The San Juan Mountains spread in every direction as they move north. Enormous and indifferent. The kind of landscape that does not care about a person's circumstances and in that indifference offers something almost like fairness. Odell drops her at the southeastern corner of the claim, takes his payment, and is halfway turned around before she has both feet on the ground. You'll want to flag down anyone on the north road if you need anything," he says without looking back.
Caldwell's men ride through most mornings. She does not ask who Caldwell is. She picks up her pack, walks to where the creek bends east, and looks at what is hers. It is not beautiful in the way she had imagined. It is simply there, dense with pine and spruce along the northern edge, a clearing of perhaps 5 acres, where last season's grass came in thick, a rise to the west, where the ground levels before dropping toward a second water source she can hear but not yet see.
The air smells of pine resin and cold stone and the particular dryness of high altitude. She sets down the pack and opens the tool chest. Henry had been a carpenter since he was 14. She had spent 12 years of marriage watching him work. She had not only watched, she had handed tools, held corners, asked questions, made herself useful in the particular way of a person who understands that knowledge accumulates whether or not it is being formally taught.
She is not Henry. Her hands are capable but not trained to his precision. Her arms are strong. She has always been strong. Her size a fact.
She has moved through the world with rather than around but not yet accustomed to the sustained rhythm of an axe. The pregnancy complicates everything. Her center of gravity is shifted. Her stamina is unreliable. There are hours in the afternoon when the altitude and the child's weight combine into something close to unbearable.
But the tools are good, the trees are there. She has 60 days. She chooses the cabin site first, the way Henry always said most builders went wrong, getting attached to a tree before thinking about drainage and wind. She walks the clearing three times in the remaining light, noting where the ground sits highest, how the shadows move, where the slope carries water away from the foundation. She chooses the western rise hardpacked earth 6 ft above the creek line backed against a natural windbreak of old growth timber on the north and west.
Then she goes back to the creek, washes her face and hands, eats what she has and sleeps. She starts felling timber at first light. The first tree takes most of the morning. A pine not large, maybe 14 in across. By the time it comes down, she has sweated through her dress twice and stopped four times to rest, and the notch she cut is adequate at best.
The sound of the fall is enormous in the mountain quiet, and she stands for a moment in the silence it leaves behind. Then she moves to the next one. By the end of the third day, she has felled six trees, limmed them clean. Her hands have blistered, and the blisters have broken and are beginning to harden. Her back aches at the base and she monitors carefully knowing the difference between muscle fatigue and something requiring attention.