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I stand there with a paper cup going cold in my hand and start, very quietly, to run the odds on a hand I have already bet the entire stack on.

CHAPTER 4

GHORLAN

DAY 1

They put us out at the north site at eleven in the morning and the rain has already changed twice on the way up.

That is what this country does. There is rain that falls, rain that drifts, and rain that simply exists in the air at all altitudes like a condition of the place. Tarn Reach gets three hundred inches a year and most of that arrives in the exact window somebody at a network chose for filming, which tells you what the window was chosen for.

The site is a bench of flat ground under old spruce, forty feet across, with a slope above it and a creek eighty yards below and a jumble of rock further up the hill that I will get to.

The drop kit sits on a stump in a mesh bag.

One tarp, twelve by ten, coated nylon with a shaped ridge. One pot, four quart, aluminum, dented. One knife each. One flint striker each. Two wool blankets. A coil of paracord that somebody has already shortened, which I will be mentioning to a producer at some point.

Halloran stands in the middle of the bench with her pack still on both shoulders, turning in a slow circle, taking in the trees.

"Okay," she says. "This is just a lot of outside."

I am already at the spruce on the uphill corner with my hand flat on the bark.

Because here is what a site is. A site is not a view. A site is two anchor points, a drainage, and a wind. Everything else is decoration.

The spruce on the uphill corner has a butt flare that says it has been standing through weather from the southwest for eighty years, and the second spruce, thirty-one feet out, has the same lean, which means the two of them agree about where the wind comes from. Between them the ground crowns very slightly. Water will part around a body lying on that crown instead of pooling under it.

That is the site, entire. It took eleven seconds and it will keep us alive.

"You're already doing something," Halloran says.

"Yes."

"I haven't taken my pack off."

"That is fine."

"That is not fine. That is a scored event."

I run the paracord from the uphill spruce to the downhill spruce at a height that puts the peak above my head and the eaves near the ground, because a low tarp is a warm tarp and a high tarp is a sail. My hitch goes on in about four seconds. It is a truckers hitch with a marlinspike on the standing part and I have tied it since I was six.

Somewhere behind me a woman clears her throat.

She has come up the hill without a sound, black rain shell, hood down, wet hair pulled back hard. Twenty-six, maybe. She holds a stack of laminated cards banded with a rubber band, and she raises the top one to chest height and holds it there.

The card says: FIELD PRODUCER, NORTH SITE. I AM NOT PERMITTED TO SPEAK WITH YOU.

She flips it.

The back says: NEVE. HELLO.

"Hello," I say.

She nods once, tucks the card to the bottom of the stack, and steps back three paces to a stump she has apparently already chosen, and sits on it.

Behind her, the enormous camera operator from the gravel lot comes up the trail with a rig on his shoulder and a battery belt around his waist and settles at an angle to the site that gives him both of us and the ridgeline in one frame. He does not say hello. He does not nod. He puts the lens on me and the little red eye comes on.

"Does he have a name?" Halloran says.