The wheelbarrow's tire had flattened from the cold and didn't turn easily. He used it like a ski and slid it through the snow.
He stacked the barrow with another load of logs and tried to ignore how much his fingers and toes hurt already from the cold. They had bought winter gear, but not for this. Even with the hood and ski mask, with each breath he could feel the mucous in his nose drying and hardening, crackling when he flared his nostrils. By the time he got the barrow full and started back to the cabin, a vague warmth had begun creeping into his toes. That was a bad sign.
At the horizon, the nine thousand ninety-six visible stars of the night sky intersected with snow-silvered hills. He thought of his family there in the cabin, and then of the people in their houses in Granite Shoals and Marble Falls and Llano and Austin. The people who didn't have wood stoves and firewood. ERCOT had started rolling blackouts when the inland temperatures fell below 10 degrees. They had fired up all the coal and natural gas capacity on the grid to replace the missing solar, and the frozen hydro, and the slowly dying wind. But it wasn't enough for all those furnace fans and electric heaters. The coal couldn't last forever. The roads were frozen. The railroads and gas pipelines broke down. Eventually the blackouts rolled in and didn't roll out again.
He dumped the wood in the mudroom and turned back around.
