As always, the first breath of outside air made him feel as if he’d inhaled a lungful of knives and saws. His work boots crunched in the snow as he made his slow way toward the barn. The second breath wasn’t so bad; by the third, the air was just cold. He’d felt it much colder; he doubted it was any more than ten below. This sort of winter weather came with living in Manitoba.

A north-south dirt road marked the eastern boundary of his farm. Most winters, it would have been all but empty of traffic. Not this one, nor the two previous. Big snorting White trucks painted green-gray growled over the frozen ground, hauling men and supplies toward the front south of Winnipeg.

“Not far enough south of Winnipeg,” McGregor said under his steaming breath. Canadian and British troops still held the United States out of the link between the west and the more densely populated provinces to the east, but the sound of artillery from the front was no more than a low mutter on the horizon, not the thunder it had been the summer before, when for a while he’d hoped the Yanks would be driven from his land.

Horse-drawn wagons and columns of marching men supplemented the trucks. McGregor hoped the marching soldiers would all come down with frostbite. Some of them surely would; the United States did not have winters to match these.

Other trucks carried soldiers south, away from the fighting. Ambulances with red crosses painted on their green-gray side panels carried soldiers away from the fighting, too, probably for good. Any man hurt badly enough to need treatment so far away from the front was likely to be in bad shape. McGregor hoped so.

He went into the barn and tended to the livestock. He didn’t have so much livestock to tend as he’d had before the war started; U.S. requisitions had made sure of that. He milked the cow and fed it and the horse and the pigs. He shoveled dung. When spring came, he’d manure his acres as best he could. He gathered eggs from under the chickens, who squawked and tried to peck. He put corn in a trough for them, glad he still had corn to give.