"You've got three hundred and eighty yards of dead space, Kane," the old lawman called out, his voice flat in the dead, freezing air. "The rock shelf peters out two hundred paces north. Beyond that, the topsoil is frozen like cast iron. You won't set posts there with a spade, and if you blow powder on that shale slope, you'll bring twenty tons of loose scree right down into the watercourse."
Elias walked out to join him, his gait slightly stiff, carrying two spools of heavy double-strand wire suspended on an iron pry-bar.
"We don't dig," Elias said. "We lay trip-wire through the scrub juniper and tie the top runs to the cedar roots. A horse running through that draw will take the deadfalls chest-high before he ever sees the barbs."
Aiona emerged from the cabin, leading the big gray gelding.
The horse wore a harness cobbled together from logging traces, wagon tugs, and braided rawhide lines. His massive flanks were covered in a patchwork of woolen horse blankets held tight by a leather surcingle, his hooves wrapped in strips of rough burlap to give him purchase on the glazed limestone. Aiona walked at his head, holding the cheek-strap in one bare hand while her other arm cradled a five-gallon iron kettle of warm lard and axle grease.
She stopped beside Elias. Her eyes, shadowed by deep purple hollows of exhaustion, were clear and sharp as chipped flint. She did not ask how his feet felt. She did not offer him empty sympathy. She merely lifted the kettle, took a piece of clean sheepskin, and began swabbing the iron wire as it uncoiled from the spool, coating the steel in grease so the freezing drizzle wouldn't weld the strands to the wooden stays.
"Vance left the crossing at first light," she said quietly.
Elias stopped turning the spool. He looked past her, toward the white rim of the southern ridge. "How do you know?"
"The crows," she said, nodding toward the lower narrows. "A whole flock rose out of the willow bottoms twenty minutes ago. They don't leave the roost in thirty-below weather unless horses are moving through the brush."
Marshal Cole pulled an enormous silver pocket watch from his vest, pryed the frozen lid open with his thumbnail, and squinted at the face.
"Nine o'clock," Cole muttered. "He's got five miles of bad road, two wagons of cedar stays, and eight men riding drag. He'll hit the bottom of this canyon by two this afternoon. If that wire isn't stretched and spiked into the rock before his team clears the ford, he has the legal right to drive his survey stakes right down the middle of your kitchen floor."
"Then we don't stop for dinner," Elias said.
The work became a brutal, mechanical agony.
Elias threw his entire weight against the lever of the stretcher. The iron gears clicked with a harsh, ratcheting scream: clack... clack... clack. The thick galvanized wire pulled out of the drift, shedding its crust of white frost and humming under immense tension like the bass strings of a giant harp.
Beside him, Aiona drove the square iron staples home with short, furious swings of a four-pound hammer. Tink. Tink. Chunk. The cedar posts groaned as the wire bit into their bark, weeping dry, fragrant dust into the freezing wind.
When the wire snapped at eleven o'clock—the cold steel fracturing under the strain with a sound like a pistol shot—the whip-end coiled violently through the air, catching Elias across the forearm. The barbs tore through his heavy canvas sleeve and bit into the meat of his wrist, scoring a three-inch furrow that welled with thick, dark crimson blood.
The blood did not drip. It froze against his skin into dark, ruby beads before it could reach the cuff of his glove.
Aiona dropped her hammer, caught his arm, and twisted the cloth back to expose the torn flesh. Without speaking, she reached into her pocket, brought out a clean square of linen and a pinch of ground black pepper, pressed the spice directly into the weeping wound to sear the bleeding, and bound the cloth tight with a length of rawhide.
Her hands were shaking—not from fear, but from the bone-crushing chill that had settled into her fingers. Her face was inches from his; he could feel the faint, desperate heat of her breath through the wool of her muffler.
"You're bleeding on the timber, Kane," she whispered, her voice fierce, rough, and trembling at the edge of tears.
Elias looked down into her dark eyes, his jaw clamped shut against the blinding, pepper-fueled fire in his wrist. He reached out with his uninjured hand, his gloved fingers closing over the iron hammer she had dropped, and placed it back into her palm.
"Then let it freeze into the wood," Elias said. "Spike the next post."
By one o'clock, the four-strand wire stretched unbroken from the sheer rock of the red bluff, across the scrub-juniper gulch, and straight into the stone-filled timber cribs guarding the sheep meadow. It stood five feet high, taut, gleaming with axle grease, with twisted cedar stays every six feet to keep cattle from forcing their shoulders between the strands.
It was not merely a fence. It was an iron wall planted squarely across the mouth of the wilderness.