Mary grumbled to herself as she walked over the frozen snow sinking every few feet despite the sturdy snowshoes strapped to her feet. Whatever had possessed her to believe she could get through an entire writing session on a single cord of wood was beyond her.
She had known of course that if her estimates were off at all that she would run out of wood but at the time it hadn’t really seemed to matter. The only thing that had mattered then was the book, but now the book was done and so was her wood supply.
She had finished late at night and gone to bed expecting to leave the cabin the next morning. She had been so busy congratulating herself on her perfect estimates when she’d brought that last armful of logs into the house that she hadn’t even noticed the swirling skies.
Perhaps if she had she would have had the sense to at least get into town before the storm hit. While she knew now that the storm which had been coming would have prevented her from getting all the way home she could at least have found space in the McKintey’s motel.
It wasn’t a particularly appealing option but even that disgusting motel would be preferable to freezing to death in her own cabin.
She had set aside a small store of wood in the garden shed which she’d managed to stretch out through the first days of the storm but the last log was now on the fire. She was pretty confident a stand of dead wood wasn’t that far from the cabin and so she had resigned herself to dragging the sledge out to bring it in.
