Harsh Winter

Story In the starving end of that winter, when the settlement on Plum Creek was boiling the last of its seed corn into mush to keep the children quiet

Story On the night the town of Carrow ran out of wood, it was a half-grown girl named Tess Halloran who kept it from freezing, and she did it with hay

Story The settlement at Two Forks said Elsa Rourke was digging her own grave a bucket at a time. All through the dry summer of 1880 she went down behind

Story When the Aldous family took in the orphan they did it for the labor and said so plainly, and the boy, who was eleven and had buried both his parents

Story When the Tully parents died within a week of each other and left three children and no kin, the settlement of Stone Lake held a kind of meeting about

Story They called her a strange child for standing at the river's edge with her head cocked as if it were talking to her, and so it was, though only

Story When the morning of January twelfth came up warm and bright, half the township decided Cora Lindqvist was a fool for keeping a winter’

Story The Bauers and the Quinns had not spoken in three years over the matter of a strayed bull and a broken fence, and they would not have spoken in thirty

The settlement laughs at the widow's strange stone hut and calls it a root cellar, until the worst blizzard in twenty years proves it is the only warm

A frontier widow is mocked for moving her stove before winter, but the preparation her town laughs at may be the only reason she survives the coming storm.