text: The New Year brings no fresh joys with it. Those in the cabins around Truckee Lake remain cold and starving and those at Alder Creek are little better off. After the initial wave of six deaths people are adjusting to the terrible conditions but that doesn’t make it any easier. The babies and young children cry continually and it is hellish for the adults. You have heard nothing of the Snowshoes Party and have no idea if any of them have made it to civilization. Things continue to worsen and near the end of January Louis Keseberg’s infant son, also called Louis, dies in the Murphy Cabin. Keseberg is grief-stricken and one night he stumbles into your cabin with his dead baby in his arms and asks you to help bury him in the snow.
  
  
  What do you do?
  
  
   
  > You try to get him to wait until morning
  You manage to persuade Louis to wait until morning when a group of the remaining men help bury his son. The death of Louis Keseberg’s child is just the first of the year. John Murphy, a strapping sixteen-year-old who looks after his mother and extended family of younger children worsens steadily. His mother, Levinah Jackson, tries to revive him by placing a little piece of meat in his mouth and John swallows it, goes to sleep with a weak gurgling snore and dies. His mother asks you for your blanket to bury the child.
  
  
  What do you do?
  
  
   
  > You let him have it
  Without your blanket you have no chance of surviving the bitter cold. Lying in the corner you too go to sleep, a deep sleep from which you do not wake.
  
  
   