We had been warned by other miners not to remain at the Divide Mining District through that winter of nineteen-sixteen. Because of the severity of the weather, most miners, especially those with families, wintered in Tuscarora about twelve miles down the mountain.

It was not by choice that we prepared to spend the winter in our one room cabin with the lean-to. The first winter we'd rented in Tuscarora. But, by nineteen sixteen, we could no longer afford lodging.

I was going on seven and until that winter had never been fully aware of what my mother's life must be like. She was no more than thirty, while Dad was past fifty. However, she was imbued with the pioneer spirit.

"We'll make do," she often said.

We did. Along with my friends the squirrels and chipmunks we prepared, or so we thought, for the months ahead. We stuffed the cracks between floor and walls with newspapers, and filled the huge fuel box with cottonwood and dried sage for kindling.

Disregarding my love for animals, Mother lined my wool coat with rabbit skins and made the beaver-skin turban.

A stack of boxes along an inside wall of the cabin contained canned vegetables and fruit. I overheard many discussions over the venison, duck and trout packed under snow and ice in our "freezer", one of two inside-outside cabinets built on the rear of the cabin; the second cabinet, a woodbox. Extra wood, stacked outside the cabin, was covered with canvas. Would the supplies last until spring?

Mom and Dad tried to guess when they might expect the spring thaw that would make it safe to drive the twelve miles down the grade for supplies. Twelve miles, given the road conditions and pace of a horse-driven buckboard in a storm, could take as long as three or even four hours.

For me the hours, like falling snow, went on and on divided by darkness and light with the darkest hours changing only by degree. On the calendar our icy fingers marked out the days - days that crept across the page to a week, and finally, a month. Sometimes the snow blew in flurries, sometimes turning to hail, it pelted down on the cabin roof.

I would rub a peeking space on the window pane and look up at glistening icicles decorating our roof, or gaze at a white world broken only by a scattering of frosted sagebrush until snow concealed all. Farther across the valley, branches of pine drooped beneath their heavy burden and I thought of the buried robin's homes, imagining that bird song, too, was frozen in the silence. By January snow threatened to bury our home. Every few hours Mom or Dad went out with a shovel to clear the path from our door to the outhouse and the shelter for the animals'. Each time they would bring in a supply of wood to dry out for the next day. For me it often seemed that time like everything else had frozen to a stop. There we were, our lives suspended in this small space with constant smell of dry sage burning in the iron stove. I had no solitary place to escape into my alternate world. Mother wrote to her sister for books to read to me. I guess she may have hoped to wean me from The Wad. Even though I missed the imagination games I played on the Sandy Shore, I loved hearing the adventures of Heidi that winter. The only sad thing was knowing the book would end and my new friend, Heidi would vanish.

Locked together in the one room-plus cabin, my parents must have worn on each other's nerves for they constantly bickered and quarreled. I couldn't shut out the unhappy voices. How I longed for spring to set me free.

At night I heard the sorrowful howl of a coyote and the angry wind roaring as it whipped across the mountain.

In the mornings, wrapped in a blanket, I studied under a kerosene lamp that flashed strange shadows on the wall where the guns hung. Sometimes, bundled in scarves and my rabbit-lined coat, I went with Mother to bring in fuel or to race down a newly shoveled path to the outhouse. Other times I went with Dad to the stable to feed and supply dry blankets for Dolly, the mare, and Minniehaha, our burro. Between meals, a clutter of books, magazines and paper dolls filled the table. Mother read to me. I played with Smokey, but missed the chipmunks who rode on my shoulder and my imaginary playmates who waited down at the Sandy Shore. Soon the color of those days blended until all our mundane activities ran together to leave only the memory of a single scene like an impressionist painting on a post card: icicles hanging from an isolated cabin, whites blending into creeping shadows.

One day I turned from the window to watch Dad pack the battered brown suitcase. "Are you going away, Daddy"

"Just my usual trip down the mountain, Turk. I'll be back day after tomorrow. Bring you some candy."

"Thought I'd better make it now," he told Mother, "while the storm has let up a bit. We need to stock up on supplies. Cupboard's as bare as a jay bird's shins."

Huddleson, Dad's partner, lived alone in a cabin about two miles across the valley near the Divide. Every winter he put runners on his wagon to turn it into a sled. For the trip down the mountain, Hud and Dad hitched Dolly up with Hud's horse, Jerky.

Reassured that Dad would return, I helped Mom break holes in the ice so we could fish in the river. Shivering, while we waited to get a bite, I recited multiplication tables. Mom insisted on giving me daily lessons.

But that day fish weren't biting.

"Too many fishermen upstream," Mom said, and the frown twins puckered her forehead.

The day Dad was supposed to return another storm arrived. The cabin shook with the violent winds and the old stove smoked and failed to keep us warm. My fingers were blue and stiff as I helped Mom twist newspaper and stuff the cracks and knotholes. Hail, like tiny snowballs, beat on the window and sounded like a hollow drum on the tin roof. Mother spent a lot of time at the window, squinting to see down the road. I asked her many questions. Why didn't Daddy come? Had his wagon gone off the side of the mountain into a snowdrift? What would happen to us if he didn't come back?

"It will be all right," she kept telling me. "Don't worry."

I couldn't help but worry when she did.

One morning, I woke up early to find the cabin empty. The storm had subsided. I scrambled out of the double bed that I'd shared with Mom, to run barefoot to the door in my flannel nightgown. Out there in the snow, about thirty feet from where I stood, a small snow shoe bunny merged into the landscape. Often in the early summer I had watched these rabbits wiggle and kick to remove their winter pelt. Now I wished I had carrot tops for Bonny Bunny; then I saw Mother. A scream rose in my throat. Dressed in her bulky beaver with the snow halfway up her high boots, she aimed a rifle at Bonnie Bunny.

My scream startled both the rabbit and Mom. She lowered the gun and the frightened rabbit quickly disappeared. I looked at her as if I'd never seen her before. I shouted and it must have been something like, "you were going to shoot it! How could you?"

As we went into the cabin, her face told me something was terribly wrong. Her pretty mouth was tucked in until she had no lips at all.

With a heavy sigh she hung the gun on the wall.

"You know I wouldn't shoot a bunny unless it was necessary," she said, and sat down in the rocker. Then she told me we were running out of food. "Your father should have been back a week ago with supplies. With this last storm the road may be closed. We'll manage somehow," she said as I climbed into her lap.

"You mean we could starve?" I'd heard about people who had starved before supplies could reach them.

"Don't worry," she said. "I'll think of something."

"Couldn't we catch fish?"

Why fish were immune to my sympathy, I don't know.

"Ice on the river is too heavy to break through. Anyway I doubt if they're biting."

I wasn't too worried. Mother was resourceful and she'd promised to think of something.

What she decided seemed a good idea at the time. We saddled Minniehaha, bundled up in our snow clothes and started up the zig-zag trail to the old Robinson house.

The Robinson brothers used to come in the summer to do a little mining and a great deal of hunting and fishing. I never knew if they owned the clapboard house with the yellow peeling paint that stood up there alone on the top of the mountain. I thought of it as the castle. Likely it was three or four rooms at the most. Compared to our shanty it was huge.

We became acquainted with the Robinson brothers the summer when Ben shot Fritz, one of my squirrels. When Ben saw me crying and realized the squirrel was a pet he tried to make amends. I was inconsolable. So he built the chipmunk cage with the tiny ferris wheel and after I extracted his promise never to shoot another squirrel, we became friends. Promptly I asked Dad to remove the door from the cage so my wild friends could come and go as they wished. The cage was seldom empty. The Robinson boys, and sometimes Buck Horn, brought peanuts for me to feed squirrels and chipmunks.

At the end of each summer Ben and his brother boarded up the house with the peeling yellow paint and returned to the city. I must have reminded Mother that the house would be locked and boarded up, for I remember the shock of her words: "We are going to break in."

I had been strictly raised to "be a good girl". Now my own mother proposed to break into someone else's house! I guessed we were going to get into bad trouble. Maybe go to jail. I'd never been so frightened.

It was a long, long way up the zig-zag trail. Sometimes I sat on top of the pack boxes that Mother had tied on with rope to HaHa's sides. Even in my fur-pieced coat and high beaver hat, I was cold. My breath made smoke. I was a sultan riding an elephant and smoking a funny pipe. But even the flow of my stories was frozen. My eyes cried cold tears.

Mother suggested I might keep warmer if I walked. Our feet crunched on the icy path. A brave blue jay flew from tree to tree, scolding. We walked into the wind that came in gusts to lift the snow from the bank into poufs like powder. Wind stung my face. Except for our footsteps and the screech of the jay, the world was wrapped in a white tissue silence. The sky hung low and heavy over trees packed with snow.

I was troubled and my stomach growled after our meager meal of tea and hard tack. The latter was a coarse unleavened bread that I had to dip into the hot tea before I could bite it off. Hard tack, it was said, lasted forever and so it was valued by miners in this unreliable country where supplies might suddenly be cut off. It was always on Dad's grocery list.

I began to sense mother's growing fear. She had the far-away look and didn't hear me when I spoke to her. To escape the terror of what was going to happen to us, I turned my thoughts to happy times:

Bright days. The zig-zag trail was dusty under bare feet. Green trees sprang to life with bird song, bird chatter. Pebbles skipped along with the touch of a toe. I thought of the smell of pine and sage and green clover, and the taste of water trickling down over the rocks where we'd often stopped to fill a tin cup. In summer, water tasted thin and cool as the high mountain air.

But now I scrunched my body to draw away from the wind. The house on top of the mountain remained far, far away. By the time we finally reached the Big House my teeth chattered, not because I was shaky cold but because I was shaky scared. Mother really meant what she'd said about breaking in. She started at once knocking off icicles in front of a window and tugging at the boards nailed over the pane. Soon her hands were bleeding from the cold. Across the back of her hand the skin was split from a stove burn that never healed.

I no longer knew if my tears were cold ones or sad ones. I tried to help her but my fingers hurt even through my mittens and she gave me a stick to break icicles.

When the boards were off, Mother found a big rock. When I saw what she was going to do I yelled at her to stop. Had she lost her mind?

"Mom, we'll go to jail."

"No, we won't, darling." The Robinson boys, she explained, would understand that we must eat. We would repay them for everything we took.

I had always suspected that my mother could do anything she had to do. I guessed it the day she killed the rattlesnake. But now I knew it.

She lifted me in through the hole in the window, warning me to be careful of shattered glass. I could hear the wind, stronger up here on the top of the mountain, more frightening as it whipped the trees and I could hear my heart but the empty rooms held only scary silence and a musty smell. The cupboards were almost empty. I handed cans of milk, half a can of cocoa and coffee out to Mother, who packed the gear on HaHa's sides. Mother smiled when I found a can of corned beef although I'd never liked it. We were doing something bad. What would happen to us?

After she'd lifted me out, I asked, "aren't you going to board up their window?"

"I have no tools. Dad or Huddleson will have to come and do it when they get back."

Mother was silent on the long trip down the mountain. I guessed she was awfully worried or awfully angry at Daddy. He couldn't help it if storms closed the roads, could he? I gave up trying to talk to her. Maybe she didn't want to talk because the cold hurt your teeth too much when you opened your mouth.

When we got back to the cabin I helped bring in the damp sage brush which produced more smoke than warmth from the wood stove. I continued to shiver until Mother lit the oil burner that she usually used only for baths. She rubbed my toes and fingers briskly with snow, so I wouldn't get chilblain, she said.

For supper the hot chocolate tasted wonderful. Even the slice of corned beef that Mother urged me to try on hard tack didn't taste too bad. Smokey purred over a saucer of warm milk.

That night the storm struck our cabin. It was good we had milk and chocolate as we remained indoors except for emergencies during the next three days. A new and angrier gale came down through the trees roaring to rattle the window and shake the cabin. We stuffed the last of the papers in the cracks between the floor and wall. Gusts of wind sent the smoke back into the room. That sagey smell of burning brush mingled with the odors of the potty, for we couldn't get to the out-house. Every day we looked for Dad's return and now as I watched Mother's frown deepen, my worries kept pace.

When Mom ventured out to tend Minniehaha, the burro, or empty the potty, she had to shovel a path from the door for the snow had piled up as high as the latch. From the doorway she looked like a dark shadow moving out there in the murky haze of blowing snow.

On the first day of the big storm we ran out of kerosene for the lamps and oil burner. On the third day the wood pile was empty.

Mother said we would go to bed and tell stories. She tried to make it sound like fun, but something in her eyes and voice told me she was frightened. Were we going to die? I thought of frozen birds and rabbits we usually kept in our snow cupboard and wondered if it hurt to freeze before you died.

But when I woke up in the morning it seemed the whole world was frozen - it was that quiet.

And then, suddenly there was a shout. "Tess! Turk, you okay?"

Mother and I raced to the front door and there was the old buckboard coming up the road with Dad leaning out trying to see us. What a happy moment that was!

"Daddy!" I shouted, running to meet him.

His face was white with worry. He seemed as relieved to find us safe as we were to see him. That night we celebrated. The relief and feast of words were even better than hot chili beans and canned peas with thick slices of bread. Best of all my parents appeared glad to see each other. There was no quarreling. Dad had brought magazines and newspapers. Mother was so happy that her cheeks grew extra pink and her small, deeply-set hazel eyes held flecks of gold dust. I thought how pretty she was - how dear to me. Silently I vowed that when I grew up I would take care of her and make her this happy always.

Dad told us that the storm prevented even the arrival of the Mud Wagon from Elko. While the grade to The Divide remained closed he had spent the time with his friends, the Primeaux.

We were lucky, he said, that the road had only been closed a little over a week. It would be another week, at least, before the grade to the mining camp at Jarbidge could open. There was serious concern about the folks at Jarbidge and a trail had been cut down Jack Creek.

"Food and mail are being taken in by snow-shoe and horseback," he said.

I felt lucky and happy to have Dad home, and to have the cabin warm, filled with smells of food cooking again, and the wooden table cluttered with papers - news of a far away world.

Dad said Woodrow Wilson had signed a declaration of war.

My father, the pacifist was raving. "You wouldn't believe all the foofara in Tuscarora. Flags sticking out windows. A band playing in the church. Beats me how men can celebrate the prospects of killing one another."

Killing one another? I looked at the rifles on the splintered wall and remembered the blast of the gun the day Ben Robinson shot my squirrel. I remembered Dad killing the deer and felt the burn of terror in my throat. But when I thought of guns aimed at my parents or me, my stomach hurt and I turned my eyes from the wall.

"Why can't we stay here where we're safe?" I asked.

"Safe . . . ?" My mother repeated with a questioning lift of her brows.

She looked at my father for a moment, then they broke into laughter. It was many years before I understood what had amused them.