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Gray light entered through the high windows.

The world outside had been remade white. Fences vanished beneath drifts. Trucks became rounded shapes. The Madison Range remained hidden, but the sky had lifted high enough to suggest the mountains still existed.

Wyatt came in with his yellow pad. Everyone looked at him. He checked the count once more though he knew it.

"Three lost," he said. "Out of two hundred total head accounted for."

Three.

Too many. But fewer than the storm had come to take.

Cash sat down on an overturned bucket. One ranch hand leaned both hands against a panel and lowered his head. Josie stood beside the calf we had warmed, watching it nurse.

I put my palm against the back of her neck.

The barn phone rang.

Wyatt answered.

His face changed, then went exact. "Yes, Sheriff."

Josie turned.

Wyatt listened, asked two questions, and held the receiver toward her. "For you."

She walked to the phone with iodine dried brown across both hands. "Josie Marsh." A pause. "Yes." Another. Her eyes found mine across the aisle. "All right," she said. She listened longer. "No. I understand." Then she hung up.

I went to her. "Hutchins?"

"Derek was picked up in Bozeman." Her voice stayed level. "False reporting and coercion. They're holding him pending arraignment."

She didn't cry. Didn't fold. Didn't ask whether that meant it was over.

She nodded once, absorbing a new fact.

Then a heifer groaned in the close-up pen. Josie turned toward it. "How long has number eighty-seven been restless?"

Wyatt checked his pad. "Forty minutes."

Josie pulled on fresh gloves. "I want to look at her."

I followed.

The storm was over.

The work wasn't.

***

An hour after daylight, I took Josie to the hayloft because there were some truths a man ought to tell above the noise.

She climbed ahead of me, slow from fatigue. I kept one hand beneath her boot without touching unless she slipped.

The loft smelled of dry hay and old timber. Dust turned in the early light. Through the open loading door, the valley lay buried white from creek bottom to foothills. Fence posts showed in broken lines. The ranch road had vanished.

Josie sat on a bale near the opening. I stood beside her until she took my hand and pulled. "Sit, Daddy."

I sat. For a minute, we looked out at the white. Then I told her. "Looks likely we're going to lose the ranch."