My Grandfather's Ship Would Sail in April

• Chapter 1 The Whale in the Pasture
• Chapter 2 Pine Ribs and Iron Bolts
• Chapter 3 Stories of Salt and Baleen
• Chapter 4 The Village on the Slope
• Chapter 5 Autumn’s Last Grazing
• Chapter 6 The Sound of the Drawknife
• Chapter 7 First Frost on the Keel
• Chapter 8 Old Men and Strange Dreams
• Chapter 9 Secrets in the Sawdust
• Chapter 10 The Winter Lock
• Chapter 11 Maps Without Mountains
• Chapter 12 Fireside Harpoons
• Chapter 13 The Weight of Driftwood
• Chapter 14 Whispers in the Chapel
• Chapter 15 A Measure of Canvas
• Chapter 16 The Long Cold
• Chapter 17 Cracks in the Glacier
• Chapter 18 The Föhn Wind Rises
• Chapter 19 Rivulets of March
• Chapter 20 Raising the Mainmast
• Chapter 21 The Skeptics' Council
• Chapter 22 Meltwater and Mud
• Chapter 23 The Roar of the Torrent
• Chapter 24 April's High Tide
• Chapter 25 Slipping the Chocks
• Chapter 26 Toward the Open Sea

The cows never understood the ship, but they had learned to respect its shade. In late August, when the midday heat climbed out of the valley floor and settled heavy against the lower meadows of Saint-Jorioz, twenty-two head of brown Simmental cattle would crowd into the shadow cast by forty feet of green larch timbers. To an outsider arriving by the footpath from the rail terminus down in the gorge, the sight was altogether wrong. A pasture was meant for grass, dung, the occasional hay-barn with fieldstone footings, and perhaps a wooden watering trough hollowed out of a cedar trunk. It was not meant to harbor a deep-bellied double-ended vessel that looked as though it had been dropped from a great height by an exhausted eagle.

My grandfather, Hannes Giraud, did not see a foreign object when he looked through the kitchen window each morning. He saw a sensible piece of engineering awaiting its element.

"A boat is merely a tub with a sense of direction, Mathilde," he told me more than once while buttering rye bread with a thumb-broad pocket knife. "People make a great fuss about water. Water is lazy. It wants only to go down. The Rhone goes down to the sea, does it not? The lake takes the streams, the streams take the runnels, and the runnels take the melted ice. A child understands gravity. It is the parish council that struggles with it."

I was twelve that summer, an age when one knows perfectly well that cows do not swim to Marseille, but also an age when an old man with three missing fingers and an anchor inked in dark indigo into the skin between his wrist and thumb carries considerably more authority than the village priest. Father Martin spoke only of heaven, which sounded cold and smelled of damp plaster. Grandfather spoke of greasy trade winds, three-hundred-barrel bull sperm whales that could splinter a rowboat with the flick of a flukes-edge, and ports where the women wore flowers behind their ears and the rum was clearer than well-water.

The keel had been laid five years before, in the spring of 1889, though the village dated the madness even earlier. Some traced it to the day Grandfather’s pension from the merchant fleet in Nantes had arrived via the post coach—a small blue slip of government paper that the postmaster, Monsieur Baillod, had held up to the oil lamp twice before handing over. Others said it was the death of my grandmother, who had kept him anchored to the smallholding for forty years by the sheer gravity of her laundry baskets and her cheese-press. When she died of the lung-rot in the hard winter of eighty-eight, Grandfather had walked out to the upper pasture behind the barn, looked down the steep green throat of the valley toward the gray ribbon of the torrent four hundred feet below, and announced to the crows that he had swallowed his last mouthful of alpine dust.

He had not bought seasoned oak from the shipyards at Toulon. He had neither the money nor the patience for French teamsters who complained about the grade of the mountain tracks. Instead, he went up into the communal forest with two hired woodsmen from Les Gets and marked ninety-four mountain larches. The timber had been felled when the sap was low, hauled down across the frozen scree by teams of four heavy-legged oxen, and stacked in the field behind our kitchen garden like giant sticks of dry cinnamon.

By that August, the hull had taken its form. From the high pasture above our house, near the boundary stone where the sheep belonging to the widow Perret grazed among the wild thyme, you could look down into the vessel as if it were an open pod. It was forty-eight feet long between perpendiculars, though Grandfather insisted on measuring everything in English feet because, he said, the British had stolen the sea from the Dutch and therefore owned the only words worth using for a hull. It had a beam of fifteen feet at the widest point, a sharp, raked stem that pointed directly at the church steeple down the slope, and an elliptical stern designed to lift before a following gale.

"Look at her run," he would say, standing on an overturned butter tub with a plumb bob dangling from his fingers. "She has no drag in the buttocks. She’ll slip through the chop like an eel through wet grass."

The village did not call her an eel. Down at the tavern of the White Cross, where the men drank sour red wine and argued about milk quotas, she was known simply as Le Cachalot—the sperm whale. They did not mean it as praise. When a peasant farmer says a thing is a whale, he means it is enormous, useless for pulling a plow, impossible to eat before the meat turns black, and likely to cause a great deal of trouble if it ever starts moving.

The ship sat on three heavy oak blocks that were sunk into the meadow turf. Beneath these, Grandfather had buried four transverse sleepers of split chestnut, leveled with gravel taken from the stream bed. Every three weeks he would get down on his belly in the clover with a brass spirit level he had carried home from the Atlantic in a canvas sea-chest. If the bubble was off by the width of a horsehair, he would spend two days levering fifty-ton baulks with an iron-shod pole until the brass vial was pacified.

"Why does it matter if she sits level now?" I asked him one afternoon. I was sitting on the grass, picking wild strawberries into the pocket of my pinafore. The scent of pine resin was thick in the sun, mixing with the sharp vinegar smell of the ants that scurried across the wood chips. "She isn't in the water."

Grandfather looked out from under his gray eyebrows, which grew in two wild crests like the wool on a rams forehead. His face was the color of a smoked ham, cross-hatched with lines that had nothing to do with the mountain wind and everything to do with forty years of squinting into the glare of salt water.

"A vessel remembers its making, Mathilde," he said, tapping the keel with the knuckle of his good middle finger. The larch gave back a dull, solid thunk. "If you build her crooked, she will steer crooked until she breaks up on a reef. You cannot tell a piece of wood a lie for six months and then expect it to tell the truth to the sea. The sea is a great unmasker of joinery."

He crawled out from under the curve of the bilges, his homespun trousers gray with grass-stain and limestone powder. He was not a tall man, but his shoulders were thick and set low, as if his neck had been shortened by years of ducking beneath deck-beams. His left ear was missing its lobe—taken off by an iron block during a squall off the Horn, he claimed, though my aunt Clothilde insisted he had lost it to a butcher’s dog in Geneva when he was seven.

He took my tin mug, dipped it into the wooden bucket of cold well-water he kept under the timber-pile, and drank half of it in two gulps. He poured the rest over his forearms, where the gray hair was stuck down with pine pitch.

"The wind will turn tomorrow," he observed, looking up past the high ridge of the Dents Blanches toward the pale, washed-out blue of the upper sky.

"It’s too hot for the Föhn," I said.

"Not the Föhn. The valley draft. The grass is dry as tinder down by the river. If the haymakers down in the lower flats have any sense, they’ll have the third cutting in the lofts before the sun goes behind the shoulder." He wiped his chin with the back of his wrist. "Go down to the cellar and fetch the black kettle with the tallow. The sun has baked the grease out of the starboard chocks. If they dry out, they crack, and if they crack, she settles an inch to the north. I will not have her listing toward the parsonage. That old goat Martin would take it as an omen."

The village of Saint-Jorioz was built on a series of shelves that dropped from the limestone crags down to the river Dranse. Our house, the old Giraud homestead, was on the highest shelf, just below the timberline. Below us were eight or nine other farms, the church with its onion dome of beaten tin that caught the red light of evening, the schoolhouse, and the blacksmith’s forge. From our porch, you could see the whole world—or at least the only world the valley permitted, which was five miles long, half a mile wide, and tipped up on its edge like an unmade bed.

To reach the village from our gate, you had to walk down the chemin des chèvres, a track so steep that the cattle came down it with their rumps tucked under them, sliding on their hocks whenever the shale was wet. It was a path meant for beasts of burden, firewood sledges, and funerals. The idea that forty tons of larch and iron could ever go down that track was something the valley simply refused to hold in its head.

When I went down to the forge an hour later with a bundle of rusted square-headed spikes Grandfather wanted drawn out and re-pointed, I found Master Perrin standing in the cool gloom of his shop, his leather apron stiff with coal dust and pig fat. He was quenching an iron tire for a dung cart in the long trough by the door, and the steam smelled of sulphur and scorched pond-water.

"How is the admiral?" Perrin asked, not looking at me. He had a voice like gravel sliding down a chute.

"He wants these drawn out to seven inches," I said, dumping the iron spikes onto his anvil with a clatter. "With a chisel point, not a diamond point. He says a diamond point splits larch along the ring."

Perrin picked up one of the old ship-spikes with a pair of long-nosed tongs. It was five-eighths of an inch thick, sea-pitted and rough, salvaged from some broken coaster Grandfather had found rotting in the saltings near the mouth of the Loire twenty years ago.

"Larch," Perrin muttered. "A whole forest of larch turned into a crate for sheep. He’s sixty-eight years old, Mathilde. Does he think he has another thirty years to wait for the deluge? The good Lord made a promise to Noah about that. There’s a rainbow in the window of the church to prove it."

"He doesn't want a deluge," I said, leaning against the cold iron horn of the swage-block. "He only wants April."

"April," Perrin spat into the cinder-heap. The spit hissed and vanished. "In April there is five feet of slush in the road and the stream is full of gravel and drowned badgers. You couldn't float a butter tub down the Dranse in April. It has six waterfalls between here and the lake, each one high enough to break an ox's back. How does he propose to get over the Saut du Loup? Does the ship have wings under those larches?"

"He has a plan for the Saut," I said, though Grandfather had not told me what it was. He had only pointed at the map in his cabin—the room he still called the parlor, though it contained three compasses, four rolls of Admiralty charts that smelled of dead fish, and no sofa—and said that water was an engineer’s tool, like a wedge or a jack, if you knew where to put the pin.

"He is an old fool," Perrin said, but he took his heavy hammer from the rack and laid the first spike into the heart of the red charcoal. He worked the bellows with his left hand until the tuyere roared and a shower of white sparks drifted up into the soot of the rafters. "And you are a young fool for carrying his iron. But his money is still minted in Paris, which is more than I can say for the cheese-monger’s."

While Perrin hammered the iron into long, four-sided needles, I sat on the mounting block outside and watched the valley.

The afternoon light was changing. The great shadow of the Dent d’Oche was beginning to creep out across the green floor like a dark cloth being dragged over a table. In the village, the bell of Saint-Jorioz began to toll for the evening Angelus—three short strokes, three times repeated, then the long roll of nine. Out in the pasture two miles above, where the ship sat like a stranded monster, the sound would arrive five seconds late, thin and tired after climbing through the spruce woods.

I could see the hull clearly from the smithy door. Against the pale limestone cliffs behind our house, the dark ribs stood up like the bones of an animal that had died while trying to climb into Switzerland. It had no masts yet—only three square holes cut through the center-line of the deck beams where the pine trunks would go—and the stempost rose up like an axe-blade aimed at the sky.

When I climbed back up the goat-track with the hot spikes wrapped in a greasy rag, the cows were already waiting by the stable door, their udders full and their tails twitching at the evening flies. Grandfather had not come in to milk them. He was still up on the scaffold he had rigged out of birch poles along the port quarter of the vessel, working with a heavy wooden mallet and a caulking iron.

Tock. Tock. Tock.

It was the only sound in the whole valley that didn't belong there. The stream made a continuous white hiss down in the ravine; the cowbells gave their uneven, bronze clatter; the wind in the needles of the high larches sounded like the sea itself, or what I imagined the sea to be. But the mallet was different. It had the dry, hard strike of human intention. It was the sound of a man who believed that if he drove enough tarred hemp into the cracks between mountain trees, the world would eventually have to make room for him to float.

"Hannes!" my aunt Clothilde called from the kitchen door. She was holding a milk pail in each hand and her apron was already tucked up into her belt. "The sun’s down behind the ridge! The brindle has the hard teats again, and I won't milk her alone! Come down out of that gibbet!"

Grandfather didn't stop his stroke. He finished the seam he was driving—three inches of gray oakum that smelled of Stockholm tar—before he laid the iron into his leather tool-roll and turned to look down over the rail.

"The brindle needs her grain first, Clothilde," he shouted back. His voice was cracked and salt-bitten, carry-forward like a horn through the mountain air. "If you don't give her the grain, she holds her milk in her horn. Any fool with half an eye knows that."

"She’s a cow, not an admiral!" she yelled back. "And you’re an old man with sixty francs left in the tea-caddy and no winter hay in the lower barn!"

She let the kitchen door slam behind her with a wooden bang that started the swallows out of the eaves.

I walked under the shadow of the stern, where the huge larch rudder hung from three bronze pintles Grandfather had ordered by parcel wagon from the navy basin at Brest. The rudder was six feet tall and broad as a kitchen table, held together with straps of red copper that had not yet turned green. When I touched the metal, it was still warm from the sun, but the wood beneath it was cool and damp with the mountain sap that was still bleeding out through the grain.

"Catch," Grandfather said from above.

He dropped a short length of larch offcut into my apron. It was four inches square, smooth on one side where the jack-plane had left a surface like white butter, and rough with the bite of the two-man pit-saw on the other. It had the sweet, turpentine smell of the high woods, but Grandfather had painted a small square of dark red lead paint in the center of it to see how the pigment held against the alpine frost.

"Is that for the name?" I asked, looking up between the ribs.

"A ship without a name is just firewood with an attitude," he said, coming down the ladder one rung at a time, his bad leg swinging wide at each step. He reached the meadow turf and took the rag of spikes from my hands, his fingers testing the points Perrin had made. "Perrin is an artist when he’s angry. Look at that shoulder. That will hold against a four-inch plank without drawing."

"He says the Saut du Loup will break her in half," I said.

Grandfather didn't look up from the iron. He turned one of the spikes over in his palm, feeling the balance of it.

"Perrin thinks the whole world is made like a horse’s shoe," he said quietly. "He thinks if it doesn't fit the hoof, you have to heat it red and hit it until it does. He doesn't understand that water is a road that builds itself as it goes. A boat doesn't fall over a waterfall, Mathilde. Not if the water is deep enough. It rides the belly of the surge."

He looked down the valley, toward where the road vanished into the dark cleft where the Dranse cut through the limestone toward Lake Geneva, thirty miles to the north. In the twilight, the mountains had lost their green; they were become giant cutouts of dark slate against a lemon-colored sky. A single star—the evening star that Grandfather called the anchor-watch—was already shining white and clear above the snow-shoulder of the Cornettes de Bise.

"The snow will be five feet deep by Christmas," he said, more to himself than to me. "That will give us the head. When the thaw comes in the third week of April, that whole bowl behind the Dent will let go at once. It has nowhere else to go but down this gutter."

He tapped the side of the hull with the flat of his thumb. The wood was so thick that it made no sound at all—only the dry, solid resistance of forty years of mountain growth, shaped and pegged and bolted to meet an element it had never seen, six thousand feet above the tide.

"Go and wash your hands," he told me, turning toward the barn where the cows were beginning to low with the heavy, rhythmic complaint of their kind. "Clothilde will have burned the polenta again while she was shouting at the timber. We have to drive twenty more treenails before the frost gets into the sapwood tomorrow night."

He walked off toward the stable, his boots leaving dark tracks in the dew that was already silvering the clover. I stayed behind for a minute, standing under the dark rake of the bow. I put my forehead against the larch stem, right where the bronze cutwater would go if Grandfather ever found the money for it. The timber smelled of resin, summer dust, and the vinegar-sharp grease he had boiled out of old beef bones to seal the bolts.

From down below, in the village, came the bark of a dog and the distant, dry rattle of an empty cart coming back from the sawmill. But if you pressed your ear tight against the wood and closed your eyes so the limestone ridges disappeared, there was another sound—the faint, hollow groaning of forty tons of timber adjusting its weight against the oak blocks as the cold air came down from the glacier, creaking like a great basket waiting for the water to rise.

The steam-box sat behind the pigpen like a hollowed black log that had swallowed a chimney. It was twelve feet of spruce planking, bound with hoops of willow and plugged at both ends with rags of greased homespun. When Grandfather set a fire under the copper boiler beneath it, the smell of boiling pitch and scalded mountain sap pushed the stink of swine clear down to the church path.

"Wood is like a man’s temper, Mathilde," he told me while shoving a bundle of dried fir branches beneath the copper belly. "Cold, it snaps before it yields. But you give it half an hour of good wet heat, and it will wrap around a barrel without splitting a single grain."

He had brought eighty crooked ribs down from the upper ridge—not larch this time, but tough mountain pine that had grown sideways out of the limestone scree to catch the southern sun. A tree that grows upright in a sheltered combe is good for rafters or telephone poles, but it is useless for the turn of a bilge. Grandfather had spent two seasons scouring the crags with a notched hazel rod, looking for trunks that the winter avalanches had shoved into natural elbows. Nature had already bent the grain; all he had to do was persuade it to hold the shape of a ship.

The auger was three feet long, an iron cross with a T-handle worn pale by his palms. It took two people to run it when the pine was green: Grandfather pressing his chest against the breastplate while I pulled the crossbar through its slow, squealing circle. Every three turns, the spoon-bit came up choked with curly white shavings that smelled of turpentine and vinegar.

"Keep it plumb," he grunted, the sweat cutting bright yellow runnels through the gray stone dust on his forehead. "You lean that iron half an inch out of true, and the bolt will poke out through the garboard strake like a bone through a broken leg. Pull, girl. Put your boots into the turf."

I braced my wooden-soled clogs against the oak sleeper beneath us. My shoulders burned, the muscles along my ribs tightening like wet rope. The bit bit into the seasoned heartwood of the keel with a gritty, tearing sound that vibrated straight through my teeth. When the iron broke through into the open air beneath the timber, the auger dropped two inches with a dull thunk, and Grandfather let out a breath that sounded like a smith's bellows collapsing.

"Clean," he said, wiping the bit with a tuft of dock leaves. "Now fetch the drift-bolt."

The iron bolts had come from the dismantled tramway down at the slate quarry near Saint-Gingolph. They were an inch thick, cold-forged and blunt-ended, with round heads as broad as saucers. Master Perrin had cursed every one of them as he shortened them to length, swearing that the iron was full of slag and would shear the first time the vessel touched a rock. But Grandfather didn't fear shearing; he feared rust, and he treated every shank like an altar candle, dipping the hot metal into a tub of melted lard and powdered sulfur before driving it home.

I hauled the bolt out of the grease pot with iron tongs. It smoked faintly in the morning air, dripping cloudy beads of fat into the wild clover.

"Set the washer," he ordered, not looking up.

I dropped a heavy square of beaten red copper over the bore-hole. Grandfather set the blunt point of the bolt into the hole, raised the fourteen-pound sledge above his right shoulder, and swung.

The sound was not the hollow tock of the caulking mallet. It was an iron scream that set the goats on the cliff path scrambling for the rocks. The first blow drove the shank four inches into the pine. The second blow drove it three more, spitting a ring of gray grease out around the washer. On the fourth strike, the tone of the wood changed—it went from a wet, yielding thud to a ringing, musical chime that sang down through the keel and made the dandelion heads tremble six feet away in the pasture.

"Home," Grandfather muttered, his chest heaving under his flannel shirt. He leaned against the rib he had just fastened, his hand curled around the top of the timber where the bark still clung in gray, lichen-spotted plates. "That one will stay until the trumpets blow. You could hitch four yoke of oxen to that frame and drag it to Evian, and the wood would tear before the iron drew."

From down by the garden wall, Aunt Clothilde appeared with a willow basket full of early leeks under her arm. She did not come near the hull—she treated the ship as though it were a diseased sheep, liable to spread some terrible pestilence to the potato patch if she got within breathing distance.

"The notary’s clerk is at the inn," she called out, her voice sharp enough to skin a trout. "He came up on the morning coach from Thonon. He has a leather bag with him, Hannes. A very fat one."

Grandfather did not take his hand from the pine rib. He reached into his waistcoat pocket, drew out a twist of black tobacco, and bit off a corner with his remaining molars.

"Let him sit," he said. "The bench at the White Cross is hard enough to cool any man's paper. He won't climb up here before noon. A clerk's knees turn to butter on the goat-track."

"He has two gendarmes with him," she added, her apron flapping like a raven’s wing in the morning draft. "They’re drinking cider on the terrace. One of them has a carbine between his knees. They aren't here about the water-rights, Hannes. It’s the timber from the communal forest."

"The commune gave me the timber in eighty-nine," Grandfather said, though his thumb began to stroke the iron washer with a slow, mechanical rhythm.

"The commune gave you twenty dead larches for firewood because they thought you’d die before the snow melted," Clothilde snapped. "They didn't give you ninety trees of the first quality to build an ark for the cows. The mayor says you’ve cleared three arpents of the north slope that belonged to the church. Father Martin says the mountain will slip if another root is pulled."

"The mountain has been slipping since the flood," Grandfather said mildly, looking down at his boots. "It doesn't need my larches to find the river. Go boil the leeks, Clothilde. The clerk can read his papers to the heifers if he likes. He won't find anything in his law-books about thirty-foot beams held together with quarry iron."

She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat and turned back toward the stone kitchen, her skirts dragging through the dew-wet plantains.

Grandfather didn't move for several minutes after the door slammed. He looked down the length of the hull, squinting through the empty frame-spaces where the morning sun threw ribs of yellow light across the dirt. There were forty-four frames in all, each one coupled to the floor-timbers with two-inch treenails of dried locust wood that had been driven dry and then wedged with oak wedges to make them swell. The locust would never rot; it would outlast the mountain itself, turning as hard as flint under the influence of the sap.

"Get the hand-vice, Mathilde," he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, practical register he used when he was figuring something out against the grain of the world. "The number seven rib has a twist in the heel. It isn't sitting fair against the deadwood."

We worked until the sun was directly overhead, burning the mist off the crags of the Dent d’Oche until the gray limestone looked like bleached bone. We used a heavy screw-jack taken from an old cider-press to force the pine timber three inches to the left, Grandfather standing on the lever with both heels while I drove three-cornered iron dogs into the larch floor to keep the wood from springing back. The timber groaned, a long, tearing complaint that ended with a sharp crack as the grain settled into its new bed.

"Now the bolt," he panted, his face purple from the strain.

I held the drift-bolt with the tongs, my hands shaking from the weight, while he struck. This time he did not take four strokes. He took eight, each one slower than the last, his breath whistling through his teeth like the wind through an unchinked wall. When the washer bit into the wood, he dropped the sledge onto the turf and sat down hard on an empty herring keg, his hands hanging between his knees.

His knuckles were raw where the iron had grazed them, and the blue anchor on his wrist was dark against the swollen veins. For the first time, I noticed that his boots were tied with strips of cured rawhide instead of laces, and that the soles had pulled away from the uppers at the welt, showing the gray wool of his socks through the gap.

"Grandfather?"

"It’s nothing," he said, though his eyes stayed shut for a long time. "The air is thin today. That's all. There’s no weight to it. When you’re down on the water, the air has some salt in it to give a man’s lungs some grip. Up here it’s like breathing through a linen sheet."

Down on the lower trail, two miles below, three dark spots had detached themselves from the roofline of the village and were moving slowly up through the spruce belt. One of them had a small, flickering glint of brass—the buckle on a gendarme’s belt, catching the noon glare.

"They’re coming," I said.

Grandfather opened one eye and looked at the white peaks across the valley. "They have two legs and twenty-four buttons between them. It’ll take them two hours to reach the gate if they don't sit down to spit in the ditch."

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small piece of chalk, blue and greasy, such as tailors use. He stood up, slowly, his knees making the same dry, clicking sound as the pine frames, and walked along the line of the port sheer-strake.

Every four feet, he made a sharp blue cross on the outside of the ribs where the iron through-bolts would pass to bind the outer planking to the inner ceiling.

"You see those marks?" he asked, pointing with the chalk.

"Yes."

"Those are the ribs that take the strain when the ice pinches. A common boat has single frames, spaced wide to save the oak. This is a whaler, Mathilde. When you’re in the floes off Jan Mayen, the ice doesn't knock on the door before it comes in. It squeezes. It squeezes until the water squirts out of the seams like cream from a goat’s teat. If your ribs aren't doubled and bolted through the timber-heads, the whole ship folds up like a paper lantern."

"There isn't any ice here," I said, looking out over the green pasture where the buttercups were already turning brown in the heat.

"There will be," he said, his voice dropping until it was almost lost in the rustle of the dry grass. "There’s four miles of it hanging up there in the couloir behind the Dent. It’s been sitting there since the Romans, just waiting for the right spring to turn it into soup. People think a mountain is solid because it doesn't move while they’re looking at it. They don't know anything about weight. Put forty thousand tons of snow on a thirty-degree slope and give it three days of south wind, and that mountain will run faster than the Dranse."

He made another blue cross on the tenth timber, pressing the chalk so hard it snapped in his fingers.

"And when it runs," he said, tossing the broken blue stub into the chippings, "we won't be sitting in the dirt with the priest, praying to a piece of painted plaster to keep the mud out of the milk-pans. We’ll be fifty feet above the valley floor, riding the crest of the head."

He turned back toward the steam-box. The rag plugs were beginning to blow thin white ribbons of vapor out into the elder-bushes, and the wood had taken on that dark, sodden look that meant the heat had reached the core.

"Take the tongs," Grandfather said, picking up a pair of heavy leather mittens lined with sheep’s wool. "The number eight frame is cooked. If we don't have it on the chocks before the clerk gets his breath back, the pine will go cold, and I’ll be damned if I burn another cord of birch to please the parish council."