"No," she said lightly. "I'll just have to make some calls, so nobody thinks I went missing. I hope you're hungry." I was. Living alone as long as I had been, I was used to feeding myself and eating alone, but I wasn't as opposed to sharing space with Natalie as I thought I would have been. She had made eggs and a potato hash with corned beef. We ate on the couch and after doing the dishes, headed outside to see how bad the storm had been.
"Wow," I murmured from the porch. The snow had come down heavy. It was freezing. Fluffy snow dusted the railing and the porch. It was everywhere. We took the stairs down carefully and walked around the front of the house.
"Doesn't come down like this in Provo," she said. "Good thinking with the wood."
"What? Oh, yeah. I know wet wood doesn't burn so…" I shrugged. That was basic level survival skills. I'd be surprised if there were people who didn't know at least that much. "I hope it's enough."
"When I was a kid, my brothers and dad would have competitions splitting logs," she said. I looked at her, raising an eyebrow.
"In Montana."
"In a small town an hour from Bozeman," she looked up at me. "On a cattle ranch."
"No way."
"It's a dude ranch now. My parents run it with one of my brothers. When we were younger, summer and fall were wood harvest—"
"Wait a minute," I said, cutting her off. "A ranch?" she hadn't mentioned anything about that yesterday. All she had said was she came from Montana. Looking at her, nobody, and I mean nobody, would put her on a fucking ranch.
"My dad would always beat them," she continued, undeterred. "He could split wood like a machine, even now in his fifties. He wouldn't use a block. He would take four or five logs on the ground and chain them together so they stayed standing. Made your swing longer and brought more force down on the log, he used to say. Got the job done in half the time with half the energy."
"Why were you cutting up firewood on your ranch?"
"My parents were homesteaders. That meant heating the house, growing or killing our own food—"
"Killing?" I asked.
She grinned. "One of my brothers, Aaron, has been shot about three times on hunting trips. Once by me. I said it was an accident, but really, it wasn't. My aim was just bad." This was a lot. Natalie Cooke looked like Malibu Barbie but had grown up chopping firewood and hunting elk. She had mentioned one brother, but the total was four, all older than her.
"Are you serious?" I asked, not because I thought she was lying but because I couldn’t believe it. She looked like a girl who wouldn't know what end of the ax to use to chop the firewood, much less someone who knew how to use a gun.
"Good times," she said, looking out at the front of the house again.
"When were you going to tell me this?"
"I don't know where you grew up," she said.
"No, I mean that you had done this shit before?" I asked. "Oh my god, no wonder you knew what to bring up here yesterday."
"It's been a long time," she said, "and you seemed to have a good enough system going by yourself."
"Seriously?" I asked. She looked at me and bit her lip a little.
"Well," she started, "for wood storage, a shed would be best. A parking structure for your car too if you don't feel like shoveling snow every day during winter."
"Anything else?"
"A snowmobile or ATV are the only things that can take these roads in the snow," she added.
"You knew I was coming out here for how long? I told you weeks ago."
"I didn't think you'd actually come out here with nothing but a rusty ax and pretend you were Hugh Glass. I figured you'd try to learn something first. Obviously, the best way to learn something is by doing it anyway, so who was I to interfere?"
"Your interference would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble."
"Just don't go out to the middle of nowhere again with no way for people to reach you. That's how people die."
"Thanks, I guess," I said.