He looked at her with an expression that could have been one of pity or contempt.
“Do you want some advice? Find a husband. Find a family to spend the winter with. That cabin you live in is just an empty shell. All it takes is one bad storm and the wind will blow it apart as if they weren’t there. Two cords of wood, no insulation, all alone out there.” She shook her head. “I’ve seen the shepherds of Grande come and go. Those who make it have help. Those who don’t…”
He left the sentence hanging.
Ingred bought two cords of wood. She had two dollars left. The delivery would arrive in three days. She returned to her cabin with the calculations running through her head: eight weeks of fuel, sixteen weeks of winter, ten weeks less, walls that let the wind through, a cracked stove, twenty-four sheep to keep alive, and Elias Croft’s voice as certain as a verdict. Those who don’t make it.
What he didn’t know, as he drove home in the August heat, was that winter wouldn’t wait 16 weeks. It would arrive in 10.
September brought the first cold nights. Ingrid awoke to frost on the inside of the window, and when she breathed, it hung in the air. The newspaper batting had compressed and shrunk from the cracks. She could see daylight through the walls in seven places. She spent the month shepherding her flock across the hills north of Musselshell, watching them fatten on the last of the summer grass. The ewes were healthy. The lambs were growing. The wool on their backs was thick and greasy, soaked in lanolin, dust, and thistles. When she sheared the spring lambs for the first cut, the fleece came off in heavy, oily layers that smelled of animal and earth.
It was the smell that made her think of it.
One September evening, sitting in her cabin, wrapped in her coat because the stove couldn’t heat the room faster than the walls could dissipate heat, she looked at the pile of damaged wool in a corner: belly wool, labels, pieces too dirty or too felted for the Grandes to sell. Karen had told her to burn them or bury them. The merchants in town wouldn’t consider them. The thick, greasy smell of lanolin filled the cabin. And Ingred remembered his grandmother’s farmhouse in Norway. There, the stone walls had been covered in felt and fabric, layers of wool pressed into every crack where the cold could penetrate.
His grandmother had once explained it to him. The grease and unwashed wool kept moisture from penetrating, and the crimped fibers trapped air in a thousand little pockets. Sheep survived the cold because they had their own natural insulation. Wool was not only warm, but also waterproof.
Ingred stood up.
He approached the pile of wool scraps. He grabbed a handful and pressed it against the wall, in one of the cracks that let in the daylight. The wind died down. He held it there for a long time, feeling the draft dissipate in his palm. Then he pulled back the wool and looked at the crack. The fibers had compressed into the space, filling it completely. When he let go, they slightly returned to their original shape.
He looked at the pile. 40 pounds of damaged pile, maybe more. He looked at the walls. 12 feet by 14 feet, 7 feet high, 334 square feet of wall space, including the door and the single window.
Could you line the entire interior with wool?
The idea was absurd. No one insulated buildings with raw wool. You couldn’t sell it. You couldn’t use it. You buried it or burned it. That’s what the merchant had said. That’s what everyone did. But Ingred’s grandmother had lined the walls with wool. The Sami lined their shelters with reindeer skins. Mongolian herders lined their tents with layers of felt thick enough to survive winters colder than Montana’s. Everyone in Montana burned wood they couldn’t afford and froze in huts they couldn’t insulate. Maybe everyone was wrong.
Thomas Arnison raised sheep in the pastures east of Ingred’s camp. He, too, was Norwegian, originally from Bergen, a man of about 35 who had lived in Montana for six years and spoke English with an accent as thick as Ingred’s. In late September, he went to her cabin to check on the new shepherdess and found her busy nailing wool to the inside walls.
He stood in the doorway, watching her work. She had stripped to her shirtsleeves, despite the cold. Her hands were black with lanolin, and the smell in the cabin was unbearable: animal fat, unwashed wool, and something almost chemical, pungent and thick.
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