They Laughed at Her Sunflower Wall… Until the Blizzard Came

Chapter 2

To understand why the night sky fell on Dry Fork, and why one small cabin stood against it while stronger houses failed, you have to go back before the seeds ever went into the ground — back to the wind-scoured pocket of Wyoming’s high country where Esther Wray lived alone with a nine-year-old girl and a dog that was too old to be much use to anybody.

The basin was not a kind place. It was a great shallow bowl of sagebrush and bunchgrass, cupped between bare granite ridges that caught the weather like a net catches fish. Summers were short and stingy. Winters were long, and they were not content to be cold — they hunted. Settlers who had come west full of dreams about rich soil and open sky learned within two seasons that the cold here did not creep in politely through a poorly sealed door. It came down off the mountains in sheets, fifty degrees gone in an afternoon, wind blowing hard enough to flatten a fence line and peel the bark off a standing tree.