The erection of the first pair of sixty-foot raking shores against Pier Six was a brutal, terrifying trial of human leverage against high mountain gravity.
The wind howling through the Eleanor Gorge had climbed to over fifty miles an hour. It whistled through the empty arches like a pack of wolves, blowing blinding sheets of icy spray across the riverbed scree. On the southern limestone shelf, twenty paces from the leaning pier, sixty men were braced in the mud. Their hands gripped the wet hemp lines of a massive three-fold hoisting tackle.
Tomas Reed stood at the center of the rigging line, his boots planted in the gravel. His hands wrapped in was heavy split-leather cart driver’s gloves. Beside him stood Carpenter Kroll and Sile Rook. Their bodies leaned back at forty-five degrees against the grade, their muscles bunched under wet wool coats.
Before them, suspended over the raging white water of the river on a pair of forty-foot spruce sheer-legs, hung the first heart-oak baulk.
The timber was a monster: sixty feet long, twenty-four inches square, carved from a single trunk of ancient Sunder white oak, weighing over eight thousand pounds. It hung from a heavy four-inch sling of tarred manila rope, swaying perilously in the violent cross-drafts that boiled out of the canyon.
