The wind had risen to a sustained shriek by midnight. It drove dry snow through the chinks in the staging post’s log walls. Inside the stable barn behind the main hall, the air was warm and heavy with the smell of dry hay, mule sweat, and damp manure.
Tomas stood before a massive high-alpine freight sledge resting on heavy timber frame stands.
The sledge was eight paces long and four feet wide, built of seasoned mountain ash and braced with hand-forged iron plates at every joint. Its runners were six inches wide, shod in cold-rolled steel three-eighths of an inch thick, slightly rockered at the front to ride over wind-crust without plowing. Mounted at the rear, just behind the cargo deck, were two heavy drums of seasoned spruce wood. It was wrapped with thick hemp friction ropes and controlled by long iron hand-levers.
A man was kneeling beside the left runner, checking the clearance of the brake shoes with a flat piece of hoop iron.
He was broad-shouldered and thick-set, wearing a coat of greasy elk-hide lined with wool fleece. His beard was gray and cropped short to prevent ice from forming around his mouth. The tip of his left ear had been lost to frostbite years before. That left a blunt, rounded notch against his skull.
