Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

We passed six or seven farmsteads. All of them were clearly abandoned. About half the houses had burned. “Why do you think so many houses are burned?” I asked.

“Probably people took shelter in them and lit fires in places they shouldn’t have,” she replied. “You build a wood fire in a hearth that’s only designed for a gas log, you’ll burn the house down quick-like.”

As twilight set in, we stopped at a farmstead. It consisted of two cylindrical concrete grain silos and a one-story farmhouse. There were three hillocks of snow that might have been collapsed barns or sheds-I couldn’t tell. The front door and door trim of the farmhouse were missing-a drift of snow more than two feet deep graced the entryway. It was too dark inside to see much, but what I could see wasn’t pretty. The house had been thoroughly looted-furniture, doors, door trim, baseboards, and cabinets were all missing, probably burned as firewood. The mantle around the living room fireplace was gone, leaving an ugly hole in the wall, but there was a tiled area around the fireplace where we could safely build a fire. A big sooty stain proved we weren’t the first people to build a fire there, although there were no other signs of past occupants.

Darla started setting up the fire-by-friction set while I looked for wood. Everything burnable inside the house was gone. There were a bunch of trees outside, but all the lower limbs and smaller trees had been cut. I picked out the smallest of the remaining trees and started the long process of felling it with my hatchet-a job that really required a chainsaw or at least a full-size ax.

It was almost an hour later and fully dark by the time I returned to the living room with an armload of wood. I could barely make out Darla’s form hunched over a tiny, glowing spark.

“This is so cool-this black dust the set makes will keep a spark alive, like forever. We’ve got to find some way to store this stuff.”

“Sorry I took so long. Had to cut a tree down to get at the branches.”

“It’s okay. Make me a bird’s nest, would you?”

It was so dark, I could barely see anything. I stripped the bark from a couple of branches, working by feel. I took off my gloves to make it easier to shred the bark, and soon my hands were freezing. Darla stayed hunched over her spark, feeding it with black powder from the fire-by-friction set and fanning it gently with her knife blade.

“I think this thing is ready,” I said, holding the bird’s nest out to Darla.

“Just hold it next to the spark.” Darla cut the spark in two with her knife and lifted half of it into the bird’s nest.

I slowly lifted the bird’s nest to my lips. I whispered to it, “Burn, baby, burn,” letting the gentle breath of my whisper fan the spark. Darla was feeding the other half of the spark more black powder, building it up in case mine died.

A strand of bark flared orange, looking like the filament in an old incandescent lightbulb. A tiny flame followed, and in seconds the whole bird’s nest was engulfed in fire. I laid it down in the middle of the tiled area. It threw off just enough light that I could find pieces of kindling to feed it.

Darla abandoned the rest of the spark and helped me feed the fire. I offered to get more wood, but it was so dark out that I wasn’t sure I could find the tree I’d felled again. I took a flaming stick out of the fire, hoping to use it as a torch. It went out before I even reached the front doorway.

I bent low, using the faint glow of the embers still clinging to my stick to follow my footprints back to the tree. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the house, but the glow of the fire was clearly visible through the open maw left by the missing front door.

That aroused a new worry: What if someone came by? It would be obvious from the light that we were camping in the abandoned house. But we hadn’t seen anyone on the roads all day, and it would be even harder to travel by night.

I broke more small branches and carried them back to the house. “We’re going to need some bigger logs to keep the fire going all night,” Darla said as I dropped the wood.

“I can’t see well enough to use the hatchet,” I replied.

“Hmm.” Darla gathered up several long, slender branches, arranging them in a bunch. She thrust one end into the fire. When she pulled it out, the tip of the bundle was engulfed in a steady flame that survived movement, unlike the single branch I’d used. “Come on. I’ll hold the light for you.”

With Darla clutching her makeshift torch and me chopping, we got enough wood to last the night. By the time we finished, I was hungry and thirsty. I’d been hungry all day-there was nothing I could do about that. But the thirst I could deal with. “I’m going to get some snow,” I said.

I didn’t bother taking a torch. Snow was easy to find-it was everywhere. I molded two cantaloupe-sized snowballs and carried them inside. Darla took one, broke off a piece, and put it in her mouth to melt. “Just when I get warm, I’ve got to eat this damn snow,” she said.

“Beats going without water.”

“I guess. Let me see the hatchet.”

I passed the hatchet to her. She wandered around the bare living room for a minute, staring at the ceiling and floor and holding the hatchet by her side. Just as I was getting ready to ask her what in the world she was doing, she gripped the hatchet firmly in two hands and buried it with a thunk in the floor.

She swung the hatchet like a madwoman, chopping at the floor. Tufts of ash-filled, mildewed carpet flew everywhere. Darla was quickly coated in ash and dirt. She looked like a chimney sweep turned ax murderer: completely insane.

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

“I am sick. .” The hatchet thunked back into the carpet. “Of eating. .” A chunk of wood from the subfloor flew up. “Snow!” Darla slammed the hatchet back into the floor.

“Take it easy. How’s killing the floor going to help?”

Darla didn’t answer, just kept destroying the floor. I saw wood joists and a rectangular metal heating duct through the ragged hole she’d opened. Darla turned her attention to the heating duct, slamming the hatchet into it with a clang and screech of tearing metal.

I heard another noise when Darla hit the duct, an almost musical tinkling, kind of like a bottle rolling on the sidewalk. It seemed to be coming from the far side of the room beneath one of the windows. I followed the path of the duct with my eye-it led straight to a grate in the floor.

I stepped over to the grate, giving Darla and the wildly swinging hatchet a wide berth. She was still whaling on the ductwork, trying to cut it or rip it up out of the floor. Had the cold and hunger tipped her over the edge?

I couldn’t see what was holding the grate in place, so I got my fingernails under its edges and pulled it up. It came free fairly easily. The duct behind it jerked and shivered as Darla whacked the other end of it. I clearly heard something rolling around. I reached down into the duct and withdrew a half-full bottle of Canadian Mist.

“Hey,” I yelled, “check this out.”

“Just a sec.” Darla was totally focused on butchering the heating duct. A big chunk of it came free with a metallic shriek. She set aside the chunk of metal and let the arm holding the hatchet fall. “That was in the duct?”

“Yeah, someone must have hidden it down there. You think we should drink it?”

“I dunno. Alcohol has calories. Maybe it would help.”

I unscrewed the cap and sniffed the bottle. Even the smell of alcohol made my empty stomach turn and clench. “I’d probably barf.”

“Yeah. Let me finish, and then we’ll put that whisky to good use.” Darla started hacking at the piece of ductwork with the hatchet and knife. The sheet metal was thin and soft enough that our knife would cut it-although Darla was straining at it, holding the duct in one hand and sawing the knife back and forth with the other.