The gale screaming across the knife-edge of the Devil’s Rib carried the scouring bite of crushed ice, howling out of the northern ice-slow cirques and funneling through the limestone cleft of the Upper Arch with the force of an unvalved blast-fire chimney pipe.
Beneath the shelter of the overhang, seventy feet above the drop into the eastern gorge, Tomas Reed knelt on the frozen scree. Two heavy bolts of oiled duck sailcloth lay stretched across the rock between his knees. Coarse, double-weave flax steeped in boiled linseed oil and pine rosin, each bolt ninety feet long and four feet wide. In the twenty-four-degree cold, the fabric was stiff as cured tin, resisting every fold with a dull, wooden snap that jarred the bones of his hands.
Tomas drove an ash-handled sailmaker’s awl through the overlapping selvedges of the canvas. His right hand did the driving. His thumb pressed the forged punch through both plies until the needle-eye clicked against the flat pale limestone stone beneath. His left hand—strapped tightly into the buckled calfskin wrist brace that kept the scarred tendons of his forearm from slipping their grooves—followed with the heavy bone needle. He hauled four-ply hemp cord steeped in beeswax through the channel.
