Chapter 11 #2
"Tom, that changes the whole thing."
"It changes half the thing." Tom was thinking fast. "An untrained dog can't run a cold trail. That takes months of work and a handler who knows what he's doing. What an untrained dog can absolutely do is air scent at two hundred yards and then make an enormous amount of noise about it."
"So they're not finders," McKenzie said. "They're alarms."
"They're alarms, and alarms are a completely different problem." Tom got up and started walking. "An alarm doesn't find you. An alarm tells sixteen men you're within a couple hundred yards and downwind. Which means the whole game isn't trail at all."
"It's wind," Oliver said.
Tom pointed at him.
"It's wind. It's always been wind and I've spent four days building bridges."
"The bridges aren't wasted," Kindra said.
"The bridges aren't wasted because I don't actually know what the dogs are, and Nell saw them in September and it's January, and a man like Wingman might have spent two months working them."
Tom sat back down. "So we do both. But wind becomes the first rule of every single thing we build from now on."
They learned the wind and it took eleven days and it was the most interesting thing Tom had done in years.
"There's four winds in this drainage," he said, on the second of January, standing on the meadow edge with the whole family and a fistful of dry grass. "And I've lived here eleven years and I could not have told you any of them until this week."
He threw the grass up and it drifted.
"One. The prevailing. West to east, comes over the ridge, blows most afternoons. That one everybody knows."
"Two?"
"Two is the one that matters." He pointed downhill. "Every clear night, cold air forms on the high country and it's heavier than warm air, so it runs downhill like water. That's katabatic flow and it starts about an hour after sundown and it runs until about an hour after sunrise."
"Downhill," McKenzie said. "So at night, our smell goes down the draw."
"Every night. Straight down the draw, across the meadow, and out over the river."
"And in the morning?"
"In the morning, when the sun hits the south slope, it reverses. Warm air goes uphill. That's anabatic and it starts about nine and runs till noon."
Oliver's face changed.
"He comes at ten," he said.
"He comes at ten in the morning."
"So at ten in the morning the wind goes uphill."
"At ten in the morning the wind goes uphill," Tom said, "which means anything we do up the draw gets carried straight to a dog standing in the meadow, and anything we do down by the river goes away from him."
The family stood in the cold and looked at each other.
"The stand is uphill," Kindra said.
"The stand is uphill and upwind in the morning, and I built it in October and I never once thought about it, and if a dog comes into that meadow at ten o'clock on a sunny day in February it will smell six people and a dog at two hundred yards and it will not need to track anything at all."
"So we go downhill."
"We go downhill or we go crosswind or we go where the thermals break up, and that's the whole design problem for the next three weeks."
They spent four days finding where the thermals broke up, and it was Sofie who found the best one, entirely by accident, by complaining.
She came in from the outhouse on the fourth of January crying because the wind had gone down her collar, and Kindra said where, and Sofie said by the rock, and Kindra said which rock, and Sofie said the mean one.
The mean one was a forty foot outcrop at the bottom of the property, two hundred yards west of the cabin, where the bench dropped toward the river.
Tom went down and stood at it with a handful of grass at four in the afternoon and threw it and watched it go straight up.
He threw it again.
It went up again.
He spent forty minutes there and threw grass eleven times and it went a different direction every time.
"It's a rotor," he said, that night, delighted. "The bench drops off and the air comes over that outcrop and tumbles. It's a permanent eddy. There's four separate airflows within a hundred feet of that rock and none of them are consistent for more than thirty seconds."
"What does that mean?"
"It means scent at that rock doesn't go anywhere. It gets chopped and mixed and dropped in a pool." He was drawing. "A dog standing in that meadow gets nothing from that outcrop, ever, at any time of day. It's a blind spot."
"How big?"
"Maybe two hundred feet across."
"Is it big enough for a shelter?"
"It's big enough for a shelter," Tom said. "And it's the last place on this property anybody would build one, because it's in the wind and it's cold and it's a miserable spot, and I have walked past it eleven years thinking exactly that."
They started digging on the fifth.
Site two, the one below the outcrop, went into the slope behind the rock, and it was not a cabin and it was not a cave.
It was a snow structure, and it was Kindra's design, and she got it out of a memory of a book she had read in 2011 and had never expected to use.
"A quinzhee," she said. "You pile snow, you let it sinter, you hollow it."
"Why not dig into the ground?"
"Because digging into frozen ground in January is four days of work with no tools and because snow is the best insulator we have access to."
She was drawing. "Two feet of snow wall holds a space at freezing with nothing but body heat. Two feet of log holds nothing. In a snow shelter at minus twenty outside, it's thirty inside with one candle."
"Freezing isn't warm."
"Freezing is fifty two degrees warmer than the air at night," Kindra said, "and that's the difference between sleeping and dying, and I'll take it."
They piled snow for two days.
That was the part nobody had expected to be hard. You cannot just heap snow; it has to be piled and then left, because loose snow is crystals with air between them and it has to sinter, which means the crystals have to bond into a solid mass.
"How long?"
"Two hours minimum. Overnight's better."
They piled a mound eleven feet across and seven feet high and left it overnight in the cold and dug it out the next day, and Tom learned the single most important rule of snow shelters the hard way by nearly collapsing it.
"You have to know when to stop digging," Kindra said, hauling him out. "And you can't see the wall thickness from inside."
"So how do you know?"
"Sticks. Before you pile it, you push forty sticks into the mound, all over, all of them exactly a foot long, pointing at the center." She started cutting them. "When you're hollowing from the inside and you hit the end of a stick, you stop. That's your foot of wall."
They repiled and restuck and rehollowed and on the eighth of January they had a chamber seven feet across and four feet high with a foot of wall all around.
Then they did the details, and the details were the survival.
A sleeping platform raised eighteen inches above the entrance tunnel floor, because cold air sinks and warm air rises and a cold well at the door keeps the cold in the door.
An entrance tunnel that went down and then up, an L shape, so the wind could not come straight in.
A ventilation hole in the roof at forty five degrees, three inches across, with a stick left in it to punch it clear, because a sealed snow shelter kills you in your sleep and it kills you comfortably.
"That's the one that scares me," Kindra said. "Everybody worries about freezing. Nobody worries about the other thing, and it's the other thing that actually gets you."
A second vent low in the wall opposite the door.
And a glazed ceiling: they burned one small candle in it for an hour with the door blocked, which melted the inner surface a fraction, and then opened the door and let it refreeze into a skin of ice.
"Now it doesn't drip," Kindra said. "An unglazed roof drips on you all night and you wake up wet, and wet is how everybody dies."
It took eleven days total.
When it was finished, Tom crawled in with a candle and lay on the platform and watched his breath in the light and felt the temperature.
Twenty nine degrees outside. Thirty three inside, with one candle and one man.
"It's warm," he said.
"It's not warm. It's survivable, and it's silent, and the wind at that rock will tear a scent cone to pieces before it gets forty feet."
"Kindra, this is the best thing we've built all year."
"It's the best thing we've built and it'll be a puddle by the first week of April," she said. "That's the trade. It's a shelter for exactly one season and then it's gone and leaves nothing behind for anybody to find."
Site three was McKenzie's and she found it herself and did not tell anybody for four days while she checked it.
"There's a place," she said, on the tenth.
"Where?"
"I'm not going to say it in the house."
Tom looked at her.
"Good," he said.
She took him and Kindra out at dusk and made them walk a route she had worked out, and it went a mile and a quarter west on ice shelf along the river edge and then up a scoured rock rib and then down into a place Tom had been past four hundred times and had never entered.
It was a log jam.
Not a small one. The 2018 flood had piled forty trees against a rock buttress at the outside of the river bend, whole cottonwoods with root balls, and eight years of high water had packed silt and gravel into it and willow had grown up through the top.
And underneath it, where two root balls crossed, there was a cavity the size of a small room.
"How did you find this?" Tom said.
"I fell in it in August chasing a grouse." McKenzie was almost bouncing. "Dad, look at it. Look at the roof."
Tom looked up.
Eleven feet of packed logs and silt and gravel. Snow on top of that.
"It's already built," he said.
"It's already built and it's been there eight years and it looks like exactly what it is, which is a log jam, and there are four hundred log jams on this river."
"Wind?"