The morning air on the headframe platform was cold enough to freeze water in an iron kettle within ten minutes. A thick, gray frost coated the pitch-pine timbering. The wind that howled out of the northern gorges carried the dry, stinging bite of high-sky ice, whipping fine swirls of white granite dust across the wooden decking.
Tomas Reed stood by the open steel gate of the central lift cage, carefully checking the equipment lashed to his four-foot ash-wood pack frame. His breath formed dense white plumes that vanished into the gray mountain dawn. Beside him on an upturned nail keg, four brass-and-mica miner’s safety lamps were set in a row. He trimmed each braided cotton wick with his folding brass shears, checked the pool screws. Then he filled the bases with refined colza oil from a sealed lead flask. In the damp underground drifts, an ordinary animal fat candle would gutter and die in foul air. A safety lamp with a double-gauze flame arrestor was the only reliable witness between life and choking firedamp.
He pulled the calfskin brace tight around his left wrist. He set the two brass buckles into their third holes. He spread his fingers, thumb to index, thumb to little finger. He felt the stiff pulling ache along the jagged white scar on his inner radius. The cold air made the gristle feel like frozen rawhide. But the brace supported the wrist bones with rigid, unbending firmness.
