Page 52 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

DAY 11

Winning does something to a mountain.

I have never had it happen before and I do not have anywhere to put it, so I do what I do, which is note the load paths.

On Day Ten, one team came up our hill.

On Day Eleven, by two in the afternoon, four have.

Rooney Pike and Ovid Cassabon come at nine, ostensibly to return a stake and actually to stand in my shelter and look at the ridge beam from underneath, and Rooney puts his hand flat on the upright and says, "How'd you get it up," and I tell him, and he does not understand a word of it, and he stays for forty minutes anyway.

Coby and Stitch come at ten with a tripod and a lighting panel.

The lighting panel is new. It has come up that hill in a boon, which means four million people voted to give two survival influencers a light.

"Okay, so, day eleven," Coby says, into his own camera, in front of my woodpile, with my shelter behind him. "We're at Big Ghorlan's."

"Do not call it that."

"Big Ghorlan's Ridge Lodge."

"Do not."

"That's the brand now, brother, that's out of my hands." He turns back to the lens. "We came up here for a collab and honestly, guys, honestly, look at this. Look at this. That's a duck's foot right there."

"It is a birdsmouth."

"Duck's foot."

"It is a seat cut and a heel cut and it puts the rafter into the plate in compression."

"And that, right there, is why we come up here," Coby says to four million people, "because Big Ghorlan educates."

Junie goes behind the woodpile again.

Their own shelter has collapsed for the fourth time. Stitch tells me this while Coby is doing a piece to camera about the deck. He tells me it plainly, as someone who has stopped being embarrassed about it, sitting on my step stone with his boots out, and he has lost more weight than either of us and there are sores at the corners of his mouth.

"Four times," I say.

"Four."

"You have a ridge pole and no plate."

"I have eleven million followers and no plate." He rubs his face. "Every time it goes down we get two hundred thousand on the clip. Best numbers of my career, man. I'm going to die on this mountain with the best numbers of my career."

I go and get four alder poles and cut him a plate and two braces and carry them down to the creek site with him at eleven, and Coby films the entire descent, and Bear comes with us and Neve comes with us, and by the time we get there we are a parade.

Marisol Arbogast is at the north site when I come back up at one.

She is not on the bench. She is standing off the edge of it, in the trees, the way she stands, with a coil of wire in her hand.

"Halloran here?"

"Down at the creek."

Marisol Arbogast looks at the shelter for a while.

"Twenty-six minutes," she says.