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She is talking about the diaphragm of an elk.

The clipboard man is saying something to me about knife length, and I hold up a finger, and I let the rest of it play.

She describes a sheet of muscle across the chest cavity, front to back, and cutting it free all the way around the ribs before anything else will come loose. She describes reaching by touch past the elbow. She describes steam coming off her forearms in cold air, and she says it the way you say a thing you have washed off your hands.

Then she says the calm part is the whole job, and she stops, and the timecode keeps running on a woman sitting very still.

"Sorry," I say to the clipboard man. "Say the length again."

"Four and a half inches. Fixed blade only."

The gear table gives me a knife, a flint striker, and a pot, and then takes the pot back because pots are team issue.

"You'll get one pot between you," the clipboard man says. "One tarp, one pot, a knife each, a flint each. That's the drop kit."

"One pot."

"One pot."

"For two people, one of whom is me."

He glances up. He has to go a distance to do it. "Yeah," he says. "That's, uh. That's the format."

Six foot eleven has certain arithmetic attached to it and the arithmetic does not care about formats. I eat what two men eat when I am framing. I have eaten what three men eat during a bad week on a bridge deck. Twenty-one days on drop rations will take something out of me that does not come back in twenty-one days.

I have run this number. It still works. Forty-one thousand against three weeks of hunger is a trade I would take twice.

"Ostvek." A woman with a folder, and it is a different woman than the blazer, older, kind around the mouth in a way that has been earned rather than installed. "Do you have a minute for pairing prep?"

"Yes."

She sits on the folding chair across from mine.

The chair holds. I had already priced it. Tubular steel, one inch, seam weld at the leg junction rather than a full pass, rated somewhere around three hundred if the floor is level and closer to two twenty on a floor that is not. The floor here is not. There is a slope toward the drain at the far wall, which the hotel put in because this room used to be something else.

I do that with every chair. Also every stair tread, every handrail, every dock, every truck ramp, and one time a hammock, which is how I learned that a hammock is a rope problem disguised as a furniture problem. My grandmother says I cannot be taken anywhere. My grandmother is the only person alive who says things to me at full volume.

"So, normally we don't give this out early," she says. "But you asked, and you asked politely, and frankly nobody else has been polite to me since Tuesday."

"Thank you."

"Your partner is a first-timer."

The room does not change. My understanding of the room changes.

"No field seasons?"

"She has field experience on her application." A small pause where a professional weighs how much of her own opinion to spend. "But this is her first competitive format. First anything like this. She's small, she's fast, casting loves her, and you're going to be carrying the shelter build."

Six teams. One of them has a lopsided ridgepole before anybody sets a foot on the ground, and it is mine.

Twenty-one days. Forty-one thousand dollars. Four buckets on a floor that has begun to cup.

"Any thoughts?" she says.

There is a way to say this that would be more comfortable for everyone. I have never located it.

"Then I will build for two."