Sunrise Lands

A low moaning began as the wind strengthened, at first the sort of teasing almost sound that you couldn't swear to, then louder and louder.

"Look, we have both lain out in the woods often enough in wintertime," Rudi said.

Ingolf nodded, but that was not the same thing. Down on the floor of the Willamette snow lasted a week at the outside, usually a lot less. He'd been told that some win ters didn't have any at all. There was nothing like the months of hurt-your-face freezing weather he was used to back home in the Kickapoo country on either side of Christmas. Or the blizzards that he'd experienced out on the high plains in the Dakotas, which could kill a man trying to get from the campfire to a tent fifteen feet away. Up here, six or seven thousand feet higher than the valley floor, it probably got just that bad-or possibly even worse. Judging from what he'd gone through last year in the Santiam Pass, which was lower and warmer than this area… it was worse.

The trouble was that every particular stretch of the world had its own way of killing you, and the countermeasures were usually highly specific too. What worked in the Kickapoo country wouldn't always work in the north woods, and neither set of skills would map right onto the shortgrass plains of the Dakotas. He guessed that went double for mountains… which, to date, he'd mostly traveled in the summertime.

"OK, it looks like our luck has run out," he said, jerking a thumb upward.

Rudi and Edain looked up, took deep breaths to taste the weather, looked at the snow, blinking as flakes drove into their faces.

"You could be saying that," Rudi said with a wry smile, and the other Mackenzie added:

"Just a wee bit."

Rudi went on: "I'd say we're in for a really bad one-last of the season, perhaps, but bad. By tomorrow morn ing it could be twelve feet deep. Good day to stay home drinking mulled cider and roasting nuts by the fire and telling stories."

Ingolf joined in the laugh. They were experienced woods ru

"And cold enough to freeze off your wedding tackle," Ingolf said. At Edain's grin: "I'm not joking, kid. I've seen it happen."

The young man looked stricken and visibly refrained from a reassuring clutch at himself. Rudi thumped him on the back.

"And are you glad you switched to trousers the now, eh?" he said.

Edain shuddered and nodded. They were all in thick wool pants over long johns and fleece-lined boots of oiled leather, with bulky sheepskin coats worn hair side in and knitted caps and good gloves; that and the heavy packs made them look like fat white snowmen in the growing blizzard. They had their cased bows and quivers over their backs as well, and the two clansmen wore their plaids and carried six foot quarterstaves of ashwood with iron butt caps. The warm clothes weren't perfect protection against freezing to death, particularly if they got wet. And they would, if they kept walking too long, or they'd simply get buried, if the snow could come as deep as the other two said.

"OK, let's keep an eye peeled for someplace to fort up," Ingolf said; louder now, to override the soughing of the storm. "You guys have been up here in summertime, right?"

"That we have," Rudi said, and Edain nodded vigorously. "In the general area, as it were."

An hour later Ingolf was starting to get really wor ried. The wind was slashing at them like a Sioux raiding party off the high plains, coming from any direction or none without any warning; and it carried enough snow to feel as if someone were socking you with a snowball every half second or so. He could barely see ten yards, and that only when a gust cleared the way, and the snow was up past his knees. That meant even with the pants bloused out and tucked into the boots snow was working its way inside, then melting and ru

Ingolf thought Rudi was looking a little worried too-it was hard to tell when all you could see of a man was snow-covered eyebrows, what with the cap above and the scarf wrapped around his face below. And of course Rudi wouldn't show it. The best way to keep fear under control was simply to refuse to acknowledge it; not to others, and not to yourself if you could help it.

He scraped the wet clinging stuff off his face with one glove and peered ahead. "I think that overhang ahead is our best bet," he said, pointing. "Unless you know about a real cave around here?"

"No, I don't," Rudi said. He hesitated, then nodded. "Better than nothing."

The snow was starting to sting when it hit exposed skin, ice crystals hard and sharp in the colder air. They fought through a gust like a punch in the stomach and into the shelter of the overhang, where the rock of the mountainside showed bare and leaned a little over the trail. It wasn't a cave by any means, but it did slope in six feet back from the trail proper, with a floor that was nearly horizontal. From the way dirt and needles had mounded up there it didn't flood. Ingolf looked around as best he could.

"We need some saplings!" he shouted into the others' faces. "These firs are too big!"

Edain was lost in a stolid misery, ready to keep going until he dropped but more likely to do that and die than think; Garbh nuzzled at him, whining. The elder Mac kenzie shook Edain until some semblance of humanity returned to the gray eyes.

Then Rudi shouted back to Ingolf: "I think there's an old burn just down from here!"

They all threw their packs down in the back of the overhang, where the snow was thi

"Work as if your life depended on it," Ingolf said. "Because it fucking does!"

Rudi turned out to have some old-time metal tent pegs in his pack. Ingolf beat two of them into a crack in the rock with the back of his tomahawk.

"You've got to be ready to haul up!" Rudi yelled at Edain. "Are you ready, clansman?"

Edain whacked himself on both cheeks with the palm of his glove. "That I am, Chief!" he shouted back through the white noise of the wind.

The rope went through the notches in the steel pegs; Edain took a hitch across his back and wrapped it around his left arm, paying out with his right. That way he could walk backward against the weight when he was hauling in. The two older men went down the rope swiftly, using it more to steady themselves than to bear their weight, through a screen of snow-heavy bush and into a patch of tall thin Douglas fir saplings, wrist-thick and fifteen feet long. He couldn't tell how big it was, not with the snow swirling thick about them, but it was more than enough.

"Perfect!" Ingolf said. "Get 'em!"

They both had hatchets-his own was his tomahawk. He cut a sapling off at knee height with two strokes, fore hand and backhand, and pushed it over; it caught on half a dozen uncut ones as it started to slither downslope. The next time the round handle turned against the slippery surface of his glove; he wrenched himself aside, and it was the flat that bounced against his boot rather than the cutting edge. .. enough to hurt, but he broke a cold sweat at the thought of what a wound would mean here and now.

By the time they'd sent four bundles of saplings up to Edain, Ingolf was afraid that everything would blow away anyway. He and Rudi climbed back up to the trail to find that the younger Mackenzie had already started stacking the saplings in a half-moon, their butts braced with rock and the tops trimmed and jammed against the stone, each woven to the next with their branches. The other two men pitched in; by the time the little shelter was complete snow had already covered its sloping sides six inches deep.