With these up at the meadow, finally, he began to work through the space of the door opening he had left in the inner wall.
He timbered as he went, and gradually excavated a room about eight feet wide and ten feet deep, with an interior ceiling over his head, both to support the earth above and keep it from trickling down upon him.
He had begun the interior room deliberately at a level a good two and a half feet above the level of the front room he had made with his two walls. Now, he was attempting to put to use something he had read about, which evidently worked in the building of igloos and snow caves. An igloo, he had read years ago, had its entrance, and a small interior area, below the level of a higher shelf on which much of the actual living was done. This arrangement caused a cold air barrier to form in the lower area. The heavier cold air below could not rise; so the warmth above was not lost to the icy outside temperatures.
The theory was undoubtedly excellent, but he found that in practice, even with both doors open to the outside, after he had worked a short while, the air began to grow bad. There was no real circulation into the area where he was digging.
He was forced to stop. Clearly he would have to provide some air circulation to the cave.
Happily, he had already made some plans to solve not only the circulation problem but the problem of heating the cave at the same time.
He went up to the top of the bluff, and by measuring, positioned himself over the space he had already cleared in the original hole, below. He began to dig a slanting hole down from there for about twelve feet. At this point he was sure he was well below the ceiling he would be excavating up to for the inner cave.
He went back to digging within the cave and soon, at what would be the left side of the inner room, as seen from the entrance, broke through to the point where the hole had been opened to the top of the bluff. He had brought up a length of chimney pipe from a dusty, long-unused, potbellied heating stove in one of the outbuildings of the ranch. He poked this up through the hole to just above ground level at the bluff’s top and anchored the pipe in place. Then he began building a clay-mortared stone fireplace and chimney up to and around the pipe.
Now that he had ventilation in one wall of the cave, he returned to the digging. Air came in through the open doors and was warmed by his body heat and exited up the pipe. When he experimented with the doors closed, still enough air leaked in to keep it fresh while he worked. Whether it would be safe to build a fire in the fireplace was another question.
He was extremely doubtful that his crude heating plant would work at all, or that if it did, it would not also smoke him out or otherwise asphyxiate him. But he built a fire in it with the doors open and there was a moment of extreme jubilation on his part when he found that it drew quite well. Even with both doors closed, it would draw, and the firelight within it illuminated the cave somewhat.
The illumination was not great, but it was enough to let him do without even the interior car lights if he had to.
It was only a stop-gap form of illumination, but would have to do for the moment. It was time for him to go hunting again. He had been doing a minimum amount of gathering meat, grudging the time that it took away from his work. But he was now scraping bottom from his last slaughtering trip to the flatlands, and the last of the meat had not really kept too well. It had not made him sick. But even though the nights were much cooler, outdoors it was still nowhere near refrigerator, let alone freezer temperatures.
Accordingly, that evening, by an outside fire—for Wolf would still not go into the inner room of the cave—he made plans to go down to the flatlands for at least a couple of days. The first he would spend hunting. The next would be at the ranch, gathering up at least several more of the vehicle batteries.
The air was chill in spite of the fire and he thought he felt a hint of snow in the dark night air around him. He changed his mind. He had originally been thinking of riding Brute down and taking Sally along as a packhorse to carry the meat and the batteries—which together would not make too much of a load for her.
Now he decided to take the trailer. He had put off bringing up the skis for it. He should get those and keep them with the trailer; after first finding out how they went on. He would need to have the necessary nuts, bolts, and wrenches—or whatever—with him to put them on in case he was caught unexpectedly by snow.
The next morning was frosty. He harnessed both horses to the trailer and started down. It was now only mid-September. He had thought about the possibility of freakish early snowstorms, but it had really not come home to him until now what a difference it would make for him if one caught him unprepared, with wind and an abrupt, steep drop in temperature.
Even on the drive down to the ranch, the wind picked up and became colder. He was glad, and he was sure the horses were glad as well, to get to the ranch. He tied them in the shelter of one of the partially burned outbuildings, and went himself to look in the outbuildings where he had seen the skis for the two wagons. He had merely looked at the skis the time before, registering the fact they were there. He had not examined them.
Now that he climbed up to the rafters and looked at them closely, he discovered that the skis for the larger wagon were unusable. One had its tip ruined by fire, the other was half burned away. The skis for the small trailer were untouched, but as he looked at them, common sense suddenly shoved his imagination aside.
He could use them on light snow over level ground. But in deep or slippery snow and upslopes, the weight of the trailer alone would be too much for the horses to pull.
He took them down anyway. Tied to one of them, in a large and strong cloth sack that had printing—now unreadable—stamped in black upon its once-white surface, he found all the necessary parts to connect them in place of the wheels.
He took them to the trailer, and put them in it. A few solitary but heavy flakes were drifting on the wind now and one lit on the back of his hand to touch him with a sudden sensation of an icy fingertip.
He looked at it in the moment before it melted from the heat of his body and disappeared. After a moment’s thought, he took the hitch of the unloaded trailer and pulled it himself into the same outbuilding that was sheltering the horses.
If it turned into a real snowfall, they might all have to hole up here at the ranch for a day or so. He still found it hard to imagine a real blowing blizzard this early in the year. But the sky above him seemed to sag low with the weight of the dark clouds that hung overhead from horizon to horizon, and the snowflakes were coming at him more thickly.
He decided to ignore the storm, for the moment at least. He was dressed warmly, and by turning the collar of his jacket up around his neck and ears, he could ignore the cold wind. He had already started to think of what he could do if the trailer proved unusable. Not only the trailer, he reminded himself, but the horses. Deep snow would make it almost impossible for them to get through. Certainly, it would make it impossible for them to drag any amount of weight.
What he would have to do was build a light sledge that he could pull himself. Then he could go on foot down into the lowlands on snowshoes, which were one of the things he had found in the house here. That was handy, though he had researched them before leaving Stoketon. He knew two patterns for building them, including a temporary, emergency kind that could be built by someone who was lost in wilderness in sudden snow.
He didn’t have to try to make them now, and in fact had already removed the snowshoes he had found, along with the skis, to the cave—as well as the heavy snowmobile boots.
He went now to look for lumber that he could peel from the outbuildings of the ranch, lumber that would make it possible for him to build the kind of one-man sledge he had in mind.