The basin carpentry shed smelled of green ash shavings, melted pine pitch, and neat’s-foot oil. Outside the double doors, a steam box fashioned from a hollowed spruce log bubbled steadily over an open stone hearth, fed by two young joiners who kept the water level topped from wooden pails hauled from the irrigation water tank.
Fellis Dain stood beside the long worktable, his leather rigger’s apron dusted with pale cedar sawdust. His left hand and forearm remained locked inside the rigid ash splints that Paxa had bound with oiled linen on Day 68 after the iron staple snapped away on the Hushwood cliff. Two fractured hand bones and a cracked knuckle throbbed with a dull, persistent ache whenever the alpine chill settled into the workshop. But the nineteen-year-old rigger refused to sit on a bench with folded arms. Meanwhile, the basin prepared for winter.
Across the split-log bench lay three seasoned ash staves, boiled and steamed until they were as pliable as thick harness leather. Beside them rested a bolt of heavy sailmaker’s hemp canvas, salvage from an old ore-winch hood, and two coils of four-strand braided linen cord.
“Twenty-two inches wide,” Fellis said. He pointed with a lump of charcoal held in his good right hand. “Not an inch wider. If we build it twenty-four inches, the frame will scrape the limestone rib at the second turn. If we build it twenty, an adult’s hips will wedge against the ash uprights and bruise the iliac crest. We need exactly…
