She collapsed face-down on the porch steps, unconscious, with her face in the snow.

And she did not get up again.

Six Hours

The human body in extreme hypothermia does not simply stop.

It slows down.

That distinction is one of the most important things to understand about what happened to Jean Hilliard in the six hours she lay on Wally Nelson’s porch.

She was not dead in those hours.

But she was in a state so far removed from normal biological functioning that the differences between her condition and death were microscopic — a heartbeat that slowed to near-imperceptible rates, a respiratory effort so reduced that it produced no visible chest movement, a core temperature that approached but may not have quite reached the point of total tissue freezing.