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I eat half of mine and give the rest to Ghorlan, who takes it after a pause I do not care to unpack.

We are eight hundred yards up the trail toward the north site when Neve appears at the switchback with the card stack, and holds one up.

Episode one drops tonight at nine. Reactions to camera tomorrow.

She holds it. Rain on the lamination.

"Tonight," I say.

She turns the card over. The back is blank, and she holds the blank side toward me for about a second longer than she needs to, and puts it away.

Four hundred miles from here, at nine o'clock, four million people are going to be shown two days of my life that nobody has shown me.

CHAPTER 8

GHORLAN

DAY 3

Day three, and I build.

The tarp keeps rain off a body. A shelter keeps rain off a camp, and there is eighteen days of difference between those two things.

I start at first light with the site laid out in my head from the night before, which is where a build happens, and the actual work is only the part where you find out how wrong you were.

The frame is a lean-to with a raised deck, and it goes up out of three species and no nails.

Two spruce uprights, six inches through, felled dead standing and cut to eight feet nine and eight feet three, because the ground falls two thirds of a foot across the bench and a level plate matters more than equal posts. Notch the tops, and a saddle notch rather than a flat one, cut with a series of stop cuts down to the line and then cleaned across with the knife, so the ridge beam sits down into wood on three faces instead of balancing on one.

The ridge beam is a hemlock pole, twenty-two feet, dead standing, dry, straight enough to be irritating about it.

I set it and the whole camp changes shape.

Rafters next, alder, eleven of them, because alder is bad for load and excellent for anything you want to cut fast. They lay from the ridge down to a ground plate on the uphill side, and each one gets a birdsmouth where it crosses the plate, which is two cuts, a seat and a heel, and which is the difference between a rafter that sits on a beam and a rafter that hangs on it.

Every one of those joints is cut with a four and a half inch fixed blade and a baton and my hands and nothing else. It takes six hours and I lose two rafters to bad reads on grain and cut two more.

Then the roof. Cedar bark, pulled in sheets off a down cedar the length of the bench, laid from the bottom course upward with each course lapping the one below by a third, because water goes down and shingling is just an agreement with gravity.

At three in the afternoon it is a building.

You can stand in it. I can stand in it, which is not a sentence I get to say about most buildings.

The deck is the part I care about. Split alder rounds laid on two sleepers, eleven inches off the ground, so the bed is off the wet and there is air under it, and cold ground stops being a thing that happens to you at four in the morning.

"That," Junie says, "is a house."

She has been up and down the hill all day hauling bark and she is filthy to the eyebrows and she has said almost nothing since we left the bog yesterday.

"It is a lean-to."

"It has a floor."

"It has a deck."

"It has a FLOOR." She goes up onto it and stamps twice with both boots, and the whole deck takes it without a sound, because the sleepers are bearing on the crown of the ground and not on the low spots. She stamps a third time, harder, purely to check. It holds. "You built me a floor."

"I built us a floor."