and lifted the wood axe from where she’d leaned it against the chopping block, its sharpened steel head wet from being buried in the deepening snow for the moment it took her to retrieve the piece of pine she was going to split into firewood.

She eyed the wood she intended to chop and positioned her gloved hands along the axe’s maple handle, worn smooth and glossy from years of use. Her eyes narrowed, and she grunted as she brought the axe blade down into the pine.

Raymond’s eyes opened early in the morning. He’d taken in the darkness and the cold and the faint sound of the waning wind and falling snow outside the cabin. Then the outdoorsman, a retired game warden, closed his eyes and promptly slept in a couple more hours.

When he awoke later that morning, Raymond saw feeble silvery light through his bedroom window. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked through the window a while longer from the warmth of his bed, and he watched the dense snowfall drift slowly down. The flakes were big and clumped together. The freezing wind from the night before, when the storm had first blown in over the mountains, had blessedly vanished with the dark, and what was left behind was a low heavy sky and an impenetrable winterscape of drifting snow. The silence was crystalline.

Raymond wasn’t in a hurry to get out of bed to get a fire going in the woodstove and start coffee and breakfast. His large prone form remained for some time bundled beneath blankets and an old handmade quilt. The quilt had been a wedding gift from his late wife’s mother when he and Annie were married about forty years prior. They had been young, poor, and in love, hopeful for a lifetime of adventure together.

They’d made it about thirty years before cancer took Annie. Their marriage never produced children. Raymond, in his ten lonely years since Annie’s death, missed her each day, but he was thankful for the many years they’d had together. He’d let go of her and had accepted his quiet solitary life up in the mountains.

John and Mabel, Raymond’s closest neighbors on the mountain, had eased his loneliness for several years, but when John had suffered a fatal heart attack a couple years before, the loneliness had crept back like an old familiar enemy, a looming shadow peering down from up the mountain and stalking closer every day. Raymond was aware that his loneliness was self-imposed in a way. There was the opportunity for friendship and companionship. Mabel was a widow and just as lonely as Raymond — probably lonelier with John’s passing still somewhat fresh in life.

Raymond stopped in on Mabel at her cabin now and again to lend a hand where he could. She had refused to move to town or to be closer to her children since John died. Mabel refused to leave the cabin behind, because she knew that would also be leaving behind the memories that she and John had forged there in the happy wild years before he passed. Raymond respected the widow’s decision because he felt the same way about his own life and his own loss.

Bundled up in bed on that snowy morning, Raymond began to think about Mabel, to daydream about her. He thought of her fondly many mornings and evenings. Raymond had always thought of Mabel after he’d met her, even before John’s passing, and those thoughts had always come laden with a burden of shame and guilt for the widower. The anxiety of that burden imposed a rift between the widower and the widow. It was a rift that Raymond had wordlessly levied between Mabel and himself out of respect for his late friend and out of respect for his own beloved Annie, ten years gone.

However, Raymond yearned for a continuation of his friendship with Mabel. They’d both lost everything, and so why not lean on one another? He missed her. He missed her one hell of a lot.

With a mighty groan, Raymond threw off his blankets and quilt, and he stood up out of bed. He scratched his scalp beneath his short, unruly, grey hair, which was still thick in his late sixties. His beard matched in hue and density. Raymond was a tall broad-shouldered man, solidly built and powerful, even at his age. Years of rural hard-living and a healthy avoidance of beer had kept him that way. On the rare occasion when he did drink, Raymond preferred a little bit of maple whiskey, though it took him at least six months to finish a bottle. His old friend, John, had helped him to finish a bottle of whiskey much quicker. So had Mabel.

But drinking whiskey alone was dangerous business. Raymond knew that. He’d seen it kill more than one lonely sad man.

Raymond fastened the buttons on the front of a thick flannel shirt of green and gold plaid, and he slipped into a pair of worn-out jeans. Then he sat on the side of his bed and sheathed his big white feet in warm wool socks. He remained there in the morning gloom of his bedroom for a moment, sitting on the edge of the mattress, his hands splayed over his knees. Then Raymond stood up with a rumbling groan and strode from his bedroom.

A tall continually replenished stack of firewood was kept in the rustic living room, against a wall near the cast iron wood stove which was set at an angle in the corner of the room. Raymond took an armful of the dry cut pine from the stack and piled it in the wood stove, and he started a fire. The flames took to the dry wood quickly, and in moments heat and the spice of smoldering pine began to spread throughout the shadowed rooms his small cabin.

He went into his kitchen to make a pot of coffee, and as it brewed, Raymond watched the heavy snow come down in the dim morning light beyond the kitchen window. He thought of Mabel again. He thought of her alone in her cabin, up there on that lonely mountain in the deepening snow. Raymond was worried about her.

The older man decided then that he was going to snowshoe over to her place after a quick cup of coffee and a little breakfast. He’d bring her some supplies and food in case she ended up being stuck at home until the mountain roads were plowed out long after the storm. “Mabel, I hope you had sense enough to not drive last night in that storm,” Raymond muttered to himself as he gazed out of the kitchen window, his heavy brows suddenly tightened with concern for the widow that he had such fondness for.

He took his cast iron skillet from a kitchen cupboard and heated it on the stovetop. He dropped a cool chunk of yellow butter into the skillet, and it sizzled and slid around on the scalding black surface. Raymond broke three eggs and emptied their viscous contents into the sputtering cast iron one at a time. They cooked quickly in the hot skillet, and when the whites were opaque with crisped edges and the orange yolks were just barely still a liquid, he slid the eggs from the cast iron onto a plate. Lastly, he sprinkled some ground black pepper and salt on his breakfast.

The coffee was brewed by the time his eggs were done cooking, and he poured himself a mug. Raymond stood at the polished pine countertop and ate the eggs quickly, gulping down his hot coffee between bites and numbing his tongue from the scalding heat. In a couple minutes, he’d finished his eggs and coffee and put his dishes in the sink.

With a grunt, Raymond took his battered leather rucksack from the top of the coat closet. He emptied it of the assorted sportsman supplies and old food wrappers left in there from a prior hunting excursion, and he put in some spare batteries and a flashlight in case Mabel lost power to her cabin, as well a couple rolls of toilet paper and a gallon of drinking water. He kept several gallons on hand beneath his kitchen sink. Raymond’s cabin still had power and he presumed Mabel’s did as well, but he couldn’t guarantee it if the snow continued to deepen throughout the rest of the day and into the next day.

Next, Raymond filled the rucksack with several different foodstuffs from his fridge and cupboard for Mabel in case she hadn’t been into town for groceries before the storm hit. He put in a package of thick-cut smoked bacon, a couple sticks of butter, half a box of buckwheat pancake mix that just needed water added to it for flapjacks, and a couple ruby red sirloins that were still wrapped in the white paper that the butcher in town had put them in. Then he put in what was left of a block of sharp cheddar cheese, four or five big potatoes, a couple yellow onions, and a few pomegranates that Raymond had bought on a whim from the grocery store in town. He’d read something in a magazine at his doctor’s office about how nutritious pomegranates were.

Lastly, almost as an afterthought, Raymond took his bottle of maple whiskey from the cupboard and put it snuggly in the stuffed rucksack. The bottle was only about a third full of the sweet brown liquor, but to Raymond that was a generous portion, especially when considering the ponderous way he nursed the bottle throughout many months. He surmised that Mabel would appreciate a drink in this wintry weather.

Raymond placed the full heavy rucksack near his front door, next to his well-made and well-used pair of snowshoes that waited there. The man took his .38 revolver in its aged leather holster from his nightstand and fastened it to his belt. The pistol had belonged to his father, and Raymond had always worn it when he was out in the woods and mountains. He’d seen enough mountain lions in his life to be wary of the wild.

On his other hip, Raymond fastened his fixed blade knife in its leather sheath. A detailed image of a howling wolf was embossed into the tea-colored leather. The handle of the knife was elk antler and wrapped tightly in worn leather.

Before setting off to Mabel’s cabin, Raymond put on his heavy deep brown canvas coat. It was lined in thick soft shearling. He also put on a black stocking cap and a warm pair of gloves. The final acts before departing his cabin were to put on his hiking boots and snow shoes and to grab his sharp wood axe that leaned against the wall by his wood stove. Raymond figured that Mabel could use some help cutting pine for her fireplace.

Grunting beneath the burden of his rucksack, Raymond rested the head of his axe on his shoulder and opened the front door. The world beyond was quiet, cold, and white. He trudged out into it and closed the door of the cabin behind him.

It was still rather early in the morning when Raymond set off cross-country from his home, in the direction of Mabel’s cabin. The snow was deep and untouched, even beneath the dense cover of the pines. The flakes continued their slow fall through the still winter air.

Raymond’s snowshoes vanished deep into the snow as he hiked through the white wintry woods, as high as his knee at some points and as high as his hip at others. His direct route across the forested mountain slope cut a messy furrow across the pristine milk-white of the snow, but already the edges of his passage softened with the new fallen snow that continued to come soundlessly down from the low clouds. Snow gathered on his stocking cap, his broad shoulders, and the distended rucksack on his back. His grey beard quickly gathered a frosty adornment of clinging snow.

Raymond knew the cross-country route to his closest neighbor’s cabin well, even when the way was obfuscated by a pale winterscape. He hiked across the wooded face of the steep mountain slope. Far below him, the county road cut somewhere through the pines, but it was lost to the incline, the dense woods, and the heavy snowfall.

His snowshoes found purchase in the deep fresh snow, but Raymond still leaned to the left as he hiked, away from the steep slope that plunged away to his right. It wasn’t a cliff, but a tumble down that slope had a high probability to leave the older man broken and buried beneath the snow, a spring feast for roving wolves, coyotes, buzzards, mountain lions, or hungry bears fresh from hibernation. It was best to be cautious in the terrible majesty of the wild.

Suddenly Raymond heard the rare snap of a broken pine, the sound of a weakened tree giving way beneath the heavy piled snow that had so quickly fallen overnight and throughout the morning. He shot a quick glance uphill and was started to see the movement and closeness of the fallen pine. The yellow of the splintered wood contrasted the darkness of the bark and needles as the tree tumbled down the slope towards him in a churning wave of snow and ice.

As the heavy bulk of the broken pine and the miniature avalanche that carried it rushed towards the outdoorsman, he had only a second or two to react before he would be struck, thrown down the mountainside, and buried more or less alive. Raymond took a single broad step forward in his cumbersome snowshoes, and he swung the wood axe from his shoulder, into a quick extended chop at the limits of his reach and strength. The sharp axe blade bit deep into the pine trunk nearest him, an old and thick tree that had weathered winters and snowstorms much worse than the current one that was burying the mountains.

Just before the tumbling pine and the tide of snow smashed into him, Raymond used his strong grip on the axe to pull himself to safety behind the sheltering girth of the old tree. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he leaned heavily against the bark of the tall pine.

In a cacophony of breaking branches and hissing snow, the broken pine and the avalanche rushed by, right where Raymond had been standing. The pines that stood down the slope stood strong against the onslaught of heavy timber and rushing snow. The tumbling log broke itself against the stronger solidly-rooted pines, and the avalanche carried the shattered columns of wood and shivering pine boughs further down the mountain, likely to the flat gravel road that was hidden down there, cut into the steep slope and buried beneath the snow.

Raymond’s heart raced and his breath came hard and fast as he watched the chaos and destruction below him, down the slope. A slower torrent of snow, pine needles, and small branches still slid across the path where he’d been standing. He watched it until it had grown quiet again and had all but settled except for the whisper of loosened snow that fell from the boughs of the surrounding pines.

“Well, goddamn!” Raymond yelled.

Chuckling softly, the outdoorsman got himself together and stood, brushing snow and flecks of bark from his outerwear. He jerked the wood axe from the flesh of the pine, and the steel squeaked against the wood as it came free. He returned the axe to his shoulder and patted the bark of the big pine he’d hid behind. He said with a kind smile, “Thank you kindly, old friend.”

Raymond continued through the snowy woods on the mountainside, towards Mabel’s cabin.

In the falling snow, Mabel had chopped up several chunks of pine. She wanted a decent supply of firewood inside, so she intended to shop wood until lunchtime. The yellow flesh of the pine she’d already split was muted beneath a fresh sheet of snow. Her arms burned, and her hands were wet with sweat in her thick woolen gloves.

She chopped another chunk of pine into firewood and left the axe embedded in the chopping block. She stood straight and rolled some pain and stiffness from her joints. As she did so, movement through the falling snow caught her eye. She squinted into the evergreens.

It was Raymond.

Mabel could tell it was him by his height, his broad stride, and, when he got closer, the rough good looks of his bearded face that hadn’t diminished as his sixties dwindled. One of his gloved hands held the shaft of a wood axe that rested on his shoulder, and the other hand lifted in a slow wave.

“Look at what the storm blew in!” Mabel shouted as Raymond trudged towards her from the trees in his snowshoes.

His cheeks were red, his beard was locked in snow and frost, and his outerwear and rucksack were covered in snow. He came up to the widow and glanced down at the work she’d done chopping firewood. “Mabel,” he said simply in greeting.

“What in the hell brought you over here in this weather?”

“This weather is what brought me over,” he said with a smirk, looking up into the heavy snowfall. “I wasn’t sure if you’d been into town for groceries or anything before the storm hit. I was worried about you.”

Mabel felt warmth in her belly and in her ribs at the notion of Raymond’s concern for her wellbeing. She smiled at him and was thankful that the cold had already colored the apples of her cheeks so the blush that came over her wasn’t as obvious. She pointed down the narrow driveway that went down from her cabin to the county road and to the snowed-in hulk of her truck that was stuck there at the limit of her view.

“I was in town yesterday,” she explained. “I made it back during the storm, but my truck couldn’t make it up the drive. The snow was already too deep.”

“Still there?” Raymond asked, squinting down the driveway in the dense snowfall.

“Yep.”

“Well, damn. We’ll get it out once they get the road down there plowed out and I can get my truck up here,” he offered.

“Thanks, Ray.”

“You bet.”

Raymond looked back down to the chopping block and the firewood and at her axe that was buried in the pine. “Would you like a hand?” he asked with a nod toward her work.

“Well, I’d like some help,” Mabel answered with a smirk, “but I don’t need it.”

Raymond chuckled and lowered his rucksack from his shoulders. He set it onto the soft snow. “Oh, I know you don’t need help, Mabel. I know.”

The widow and the widower made short work of chopping a sizeable supply of firewood, enough for at least a week of constant burning in the fireplace. They each carried load after load of firewood in the cabin and stacked them next to the fireplace. It was nearly noon by the time they were finished.

Mabel and Raymond left their wood axes on the porch, leaning side-by-side against the log wall next to the front door of the cabin. Inside, Raymond hung up his coat and set his stocking cap, gloves, and leather rucksack on the hardwood floor beside the door. He took off his snow-caked snowshoes and boots and set them on a rubber mat where Mabel kept her own wet boots.

She went into the kitchen to start whipping up some homemade biscuits, and Raymond sat heavily in a wooden chair at the kitchen table. He knocked on the table with his knuckles and admired its craftsmanship. John was one hell of a woodworker, Raymond thought to himself. Then he looked up from the table and watched Mabel gather the ingredients for biscuits from the cupboards and the fridge. When she got started mixing the biscuit batter, Raymond glanced into the living room at the yellow and orange flames that consumed the pine in the fireplace.

“The place looks great, Mabel,” he said as he looked back to the woman working in the kitchen, her pretty face still reddened from the cold and her long brown and grey hair gathered into a thick tousled braid on the back of her head.

“Thanks,” she answered, her bright blue eyes flashing up at Raymond from her culinary work. “I manage.”

Mabel wanted to say more, to tell him that he should come around more often. She wanted to tell him that she was lonely without John and that the cabin was too damn quiet. She wanted to tell Raymond that she missed him as much as she missed her late husband, and that it was ridiculous that he was alone in his cabin and she was alone in hers. Mabel didn’t say these things, however. Instead she asked, “How’s biscuits and orange marmalade sound for lunch?”

Raymond smiled and nodded. “Sounds perfect. I’ll cut up some pomegranates too.”

He went to his rucksack and took out the pomegranates he’d brought over form his cabin. He sat back at the table with them, unsheathed his knife from his hip, and began to cut into the fruit. Dark purple-red juice dripped from his blade and fingers.

“Hold on now. Do it over this,” Mabel scolded as she brought over an old dishtowel and laid it on the table beneath his big hands that held the fruit and the knife. “What else did you brink with you?” she inquired as she went back behind the kitchen counter.

Raymond answered as he cut, “Well, let’s see. Some bacon, steaks, potatoes, onions, cheese, butter, buckwheat, these pomegranates, a gallon of water, toilet paper, some batteries, and a flashlight in case the power goes out. I think that’s everything. Oh, and a little bit of maple whiskey I had left.”

The mention of the maple whiskey suddenly filled Mabel with emotion. Choking up, she turned from the counter to look out the window over the sink so Raymond couldn’t see the tears that quivered in her eyes. She’d missed Raymond’s visit very much, missed him bringing over his bottles of maple whiskey for long chats because he couldn’t ever finish a bottle himself. He hadn’t come over for one of those visits since John’s death, and it felt overwhelmingly good and nostalgic in that moment when she discovered that he’d brought his whiskey. She hoped that it would be a good long visit, like they had been years ago when John was alive.

Instead of voicing her thoughts, Mabel cleared her throat and said, “It’s a good thing you brought some extra food, because that snow’s really coming down and doesn’t show any sign of letting up. It looks like the wind’s picking up to.”

“Yeah,” he replied, nodding as he carefully cut up the pomegranates over the dishtowel, so their dark staining juice didn’t get on the table that John had built. “It seemed like the wind was going to kick itself up into a blizzard again. It was nice this morning, as the snow just came down slowly and quietly. That wind can be brutal.”

Mabel slid the biscuits into the oven, washed her hands at the sink, and said to Raymond as she dried them, “I’d sure feel better if you stayed her until it clears up, Ray. I wouldn’t want you getting turned around and lost out there.”

Raymond sighed and smiled. He knew that he would never get lost on the mountain, even if he was blindfolded, and he knew that Mabel was aware of his aptitude with overland navigation as well. He didn’t say anything though. He didn’t resist the offer. He realized then, in fact, that he’d been hoping for such an offer from his friend. All he said was, “Yeah, probably best to stay.”

Mabel warmed up the pot of undrinked coffee from earlier that morning, and she made herself another cup of hot black tea. The two lonely souls sat at the table together and ate a lunch of warm biscuits fresh from the oven, orange marmalade, and deep ruby-colored wedges of glistening pomegranate seeds. They talked throughout the meal and took their time. It wasn’t until sometime in the afternoon when they’d put their dishes into the sink.

Their friendship was restored in the coziness of the winter cabin as the blizzard outside conspired to keep the pair indoors and focused on one another. Any guilt and shame from their mutual fondness for one another vanished in the ease of their talk, which often turned to Annie and John, their deceased spouses. There was a freshness in the air of the cabin, as if ghosts could finally rest. With contentment and acceptance, life could move on.

As evening chased away whatever feeble light struggled through the clouds and the windborne snow outside the cabin, Raymond put the sirloins in a buttered copper pan on the stovetop. Mabel chopped up some potatoes and an onion to make a hash in a different buttered pan. They turned the burners’ heat on low, so they could head out to the porch with the bottle of maple whiskey and watch the snowstorm.

The blizzard blew across the face of the mountain. The sheltered space of the porch was protected from the icy wind and the snow, but the cold nonetheless bit deep into them as they stood there. Raymond went out first, without a coat or boots, and gazed out into the fury of the winter storm. He unscrewed the cap off the bottle of maple whiskey and took a drink. Behind him, from the open door of the cabin, a warm yellow glow spilled out onto the grey planks of the porch. The aroma of melted butter and seared meat emanated from within.

Mabel pulled a heavy sweater over her cotton shirt, and she went outside to stand on the porch beside the outdoorsman. Raymond passed the bottle to her, and she took a hearty swig. She held the cold neck of the bottle in one hand, and she placed her free hand on the small of Raymond’s back and left it there. He put one of his strong arms around Mabel and pulled her close against him.

They held one another on the porch of the cabin and looked out into the cold winter dark.