The village was wholly unprepared one winter when six feet of snow fell.

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At first, we all stayed in our homes and made do with what we had, but before too long that natural human desire to connect took over and we began to dig trenches and tunnels through the snow to reach each other. It took us about five days to complete a basic system that allowed every inhabitant of the village to reach the town-hall. And there we gathered, one cold white Tuesday in November.

 

“We need a leader,” someone said. And so a village leader was selected.

“And we need someone to keep track of food,” someone else said. “To make sure everyone has enough.” And for reasons I never understood, they chose me. Perhaps it was because I lived close to the town hall, and the town hall was the obvious place to store the food. Whatever the reason, I became the ration master, and I took my job seriously. If we were to survive our entombment, we’d need to be careful with our food. We had no idea when the snow would melt, but we decided to assume that it might be as long as six weeks before we’d be able to make contact with anyone outside the village, anyone that might be able to replenish our stores.

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My wife was not pleased when I told her. “You have enough to do,” she said, “looking after this family. Someone else should do it.”

“Rather me than Swenson,” I told her. “You know he’s the only other choice they might have made, and you also know how that would have ended up.”

I gave her a meaningful look. She stared back at me for a moment before making up her mind.

“You’re right, husband,” she said finally. “That would have been worse, to have that thief in charge of the food.”

“He isn’t a thief,” I reminded her. “He’s an embezzler. He stole money that he was supposed to be looking after for others. It’s a worse sin.”

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The children had a wild time, those first few weeks. Snowball fights, igloos and snow angels. But soon we decided that they should be being taught, not playing. So we widened the trench that led to the small school and convinced the teacher to return to work. She wasn’t reluctant, particularly, but she was tired. We all were. The cold, the sparse calories our rations afforded us and the uncertainty: these, taken all together, formed a malaise in us all—a lethargy that was hard to shake.

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It was different for me, though. I had my family to think of, and work to do. And that kept me insulated from the ennui.

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Each morning I’d rise at five, trudge through a dark tunnel to the town hall, open it up with the huge bronze key that I kept in my bedside drawer, and get to work. I’d start, most days, by taking inventory. Some optimistic part of me hoped I’d discover some new, previously unnoticed food, hiding in a corner somewhere. Perhaps someone had found a long-forgotten stash of herbs and brought it overnight. But such discoveries were rare and getting rarer by the week.

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Once I’d finished my inventory, I’d prepare for the day’s allocations. The village had forty houses, forty families. Each adult was allotted a thousand calories per day, and each child eight hundred. It wasn’t enough—we knew that—but we also knew we had no choice.

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Of course, it wasn’t always easy to be precise with the calories. Tins and packets were labelled, but when you divided up a can of peaches into eight portions, it was near impossible to be sure how many calories you were providing to each. So, there’d be small errors, but the village trusted me enough not to worry too much about those. And in other cases, where food wasn’t labelled with calories at all, I had to make my own judgement. So, there’d be large errors too. But I did my best to be fair, within reason.

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The first death came on a Sunday. He was old, lived alone. His neighbour said he’d been unwell for a while. When his house was searched, we found a few hundred thousand calories of food. Stupid man had died of starvation, surrounded by food.

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After that, I knew what I needed to do. It wasn’t really a choice: it was a necessity. I had a responsibility to the village, for sure, but I had a greater responsibility to my family. As December turned to January with still no sign of the snow melting, I was keeping aside spare calories each day for my wife and my children. Not too many, just a few hundred.

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And as January wore on, I knew, with a clarity I’d rarely experienced before, that I needed to prioritise looking after my own health, for the sake of my family. If I were to get weak or die, I’d be replaced by someone who would not put my family’s need first. So, I began to keep back food for myself.

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When Swenson’s younger daughter died, my wife wouldn’t look me in the eye. The embezzler himself had died two weeks before his daughter: he’d been sharing his calories with his family and starved all the quicker for it.

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But my family too was starving by the time the thermometer finally rose above zero and the first droplets began to fall from the village roofs. The other villagers had passed on, one by one, but we still had enough cans to last us, my family and I, a week or two longer, perhaps.

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And so it was that when the rescuers finally reached us, there in the depths of the wet grey countryside, they found thirty-nine silent houses and one gaunt family. And I was proud of what I had done. Proud and happy that it was my family, not that thief Swenson’s, that had made it through the winter.