I woke before dawn. The cabin was cold, colder than it had been in weeks. I could see my breath in the dark. I got out of bed and walked to the washbasin, the same cracked basin that had been there when I arrived. The water was liquid. I stood there staring at it. Outside, through the gaps in the shutters, I could see frost on the ground, frost on the dead grass, frost on everything. But the water in my basin was not frozen. It was cold, yes, but liquid, moving, alive.
I walked to the corridor door. I could feel something different on that side of the cabin, not warm exactly but less cold, a presence of air that was not hostile.
I opened the door.
The corridor stretched away from me, dim in the pre-dawn light. At the far end, through the 2nd door, I could see the black mouth of the cave. And flowing toward me, slow and steady, I could feel it: the mountain’s breath.
It was not warm, perhaps 50 degrees, perhaps 52, but compared to the air outside, compared to the killing cold that should have been seeping through my walls, it felt like something close to mercy. It felt as though someone had left a door open to a gentler season.
I walked into the corridor. The air wrapped around me. I put my hand on the wall and felt the stone footings beneath the boards, felt the mass of the bluff behind them, felt the weight of all that rock that had been holding this temperature since before I was born, since before my mother was born, since before Silas first measured it with his homemade thermometer and wrote the numbers down in a ledger that nobody believed.
