8. When We Are In Need -

“Elias,” she whispered. Her voice was like dry leaves scraping over stone. He didn't look up. “I’m here.” “The soup,” she said. “It was good.”

The stranger made a sound then. It wasn't a groan or a plea. It was a dry, clicking sob. His hands, bare and blue-black at the knuckles, slipped on the icy threshold, and he collapsed forward, his head resting inches from Elias’s boots.

“Rest,” he said. His own voice sounded foreign to him—low and gravelly, stripped of its music by weeks of silence and salt meat. “The fever’s just high tonight. It’ll break by dawn.” 8. When We Are in Need

Instead, a cascade of dried venison jerky and parched corn spilled out onto the floorboards. At the bottom was a small, sealed tin. Elias pried it open with his thumbnail. Inside was a thick, dark paste that smelled powerfully of pine resin, grease, and rendered fat—bear grease salve, the old medicine for the lung-fever.

Elias took the tin cup from the table, dipped it into the melted snow-bucket by the fire, and held it to the man’s cracked lips. The stranger drank greedily, coughing and choking, the water running clear through his beard. “Elias,” she whispered

Elias looked at the man. Then he looked at his wife, dying in the dark for want of strength. He dropped the poker.

No answer. Only the wind and the scratching of branches against the eaves. “I’m here

The shavings fell like pale curls of skin onto the scarred wood.