Theo and Mausami stay at the farmstead

Theo and Mausami stay at the farmstead as winter approaches, choosing shelter and the prospect of a safe birth over the expedition’s push toward Colorado. Their separation from Peter’s party is both a practical change of course and an emotional parting: the homestead offers the pregnant Mausami a place to rest, while its four marked graves make the promise of meeting again feel uncertain.

The farmstead as refuge

On Day 53, Peter’s party finds the farmstead after mistaking it at first for another ruin. The cluster of wood-frame houses, barns, outbuildings, and animal paddocks is in better condition than the places they have passed. One house appears to have been lived in not long before its abandonment: its kitchen table is laid, curtains remain in the windows, clothing is folded in drawers, and furniture, cookware, and books are still in place. The stillness suggests a departure interrupted rather than a home deliberately stripped bare.

The farm’s usefulness becomes clear in specific, hard-won provisions. Three people free the rusted well pump, bringing up cold, clear water; in the basement, intact cans of beans, squash, and corn supplement the group’s scavenged tins, smoked venison, and saved lard. They make their first substantial meal in weeks, and the expedition beds down in the largest house, setting mattresses around the fireplace. The well and stocked cellar change the farmstead from a shelter of uncertain value into a place where people can plausibly endure the season.

There is more than food and a roof. The property contains a barn with an old dust-covered car, lantern-fuel jugs, canning jars, and tools; a kitchen woodstove; and a river nearby. Four plots marked by circles of stones lie in what appears to be a graveyard. Michael proposes digging one up, but no one takes him seriously. Peter estimates that the farmstead has been abandoned for at least ten years, probably fewer than twenty. The unanswered question of who lived there—and why they never returned—gives the place a haunting quality even as its resources offer the travelers an unusually concrete chance of survival.

A contested decision

The group does not decide immediately to stay for the winter. On Day 54, Theo insists that Mausami cannot continue at the expedition’s pace, while Peter argues that they must keep moving if they are to reach Colorado before the snow. The prospect of winter changes the stakes: delay is dangerous for the expedition, but continuing at the same speed is dangerous for Mausami. By Day 56, the party is still at the farmstead for a few more days. Peter is restless and wants to leave, and he and Theo argue over whether the group should move on.

The disagreement is resolved not by persuading Peter that the journey no longer matters, but by recognizing that Mausami’s needs cannot be made to fit its timetable. The farmstead can shelter the couple, small game is plentiful, and the cellar holds food. Those circumstances offer Theo and Mausami a viable alternative to exposing a pregnancy to continued travel and impending snow. The decision separates their immediate priorities from the expedition’s larger purpose: Peter’s party will press on, while the couple will remain behind and attempt to pass the winter safely.

Parting from Peter’s party

On Day 59, Theo and Mausami announce their plan after supper. Peter objects, but nothing he says changes Theo’s mind. The farewell carries a definite promise and an unavoidable distance: Theo says they will see the others in spring and asks Peter not to forget to stop by on the way back from whatever the expedition finds. The future reunion is imagined, not secured; the seasonal timetable gives the separation a shape without guaranteeing its end.

The narrator believes everyone expected the announcement, yet its emotional force is not diminished by that expectation. The remaining party must leave Theo and Mausami at the farmstead while continuing toward an uncertain destination. The narrator thinks the couple is making the right choice, and even Peter has to know it, but practical agreement cannot make the departure easy. The scene holds two judgments together: staying is sensible, and leaving them is sad.

The four graves in the yard sharpen the fear behind the farewell. As the group considers whether it will ever see Theo and Mausami again, the graves become more than a feature of the property: they make absence and survival visible in the very place offering refuge. The narrator is due to take watch in a few hours and tries to sleep, admitting the sadness of leaving. The parting also recalls Caleb, especially for Alicia, who falls completely silent after the announcement and has not spoken to anyone. Her silence links the present separation to an earlier loss without resolving what she feels.

Life through the winter

The subsequent account shows the farmstead becoming a working household rather than merely a stop on the route. In the first days, Mausami sleeps for sixteen, eighteen, or twenty hours at a stretch. Theo chases mice from the upstairs bedroom with a broom, and the couple finds carefully folded sheets, blankets, and pillows in a closet. The domestic objects left behind are put to immediate use: one pillow supports Mausami’s head, another can be folded between her knees to straighten her back.

Mausami experiences exquisitely painful electrical currents shooting down one leg as the baby compresses her spine. She takes the pain as a sign that the baby is making space in her crowded body. Theo tends to her, bringing meals and water; during the day he sleeps on the old sagging sofa downstairs, then sits through the night on the porch with a shotgun on his lap, watching the dark. His care is practical and repetitive, shaped by the couple’s isolation and the need to protect their shelter.

Rest gradually changes Mausami’s condition. One morning she wakes with fresh energy after days of sleep, and the account marks this renewed vigor as the end of her exhaustion. The scene of recovery is modest: she sits up, notices sunshine through the window, and feels a cool, dry breeze moving the curtains. The farmstead’s quiet, which carries a sense of abandonment for Peter’s party, becomes the setting in which Mausami can recover enough strength to continue preparing for the birth.

Theo also builds a food supply suited to a winter stay. He explains that he has made soap using ash and rendered fat from a pronghorn he shot the previous morning; dragging the animal back took at least five clicks. He points to plentiful fish in the river and expects to put up enough stores to last through winter. Food gathering, cooking, and household care extend the original reasons for staying: the couple is not simply waiting for the expedition to return, but actively making the abandoned farmstead habitable and provisioned.

Separation and the hope of return

The stay at the farmstead divides the expedition’s journey into two paths. Peter and the others leave for Colorado; Theo and Mausami remain with shelter, water, food stores, nearby game, and the prospect of having the baby there. Neither path is presented as certain. Peter’s concern about snow gives the departure urgency, while the narrator’s attention to the graves makes the couple’s promised reunion with the group feel vulnerable to the same dangers that shaped the world around them.

The episode gives the farmstead a double meaning. Its traces of an interrupted household and its four graves make it a place marked by disappearance, but its well, cellar, stove, and river let a new household take form within it. Theo’s decision to stay is therefore both a retreat from the expedition’s pace and an act of care for Mausami and their child. The promise to meet again in spring preserves a thread between the separated parties, even as the farewell makes clear that hope cannot guarantee return.