The winter guard post had a single non-negotiable body-energy demand: dry firewood.
A man could endure twenty-four hours without grain if his stomach was lined with animal fat broth. But without fuel for the trench chimney pipes and fire bowls, freezing sickness claimed the outer nerves of the hands and feet within six hours. At thirty degrees below zero, an infantryman who lost feeling in his toes couldn’t march, couldn’t stand on the firing step, and became an immediate living debt to his squad.
At midday, a detail of forty conscripts from the 3rd Garrison Battalion had ventured six hundred yards beyond the outer ditch to fell a stand of dead northern larch in the White Birch Wash.
They were escorted by eight spearmen and two junior corporals.
Pei Jing stood atop the backup castle wall platform, adjusting the focus of a brass looking-glass. Beside him, Sergeant Zhao was tallying the incoming timber wagons.
Through the crosshairs of the lens, Pei Jing observed the snowdrifts three hundred yards east of the woodcutters.
A whiteout haze was drifting over the frozen scrub. But beneath the swirling crystals, the snow crust was shaking. It wasn’t the wind. The rhythm was four beats per second, with the low, hungry lope of heavy steppe wolves running with lowered muzzles.
