He’d laid up plenty of firewood for the season, but he liked to keep a good supply of kindling and lighter stock on hand too, and it needed replenishing. So he’d pulled on his light winter gear, stepped into his insulated boots, yanked the slat-sided sledge out from under the lean-to next to the woodshed, and headed out into the snowy woods, dragging the sledge behind him.

The sun was out, slanting through bare branches and wet-trunked trees, and the snow crust was freeing up, loosening from the bottom and softening at the top. As he trudged across the winter landscape, he unhooked the top two buttons of his flannel shirt, and the ones at the wrists as well. He’d worn only the shirt and an insulated undershirt with his old down vest, which had flattened considerably over the years. It was warm out for a morning in late January, so the heavier stuff wasn’t required. He might have worn too much as it was. The mercury had touched forty-three degrees a couple of days ago, and had inched above forty yesterday. Temperatures were supposed to drop this afternoon, but the warmer air lingered, a few degrees above the freezing mark, continuing its gentle assault on the fringe of ice and snow that had tightly encased every single living and nonliving thing around Cape Willington for the better part of six weeks.

They’d had a couple of blizzards in early and mid-December, and a doozy of a sea storm right after the new year that left nearly twenty inches behind. The snowpack had thickened, and piles of snow driven by the hard winds had grown to chest height and beyond. But the January thaw of the past few days had cleared out some of it—enough so he could maneuver his way through the woods, going about his business.