Clothing
Ingred was carefully rationing the wood, stoking the stove just enough to maintain an internal temperature of 22 degrees. The outside temperature had dropped below the limit of her thermometer. The mercury had retreated into the bulb and would never rise again. She would later learn that White Sulphur Springs had recorded 46 degrees below zero that night. In Miles City, 200 miles to the east, it had recorded 60 degrees below zero. She was conserving fuel. She was managing. He was surviving.
Then he heard a loud knock on the door.
At first he was weak, almost lost in the wind. He thought he’d imagined it, a trick of the storm, a branch knocked against the wall. But it came back, louder, more desperate, a rhythm that could only be human.
Ingred walked to the door. He pressed his ear to the jamb and called, “Who’s there?”
The voice that answered was barely audible, torn by the wind, but she managed to catch one word. “Help.”
She opened the door.
Aquatic and Marine Sciences
Thomas Arnison fell into his cabin.
He was covered in snow, his beard completely frozen, his clothes stiff from the ice. His eyes were wild and vacant, and his hands, when Ingred grabbed them to drag him inside, were white and hard as wood. Frostbite, severe frostbite, the kind that kills fingers and sometimes even men.
She slammed the door shut against the wind and dragged Thomas toward the stove. He was shaking violently, his whole body convulsing from the cold, and when he tried to speak, his words came out slurred and garbled.
“Sheep,” he managed. “I lost them. The barn collapsed. I had to… I had to walk.”
“How far is it?”
Ingred was already taking off his frozen coat and ice-covered boots. His feet were as white as dust, just like his hands.
“Six miles. Maybe seven. I don’t know…”
Textiles and Nonwovens
His voice trailed off, his gaze lost in space.
Six miles at 46 degrees below zero, in a blizzard with a wind chill that would have raised the perceived temperature to unbearable levels. Ingred didn’t know how he was still alive. He didn’t know if he would stay alive.
He moved quickly. He wrapped his hands and feet in a coarse woolen cloth, the same material that lined the walls, and held them close to the stove, avoiding letting them touch the hot metal. He boiled water and made him drink it, first in small sips, then in larger ones as the shaking subsided. He covered him with all the blankets he owned and stoked the stove until the cabin temperature reached 100 degrees, then 104, then 113.
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