It was probably silly for her to feel more relieved at still having her hat than having made it across the barrier before... whatever was out there... had caught up with her, she wouldn't deny that. But, the last gifts her parents had given her and her twin brother were these matching cowboy hats. Her name was even embroidered inside, at the back. Her brother's was identical, but obviously, with his own name.

Thinking of Frey, she sighed, running her hand through her bangs and putting her hat down on the veranda rail. With him taking the steers on the big cattle drive, she had to do the rest of the chores alone. Maybe after he got back, they could actually hire on some ranch hands.

Freya walked around the wrap-around veranda to the backside of the house, where there was a path leading out to the barns and corrals. Right now, most of the ranch was pretty empty. They only had about twenty cows and one bull left. Things had been tight this year, so they'd sold all the heifer calves born this year, about six, to local homesteaders who wanted a dairy cow. The dozen other surviving bull calves from the year had been castrated and Frey was driving them to the big cattle show in San Francisco. That was a long drive from El Paso, and if they didn't sell all twelve steers, Freya didn't think they'd make it to next year's drive.

She grabbed a bucket of feed from the shed on the way to the chicken coop. Freya paused to pull a book of matches out of her pocket and light the oil lanterns on their posts. She didn't like walking this path in the dark, even from the double safety of the fence and the barrier. She didn't have a good reason for it, especially since standing in the light made it harder to see into the darkness beyond the light's range. Perhaps it was because of her parents' old horror stories from Norway. She and Frey always talked about how differently they saw crows than most of the other townsfolk in and around El Paso because of the stories they were raised with.

Freya's parents had been brought to America by their parents when they were teenagers, not much younger than Frey and Freya were now. They'd ridden the same boat and fallen in love during the weeks-long journey across the sea. Freya imagined it hadn't been that difficult to get to know one another and fall in love in such circumstances. Her parents had told her and her brother about the old gods they worshipped in Norway, and that opposite-sex twins were commonly named after the twin god and goddess of their faith. Freya and her brother had had many mixed feelings over their lives about their names because of how the mostly-Protestant settlers reacted to them.

Now Freya could only cherish whatever she had left of her parents, her name and her brother's name being something intangible, but permanent they could hold onto. The lessons about how to protect themselves from monsters and spirits was another.