One of them smiled sarcastically.
“Are you predicting the weather now, Ellie?”
“I’m serious.”
“Us too,” replied the second.
“We’ve lived here our whole lives. We know winter.”
Eleanor looked around the room, meeting their amused gazes.
“No,” she said quietly.
“You don’t know me.”
But they didn’t want to listen.
So she stopped talking.
And she began to build.
The shelter was no ordinary hole.
That was the plan.
Eleanor worked from sunrise to sunset, with blisters on her hands and aching muscles.
She reinforced the walls with wooden beams, covered the floor with packed earth and created a low ceiling to retain heat.
She created storage units for food – preserved vegetables in jars, grain in bags, dried meat.
She built a narrow entrance, sloping to protect against the wind.
She built a simple roof over it that blended into the landscape, making it look like an ordinary pile of earth.
