That night, the expedition made a cold, smokeless camp on a high granite outcropping four hundred feet above the timber road, perched on the western ridge overlooking the silent inside of Hushwood.
The granite shelf was bare, swept clean of needle duff by the subalpine drafts that flowed down from the Spine. Below them, the vast evergreen canopy stretched eastward like a dark, waving blanket, fully hiding the military depot and its campfires. The air up here was crisp, twenty degrees cooler than the humid forest floor. He smelled of clean granite dust, dried lichen, and cold starlight.
Fellis sat near the rock wall with his whetstone, oiling the iron shoes of the measuring rods and checking the posture pegs of his sighting frame. Paxa had portioned out dried mutton strips and very thirsty barley. It they chewed dry to avoid the betraying glow of a fire.
Kezra sat with her back propped against a shelving granite rib, her knees drawn up, her field sketchbook open across her lap under the shielded yellow glow of an animal fat stub.
With her work pencil and her brass ruler, she was drawing the day’s route corrections.
She drew the fork beneath the giant pines. The false eastern chevron with its uncallused sapwood, the genuine western blaze with its thick, five-winter lip of healing bark, the slope angles of the two under-road drains. The twenty-four hundred paces of steep, winding bypass they had paced up the ridge. Beside the drawing, she noted the…
