Page 9 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

Neve raises a card. It says: BEAR.

"Is that his name or a warning?"

Neve looks at Halloran for a moment. Then she puts the card away without answering, and something happens at the corner of her mouth that is gone before it finishes.

Halloran gets her pack off at last and drops it and does a full body shake like a dog. "Right," she says. "Put me in. I'm good at instructions."

"Set the tarp on the line."

"Set the tarp on the line."

"The ridge seam sits over the cord. Corners out and down. Windward side low." I have my back to her already, because there is a fire lay to build and the fire lay is a bigger problem than the tarp. "Then we will stake it."

"Ridge over cord, corners out, windward low."

"Yes."

I go up the slope for wood.

Dead standing, not down, because everything on the ground here has been wet since the last ice age. I take the dry inner splits off a spruce snag with the knife and my hands, and I get a double handful of resin knots, and the whole time I am running the evening in order. Fire lay, then water, then bed insulation, because a wet person on cold ground loses heat faster than a wet person under a bad roof, and every first-timer on this mountain tonight will get the roof right and the ground wrong.

Eleven minutes. That is how long I am gone.

I come back down through the trees with an armload and I stop where the ground levels out.

She has done it upside down.

Let me be precise, because precision is the only kindness available here. The hitch on the far spruce is correct. It is a taut line hitch, it is dressed properly, the cord is at tension, and there is a bight left long for release. Somebody taught her that or she taught herself, and it is good work.

Everything else is a rain collector.

The tarp is hung with the shaped ridge underneath the cord instead of over it, which means the cord now runs down the center of the fabric and every drop of water that comes off that line goes onto the seam and then follows the seam, which is stitched, which is the one place on a tarp that leaks by design. The corners are pulled up instead of out and down, so the eaves are open at the height of a sleeping person's shoulder. And she has put the two heavy reinforced corners, the ones with the double webbing, on the downhill side.

The strong corners are pointed away from the weather. The open side is pointed into it.

By tonight there will be four inches of water sitting in that fabric and a wind coming through the low end at shoulder height, and we will be colder under it than we would be in the open.

She is standing beside it with her hands on her hips, breathing hard, soaked through, absolutely delighted.

"Tell me that's not tight," she says.

Two seconds.

That is what I have. Two seconds while she is still looking at me with her chin up and her hands on her hips, and there is a lens nine feet away with a red light on it, and a woman on a stump with a stack of cards, and twenty-one days after this one.

There are men who would fix it silently. That is one kind of partner. There are men who would say it plainly and let it land, which is honestly closer to how I was raised and would be the fastest route to a working shelter.

And there is a third thing, which I have never been especially good at, and which I understand in this moment is the only one that gets me a roof in three weeks.

"The hitch is good," I say.

Her shoulders come down half an inch.

"It is genuinely good. Dressed and set. Most people get that wrong for a season."

"Okay." Careful. "But."

"The tarp is on the wrong side of the cord." I set the wood down. "Come here. I will show you the reason and then you will never do it again, and that is better than me showing you twice."