Kezra refused to let the first failure defeat her.
“Thirty paces east,” she told Fellis, her voice tight with skilled stubbornness. “There’s a wind-throw hollow where two large pines toppled three winters back. The roots must be dead.”
They hauled the gear through the blueberry scrub to the wind-throw hollow.
Here, two ancient resin pines had been uprooted by a mountain gale, their huge root discs torn out of the earth and tilted upright like sixty-foot wheels of dried mud and tangled wood. Between the two craters lay an open, gravelly depression twenty paces wide, filled with frost-shattered shale and rotting birch leaves. The trees were already dead. Because of that, Kezra reasoned that their root systems would no longer register as living attached structures.
Fellis stretched the linen-whipped line along a true-north bearing. He set the four corner stakes with the two-plumb-thread sighting frame. The sixteen-pace Plot square fit cleanly inside the depression, avoiding the tipped root plates by five feet on every side.
For forty-five minutes, Kezra walked the inside quarter-grid lines. She drove her iron rod into the gravelly fill. The soundings were rough and gritty. But they pierced four paces into the underlying clay pan without striking solid wood.
