He looked at her with something that might have been pity or might have been contempt.
“You want my advice? Find a husband. Find a family to winter with. That cabin you’re in, it’s a shell. One bad storm and the wind will push right through those walls as if they’re not there. 2 cords of wood, no insulation, alone out there.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen the Grande herders come and go. The ones who make it have help. The ones who don’t…”
He let the sentence hang.
Ingred bought the 2 cords of wood. She had $2 left. The delivery would come in 3 days. She rode back to her cabin with the arithmetic repeating in her mind: 8 weeks of fuel, 16 weeks of winter, 10 weeks short, walls that let the wind through, a cracked stove, 240 sheep to keep alive, and Elias Croft’s voice as certain as a verdict. The ones who don’t.
What she did not know, riding home through the August heat, was that winter would not wait 16 weeks. It was coming in 10.
September brought the first cold nights. Ingrid woke to frost on the inside of her window, and when she breathed, her breath hung in the air. The newspaper stuffing had compressed and drawn away from the gaps. She could see daylight through the walls in 7 places. She spent the month walking her flock across the hills north of the Musselshell, watching them fatten on the last of the summer grass. The ewes were healthy. The lambs were growing. The wool on their backs was thick and greasy, matted with lanolin and dust and burrs. When she sheared the spring lambs for their first cut, the fleece came off in heavy, oily sheets that stank of animal and earth.
The smell was what made her think of it.
She was sitting in her cabin on a September evening, wrapped in her coat because the stove could not heat the space faster than the walls bled warmth, and she was looking at the pile of damaged fleece in the corner: belly wool, tags, pieces too dirty or too matted for the Grandes to sell. Karen had told her to burn it or bury it. The merchants in town would not touch it. The smell filled the cabin, greasy and thick, the smell of lanolin. And Ingred remembered her grandmother’s farmhouse in Norway. The stone walls there had been lined with felt and fabric, layers of wool pressed into every gap where the cold crept through.
Her grandmother had explained it to her once. The grease and unwashed wool kept out damp, and the crimped fibers trapped air in a thousand tiny pockets. Sheep survived the cold because they carried their own insulation. Wool was not only warm, it was waterproof.
Ingred stood up.
She walked to the pile of waste fleece. She picked up a handful and pressed it against the wall into one of the gaps where daylight showed through. The wind stopped. She held it there for a long moment, feeling the draft die against her palm. Then she pulled the fleece back and looked at the gap. The fibers had compressed into the space, filling it completely. When she released them, they sprang back slightly, maintaining their shape.
She looked at the pile. 40 lb of damaged fleece, perhaps more. She looked at the walls. 12 ft by 14 ft, 7 ft high, 334 sq ft of wall surface after accounting for the door and the single window.
Could she line the entire interior with wool?
The idea was absurd. No one insulated buildings with raw fleece. You could not sell it. You could not use it. You buried it or burned it. That was what the merchant had said. That was what everyone did. But Ingred’s grandmother had lined walls with wool. The Sámi stuffed reindeer hides into their shelters. Mongolian herders wrapped their tents in layers of felt thick enough to survive winters colder than Montana’s. Everyone in Montana burned wood they could not afford and froze in cabins they could not insulate. Perhaps everyone was wrong.
Thomas Arnison ran sheep on the range east of Ingred’s camp. He was Norwegian too, from Bergen, a man of perhaps 35 who had been in Montana for 6 years and spoke English with an accent as thick as Ingred’s own. He stopped by her cabin in late September to check on the new herder and found her nailing fleece to the interior walls.
He stood in the doorway and watched her work. She had stripped to her shirtsleeves despite the cold. Her hands were black with lanolin, and the smell in the cabin was overpowering, animal grease and unwashed wool and something almost chemical, sharp and dense.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asked.
“Lining the walls with wool.”
“With fleece?”
Ingred drove another nail through the mass of fiber, pinning it to the planks. “The lanolin repels moisture. The crimp traps air. Air doesn’t conduct heat. The cold can’t get through.”
Thomas stepped inside. He touched the wall where she had already covered a section, running his fingers over the compressed fleece. It was dense and springy, and his fingers came away greasy.
“This will draw vermin,” he said. “Mice, moths, everything that eats wool.”
“The lanolin repels them too. Insects don’t like the taste.”
“You don’t know that.”