A half-mile below the cabin, the creek narrowed into a rocky gorge choked with willow and mountain alder. Here, a colony of beavers had spent a decade constructing a massive, sprawling breastwork of interlaced aspen poles, river stones, and frozen mud that backed the creek up into a long, dark pond covering three acres of the bottomland.
The ice on the pond was four inches thick, gray and rubbery near the center, but along the face of the dam, the overflow had frozen into a wild cascade of green icicles that hung like daggers over the lower meadow.
Elias dropped his axe onto the snow, caught the iron bar, and scrambled down the icy bank to the base of the dam.
“Watch the high timber,” he yelled up to Aiona over the rushing sound of the water beneath the ice. “If you hear a shot from the cabin, drop into the ditch!”
He swung the heavy iron bar with both hands, driving the chisel point into the frozen mass of mud and sticks at the base of the keyway.
THWACK.
The shock vibrated through his elbows, the frozen mud hard as cured granite. He struck again, and again, chips of brown ice and splintered alder flying into his face. On the fourth stroke, the bar broke through into an air pocket, and a thin, pressurized jet of black creek water hissed out, drenching his trousers with liquid ice.
Aiona was already at his side. She didn't wait to be told; she raised her felling axe and brought the heavy bit down squarely into the notched timber above his hole.
CRACK.
The sound was like a rifle report. A three-foot section of the dam groaned, settled two inches, and then the enormous hydraulic pressure of the three-acre pond took over.
A crack raced across the surface of the ice pond with a sound like ripping canvas. With a deafening, sucking roar, the center of the beaver dam blew outward, vomiting a wall of black water, churning ice blocks, and shattered timber down into the willow flat below.
Elias grabbed Aiona by the collar of her buffalo coat, hauling her backward up the rocky bank just as the torrent tore away the ground where she had been standing. They collapsed together into the deep snow of the upper bank, watching as the black flood spread out across the lower meadow, hissing as it drowned the frozen grasses and filled the cattle trails with a swirling, impassable sea of freezing mud and sharp ice floes.
Within two hours, under the twenty-degree chill of the afternoon, that flood would freeze into a jagged, treacherous nightmare of glare-ice and hidden sinkholes.
The southern gate was sealed.
Aiona lay in the snow beside him, her chest heaving, her wool hood pushed back, her dark hair plastered to her wet temples with sweat and ice. She looked down at the drowned meadow, then turned her head to look at Elias.
Her breath came in ragged, white plumes that mingled with his.
“You’re a terrible farmer, Elias Kane,” she gasped, a wild, breathless laugh breaking from her lips despite the cold. “You’ve ruined my best pasture.”
Elias leaned his head back against the snowbank, his arms shaking from the exertion of the iron bar, the cold air burning his throat. He looked at her flushed face, at the bright, fierce life shining in her dark eyes, and for the first time in ten years, he felt a sudden, sharp heat in his chest that had nothing to do with anger or survival.
“I told you,” he rasped, turning his face toward hers until their foreheads almost touched in the white drift. “I don't build things to look pretty. I build them to hold.”
She reached up, her wet, woolen glove brushing a flake of ice from his eyebrow. Her hand lingered against his temple, her fingers warm despite the freezing air.
“It held,” she whispered.
Above them, on the high granite rim of the Spanish Gap, the thin pencil of blue smoke suddenly stopped.
The scouts had seen the flood.
By the fifth day after the storm, the cold had settled into the stones of the earth like an iron spike.
The mercury in the small brass thermometer nailed to the porch post had retreated into the bulb and refused to show itself. The trees on the mountain slopes exploded in the night with sharp, terrifying cracks as their sap froze solid, the reports echoing through the canyon like picket firing.
Inside the cabin, the war was no longer against Vance; it was against the frost.
Every two hours, Elias or Aiona rose to feed the hearth. They had dragged six cords of dry cedar and red fir into the lean-to before the snow packed, but the draft from the floorboards was so vicious that a tin cup of water left on the table would skim over with ice while the chimney back-wall glowed cherry-red.
They lived in a narrow circle of heat five feet wide around the hearth.
The pallet by the door had been abandoned entirely. The wide cedar bedstead in the corner was now the center of their existence. When Elias was not standing watch at the firing ports or chopping ice from the well-head with the heavy pick, he was on the mattress, wrapped in the buffalo robe between the two women, sharing the slow, concentrated heat of their bodies against the lethal mountain chill.