Beginnings - The Cabin

The wind was distant, a moan through trees tops and over bare and exposed outcroppings of rock. With the sun long forgotten, the darkness encroached from the forest on hands and knees across the yellowed winter meadows towards the weathered and decaying cabin. The chill slipped in between the cracks in the clap board walls with a whisper. It curled and twisted across the dirt floor, licking at the heat from the cast iron stove, looking for vulnerability and weakness. It settled in pockets around discarded boots and crouched in dusty forgotten corners.

The two room cabin was shrouded in shadows. As evening approached, the darkness within the walls of the decrepit structure deepened. A lone shutter, cracked and brittle from exposure to the elements, swung slowly on a single hinge, anticipating the change in the weather.

The door to the tiny cabin, left to rest against its frame without restraint, bumped and creaked in protest as the breezes from the neighboring canyons became more unsettled.

A cracked and faded tea kettle, sitting squarely upon the surface of the stove, began to protest in a high thin whine, as the water inside bubbled and steamed. On a small square table, next to the stove, placed in hurried preparation, sat a bottle and a measured spoon of powdered milk, drawn from a gallon can on the floor.

A shallow pole corral and wooden wind break, sheltering misshapened stacks of split firewood sat fifty feet from the small living structure. From behind the corral, the ground sloped upwards to meet a thick tree line of lodgepole pines. The family axe had fallen and been left in the dirt surrounding the shelter, its neglected blade still embedded in the heart of a wide log.

The growing wind blew through the thin shelter of the windbreak, picking up the corner of a faded piece of red material and whipping it about.

The movement of her apron caused the women, spread prostrate on the ground, to convulse. Her eyes, crusted with drying blood from the crescent shaped wound on her scalp, flickered dimly. Slowly, as if in a moment of clarity, one bony hand stretched out across her body in halted gait, through the dirt and weeds, towards the cabin, fading in the growing dusk. A frantic and guttural cry of desperation burst through cracked lips. The cry rose to a thin painful whine and was carried away in the gusting wind. Her body convulsed again and the fingers of the hand, reaching for the welcome shelter of the cabin, dug deeply into the earth before shuttered momentarily and falling limp.

From within the bowels of the cabin, a baby coughed. As she stretched and stirred, the baby made inquiring gurgles. She soon became more alert and her eyes widened in the darkened silence. Her gurgles became sharper, more frantic, squawks. Then, in the emptiness of the solitary cabin, the baby began to cry.