Laughter by the Pot of Thang Co
That year, the Bac Ha valley celebrated a late and bone-chillingly cold Tet (Lunar New Year). But the cold couldn’t stop the crowds from flocking to the Bac Ha market, nor could it stop the hearty laughter of the men around the steaming pot of Thang Co.

The most fashionable, most intriguing, and most ridiculous story was Silas Drummond’s will.

“A cave! Old Silas left his descendants a cave!”

Giang Seo Phu, the buffalo driver with the thick mustache, slapped his thigh, almost spilling his bowl of corn wine. People laughed because Silas was one of the richest men in this solemn rocky valley. He had good horses, warehouses full of corn, and most importantly, the mind of a cunning old fox. Everyone thought that when he died, his fortune would make his orphaned granddaughter Clara the luckiest person in the region.

But no. The lawyer’s office announced the will: All the houses, the fertile terraced fields, the thirty fat, healthy cows were divided among distant relatives far down in the lowlands – people who had never once worn the mud boots of Bac Ha. As for Clara, his only granddaughter who had cared for him in his sickbed for ten years, the daughter with the sad, gray eyes of the mountain rocks, she received a certificate of ownership: The Old Devil’s Cave.

It was a cave perched precariously on the northern cliff, where even reeds couldn’t grow. People said Silas had become senile before he died. Or perhaps, he hated this granddaughter to the core.

“Poor Clara,” people whispered as they saw the small, thin girl pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with old circus equipment toward the cliff. “Old Silas has stripped her bare.”

The Madman on the Cliff
When her distant relatives gleefully arrived to take over the pastures and herds, their first act was to sell off half the livestock for cash, then renovate the brick house in the style of the lowlands. They looked up at the high cliff, where faint gray smoke billowed from the Old Devil’s Cave, and shook their heads mockingly.

Clara wasn’t mad. She only knew one thing others didn’t: Silas Drummond never did anything superfluous.

In November, when the northeast winter wind began to howl through the rocky crevices, Clara began her eccentric work. She didn’t buy fancy clothes, she didn’t buy jewelry. With her meager savings from selling sheep’s wool, she hired a heavy truck to carry tons of coal, large sacks of salt, kerosene, and barrels of cured pork and lard up the mountain.

And that wasn’t all; she quietly gathered all the old pine logs, old tarpaulins, and hundreds of meters of rope.

“Is she building her own tomb?” her relative Thomas, who had been given the largest chimney and barn in the valley, scoffed when he met her at the general store. “Clara, if you’re too hungry, come down to my house, I’ll give you some dried fish. Why are you clinging to that cave for warmth?”

Clara only looked at Thomas with her calm, gray eyes, like a frozen lake. She said softly,

“Uncle Thomas, you should reinforce the roof of the barn. And don’t sell off all your hay.”

Thomas laughed heartily, his laughter echoing through a corner of the market. “My barn roof is made of imported galvanized sheet metal, the strongest in the area! And hay? Winter is late this year, there’s still plenty of green grass in the fields, why stockpile it?”

Clara said nothing more. She hoisted the three sacks of salt onto her shoulder and trudged back up the path leading into the darkness of the cave.

Livelihood Underground
Stepping inside the Old Devil’s Cave, one understands why Silas chose this place.

The cave isn’t a deep, dangerous karst cave; instead, it’s structured like an inverted funnel. The entrance is narrow, just wide enough for one passage, but inside it opens up into a vast, flat space. Remarkably, deep within lies an underground spring that never freezes, providing warm, sweet water.

For three months, Clara transformed the frigid cave into a survival fortress.

Heating Area: She used boulders to build a large fireplace in the middle of the cave, with a makeshift chimney made of sheet metal guiding the smoke through a natural crack in the rock leading straight to the mountaintop.

Storage Area: Coal is piled high in the corner of the cave. Animal feed, grains, and human food are stacked on wooden pallets to protect them from moisture from the ground.

Livestock Farm: She quietly bought ten old sheep and three scrawny cows for dirt cheap from fishermen who were about to retire. Everyone called her foolish, but she knew that the warmth of livestock was the best natural heater.

On New Year’s Eve, the wind was strangely still. The air was thick and bitterly cold, a dry chill that would crack one’s skin. Clara stood at the entrance of her cave, looking down into the valley. The electric lights from Thomas’s house and other households still shone brightly. Loud music echoed from the cave. They were celebrating a bountiful year from selling land and cattle.

Suddenly, a single icy drop fell on her forehead. Then two. Three.

But it wasn’t rain.

They were the first snowflakes of the season, as big as a fingernail, fluffy and heavy, beginning to fall.

As the Bắc Hà stream began to melt, flowing down into cool, clear streams into the valley, a scene unlike anything seen before unfolded:

The valley dwellers no longer mocked the cave. They respectfully bowed their heads whenever they passed the northern cliff. And Clara Drummond, once an abandoned orphan girl, had become the true mistress of the valley – the keeper of the secret to survival when the white winter descended.