Snick.
The flame of his lighter showed the rock of the over hang and the semicircle of trail the sapling shelter cov ered. When he began scraping a circle clear and piling tinder-of which they had plenty, since the ground was covered with fir branches-Rudi and Edain looked at him in alarm.
"You can't light a fire here, Ingolf," Rudi said. "We'll smother-the snow's making this as airtight as a kitchen bread box. Our body heat will keep us from freezing."
Ingolf grinned as he stripped off his gloves. It felt good to be able to smile without ice crackling from his face.
"Watch and learn, children," he said.
He'd brought in a fair amount of bark, as well as deadwood; the bark was from some fortunate mountain larch trees, thick and furrowed and fairly fire-resistant. He tied sections into a rough hollow square tube, reinforced it with sticks, and thrust the completed article up along a crack in the rock at the edge, through the sloped saplings and the snow on top of them. More of it made a smoke hood beneath the improvised chimney, and then he got a small fire going on the floor. Flickering reddish light opened out the little chamber they'd made, seeming to push back the noise of the storm a bit. The men stripped off their outer garments and hung them from the saplings, making added insulation and an opportunity for them to dry as well.
"Well, we're not the first here," Edain said grimly, as he spread the boughs across one corner of the overhang.
What had seemed like another brown rock was in fact a skull. The bone was clean and dry, long since picked bare by insects and decay; the gold in the teeth gleamed in the firelight.
Ingolf nodded. Edain reburied the remains, and Rudi made a sign over it and murmured a few words he didn't catch. None of them were much put out; you still found the like pretty well everywhere except places where people had lived since the Change to clean things up. A lot of people had died that year, and skulls lasted.
The fire cast a grateful warmth. The little shelter would have been habitable without it, given the depth of snow piling up outside to insulate it. But it certainly helped to have their own temporary hearth.
"This is a good trick," Rudi said, grinning at Ingolf. "Home away from home."
"Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as to call it homelike, if you take my meaning, Chief," Edain said. "I'll remem ber the way of it though, if I'm ever caught out like this again."
"I learned it from an old Anishinabe named Pete-Pierre, actually-Pierre Walks Quiet. He worked for my father," Ingolf said. "Wandered in from the north woods a couple of years after the Change and ended up boss ing the Readstown forests for us-timber runner, look ing after the game, stuff like that. He helped teach me woodcraft when he took me and my brothers on hunt ing trips… and scared the bejesus out of us with stories about the Windigo. We get a lot of snow, and we get it every damned year."
Rudi stretched and yawned. The sun was probably barely down outside, but they were all ready for rest.
"I'm part Anishinabe myself," he said. "One-eighth. My father's mother's mother was Ojibwa. My blood father came from your part of the world-farther north and east a bit, if I remember the old maps."
Ingolf nodded. You wouldn't have thought it from the way the young man looked, except maybe the high set of his cheekbones and the slightly tilted eyes.
"And I'm a member in good standing of the tribe called hungry, " Edain said.
He mixed meal from a bag in his pack with melted snow and set the dough on a thin metal plate over the fire that he greased with a pat of butter. It rose and browned, filling the shelter with a mouthwatering smell that was not quite like baking bread but close enough; Ingolf felt his hunger return as warmth and the scent reminded him of just how much effort his body had put out today. The meal was premixed with baking soda and a little salt, a Mackenzie trick he admired; it gave you something a lot better than the usual travelers' ash cake.
The rest of their supper was the last of the pork chops and trail food; after today they'd be down to leathery, salty smoked sausage for meat to go with the hard cheese and dried fruit. Oatmeal and some of the fruit went into a pot of water, to cook overnight in the ashes and be ready for breakfast.
"When you're hungry enough, this all tastes good," Rudi said.
"When you're hungry enough, your bootlaces taste good," Ingolf said tolerantly. "Hope we don't come to that on this trip."
Though we probably will, sooner or later, he thought, and went on aloud: "Now for another trick."
He'd collected the saplings he needed along with the firewood, and he had plenty of leather thongs in his pack; a few minutes' work gave him two teardrop-shaped snowshoes, a little crude but usable. The Mackenzies watched carefully as the shavings peeled away from the wood beneath his knife and he tied the ends together and knotted the webwork across. The only tricky part was the square opening in the middle and the loop to catch the toe of a boot.
"I've heard of those, but I've never actually used them," Rudi said, turning one over in his hands. "Skis yes, sometimes, snowshoes no. Not much call for them down in the valley."
"There's nothing like them for deep snow in the woods," Ingolf said. "Especially when you don't know the ground; you've got better control than you do on skis, even if it's slower. Your turn."
He watched closely, but the two younger men were both good with tools and used to handling wood and leather, and produced passable if not elegant results.
Then they played paper-stone scissors to see who'd take which night watch. Nothing was likely to hit them from the outside in weather like this unless it was a par ticularly mean bear, but someone had to keep the fire carefully, given the combination of open flame and the tinderbox materials of their shelter.
Then the two Mackenzies made their evening prayers; it made Ingolf feel a little self conscious about the way he'd gotten lax over the years, so he said a rosary. It would have made old Father Matthew smile, anyway.
"Wish we were over the mountains already, though," Edain said, wrapping himself in his sleeping bag and stretching out on the crackling, sweet scented boughs. A smile: "Mom told me not to get my feet wet, you see."
Garbh curled up against his stomach; now that it wasn't so cold in here it smelled powerfully of wet dog, the wet leather of their boots and gear and the tallow that greased it, and the more pleasant scents of fir sap and the sputtering coals and the slowly cooking oat meal. Even the muted howling of the wind was comforting, with a full belly and a soft place to sleep.
"Wish we didn't have to leave at all," Rudi added. "Curse the Prophet and whatever it was you saw on Nantucket both, Ingolf. Nothing personal."
"Not much point in cursing it, any more than the weather," Ingolf said, twisting to find a comfortable position. "Mind you, times like this I wish I was settled down somewhere with a nice warm girl and a good farm, myself."
"No, it doesn't help… but cursing it makes me feel a little better," Rudi said, flashing him a grin.
"I'd settle for the nice warm girl right now, meself," Edain said. "Not that you two aren't good compan ions for the trail, but you're a mite hairy and smelly for perfection."
"Bite your tongue," Rudi said. "You might be camping out with my half sisters."