Page 16 of Something Has To Give

December 24th…

Elsie woke up stiff and cold. That’s what came of sleeping in a bathtub, with a few towels spread out to cushion her against the cold of the old porcelain encased cast-iron tub, and a few more draping her like overlapping blankets.

It was cold anyway. Really cold. When she finally realized she was uncomfortable enough to open her eyes, in the dim grey of pre-morning light, she could see her breath.

She felt like crap. Going to bed spitting mad never made for a great following morning. Her head hurt. She had a crick in her neck from the angle of the tub’s interior and everything from there on down felt half numb and stiff. And worst of all, Quint had successfully chased her out of her own bed. It was over. She may as well just leave.

A faint bleating caught her ears.

Heaving herself up into a sitting position, Elsie rubbed first her eyes and then her neck. She didn’t want to get up. Getting up meant leaving the bathroom, and leaving the bathroommeant running into Quint. Unfortunately, her clothes were in the bedroom and there were goats and chickens to tend, so just sitting here feeling sorry for herself wasn’t an option. But she was still mad enough to rather be dead than have to look or speak to him after last night.

Another bleat, echoed by a muffled chorus of the same, filtered through the frosty window. It didn’t sound right. It sounded almost—Elsie sat frozen, straining to listen until she heard it again—panicked.

Erupting out of the tub, Elsie scrambled from the bathroom and down the hall. When she crashed through the bedroom door, Quint bolted straight up out of bed, blearily shouting, “Goats in the hole, sir!”

With a jerk and a whump, he fell off the mattress and onto the floor.

Grabbing her pants, Elsie barely paused long enough to give him a withering glare, then she was running downstairs, hopping into her pants and stuffing her feet into the barnyard boots that lived under the coat rack. When she threw open the door, the sight that greeted her was one she never thought she’d ever see in the sunny desert scrublands of Utah. Not even in winter. It wasn’t just snowing anymore. It was a blizzard, and by the looks of it, it had been one for much of the night. The deep white drifts were waist deep, the snow completely burying the porch handrail and all but the uppermost step, and it was still falling.

Elsie was aghast. If she had known this would happen, she never would have gone to bed last night without penning up the chickens and goats.

The goats!

A soft lipping nuzzle at her fingertips made Elsie jump. It was Nanny Cactus, her big floppy ears bouncing as she stepped in close enough to duck her head up under Elsie’s hand for areassuring pet. Nanny Sage was right behind her, and so was the rest of the herd. Even the Curries had found a snow-free place under the porch eaves to spend the night. The only one missing was Nanny Pita.

A frantic, distant bleating haunted that realization.

“Pita!” Eyes huge, Elsie paced the length of the porch, trying to see around first one side of the house and then the other, hoping to figure out where that sound was coming from. The snow seemed to amplify and misdirect it. The frantic nanny’s cries were coming from everywhere at once. “Pita!” She clapped her hands, trying to sound cheerful. “Come on, girl!”

Another bleating cry was her only response and Elsie knew then she couldn’t just stand here. Nanny Pita was her namesake in every way, the biggest pain in the ass milking goat she’d ever known, but she didn’t deserve to freeze to death or suffocate under drifts of overwhelming snow.

Ducking back into the house, Elsie grabbed her hoodie jacket off the back of the door—much too lightweight to keep her warm and that was obvious from her first step back outside, but it was better than nothing and she just didn’t have the time to go through the house hunting up something heavier.

She charged off the porch into snow so deep that on her third step she lost contact with both porch steps and solid ground and fell face-first into the thick of it. Snow crunched under her steps, compacting down, but each fumbling footstep compacted differently and at different heights from one another. There was no stability, nothing to hold onto and the falling snow, sticking in icy kisses to her face, hair and eyelashes, was blinding.

And it was so damned cold. Great clumps of powdery whiteness fell into the tops of her boots to melt against her shins. Each step filled her boots, stung her thighs, soaked into her jeans, especially around her waist where snow was getting up under her jacket and shirt and falling into her waistband tomelt against her stomach and drizzle down the small of her back. Her shirt wicked the icy moisture up her back and every time she stumbled and dropped her arms, her hands touched the snow. They were already turning red, her fingers stinging from the cold.

“Pita!” Elsie tried to clap again, but that made her fingers hurt even worse. She pulled them into her jacket sleeves to keep them warm, and waddle-waded through the snow, kicking her feet up high with every step because the sheer weight of trying to push her way through the waist-deep blanket of white was just too much. She was exhausted, panting hard and close on to tears before she even made it to the first outbuilding.

From the house behind her, she heard Quint bellow, “Elsie!”

Ignoring it, she pushed on until she reached the chicken coop. The chickens, apparently, had more sense than the goats. They were all perched in a contented line on the roosting bar, their mild cackles of alarm giving way to excitement when she threw open the door and they recognized her. In a flutter of eagerness, they leapt down and came running to be fed.

Elsie quickly shut the door and went on to the goat pen next. “Pita?”

The swinging shed door which was usually left open had been blown partially closed in last night’s snowstorm. It was now trapped in the heavy drifts, cracked about a foot from truly closing and unable to open any further without first being dug out. Overcast as it was outside, it was black as pitch within the windowless shed, but as Elsie peeked around the door, she thought she heard movement.

“Pita? Come here, girl.” Elsie quickly scraped, kicked and shoved at the snow, digging down far enough behind the door, so that when she threw her weight into making it move, it finally did. She managed to work it open far enough to spill a littledaylight into the dark inner shadows and just caught a glimpse of a pale shape retreating behind a dividing half wall.

“Pita baby, what’s the matter with you? Don’t make me have to chase—”

Pursuing the wayward goat, Elsie was about to squeeze her body between the door and the frame when she heard the warning growl.

That was not a goat.

Frozen, she stared at the shadow-heavy stall, willing her eyes to get used to the dark. Just when she began to pick out the subtle differences between wood boards and hay and feed and water troughs, the tawny face of a cougar crept out far enough to look back at her. Crouching low behind the half-wall, its amber eyes locked on her. Every hair on Elsie’s body came prickling up on end when the cat’s low growl devolved into a hiss of malevolent intent. She forgot the cold and the snow. She tried to retreat, but hit the waist-high wall of snow behind her. Her foot skidded right out from under her, landing her in a sprawling crunch of compacting snow with her legs inside the goat shed with the mountain cat.

Spitting hisses, the cat lunged and Elsie shrieked, all four limbs scrambling to get her upright and over the barricade of deep snow at her back. She only managed one panicked crab-crawl leap backwards before flopping into even deeper drifts, the higher walls of which promptly fell in on top of her, and the next thing Elsie saw was the shadow of dark movement that suddenly covered her. She threw up her arms, shielding her head from the claws and teeth she knew were coming…only they never landed. The sharp crack of the rifle shooting directly over her head was deafening. Three sharp reports, one right after the other, had her cringing down into the cold to cover her ringing ears. She barely opened her eyes in time to see the tawny cat dashing from the goat pen and fleeing for the hills. There were no furthergunshots, but the big cat didn’t stop and it didn’t look back, and within seconds, the swirling snowstorm had swallowed the cougar from sight.

---