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+# Editorial notes
+
+## Request and outline, 2026-11-14
+
+**Request-only readings.** Codex keeper heard an explicit progression from physical invulnerability through recklessness and long captivity to learned caution. The pleasure is “watching one fact make two opposite choices feel sensible.” “Rather sticky” suggests wit and “VERY long time” puts the scale in the wait. Claude independently heard “the joke and the horror are the same idea” because a fall that should end everything “just *continues*.” It suggested a personal scale with a comic edge. Both left open the relationship, trap and outcome.
+
+**Outline discussion.** The keeper saw Marlis's range of action shrinking “from a whole route to a tooth and the tip of her tongue.” It wanted the debris bend and rope easy to place and objected that a chip swallowed by the slit made that route an obviously bad choice. Claude called the confinement “the engine” and wanted Delk legible as an older immortal whose rope has the stakes of time. It feared a solemn middle. The writer called the swallowed chip “a verdict delivered by the setting.” Both readers accepted the substituted view of real sky through narrowing ice, with the outcome of that route left open. Delk remembers spending a summer a hand's width from a buckle and wants his feet on rock when Marlis crosses. Marlis rehearses her next joke for him as the sound of his actual work dies out.
+
+**Coordinator.** Marlis sets the wager and comes through the fall undamaged. The closing ice takes away the freedom she thought an undamaged body guaranteed. Delk's rope embodies his earned caution, but she makes the hard choice herself. She gives up an exit she can see to test runoff and rock. Hours on exposed rock then cost her the original prize of crossing before dusk. The changed beats answer the concern that watching for an obvious hazard would do the work of choosing.
+
+**Outline Decisions.** Yes at 0.98 native confidence, with Yes 0.99, No 0.01 and source ambiguity 0.00. Proceeded with zero restarts.
+
+**Voice trial.** Both blind readers chose first person at “Since nothing could so much as bruise either of us, I thought this ought to make the game more enjoyable for him.” She can hear the absurdity in her own generosity and still enjoy it. The close third placed the white cairn stone and the pop through her knee more vividly. Both details went into the first-person opening. The voice trial commit preserves both versions.
+
+## Draft and revision
+
+The draft spends about half its length in the ice. The prose profile sent the writer back to the cadence of the long paragraphs and the physical details of the escape.
+
+- **Codex cold read.** “The really maddening thing was that he wouldn't say it” made the rivalry affectionate and foolish. “It took a long time to let my tongue down” and the different lamb let the loss of time feel bodily. Marlis recruits Delk into her joke while he asks her to touch what he can see, and his buckle gives her material for the joke she rehearses. The pop through the knee and the warm hemp make the crossing present. The reader would publish with a repair to the escape. “If I could follow the rock there was room coming open beside it” made the passage hard to place. “It took my weight” came after her decision.
+- **Claude cold read.** The dark arriving through an open door, the lamb and the slow noise under the ice stood out. The hemp, crunch and taste of ground stone gave the place a physical record. The turn at “Delk would have left the rope out if he knew I could see the sky” was opaque. The reported age of the spruce read as a footnote, and Delk's silence was still a gap in the relationship when she came out. The buckle speech and last glimpse of rope-colored light earned their return.
+- **Cold discussion and rereads.** The keeper protected the climbable opening and “I still wanted the ice.” Marlis now tests the rock under part of her weight before she turns. She imagines Delk collecting the rope but cannot get him through the door of the packers' yard in her mind. At his ledge she wonders how much of the rock he saw emerge and bears down on the stone. Counting fifty rings only a quarter of the way into a spruce that grew on former ice ground replaced the stated age. Both returning readers could follow the tests and felt Delk through her new acts of imagining. They preferred counting rings in the scene and both caught the shift from the low shelf she could touch to the high shelf in the light.
+
+**Line edit.** The editor heard Marlis most clearly in the thumb she holds up as if she likes the accommodations, and the cold that takes away her laugh. Paragraph breaks give the wait more than one speed. “A strip of old snow cut straight across that bend” became “The ponies kept to the rubble. I could see where a strip of old snow bridged a cleft between two parts of the bend, and how many steps it would save me.” The open valley now arrives after “the water ran out and the wind went up inside it.” “See what there was to see” became a hope of seeing how someone hands her change. The writer initially kept Marlis's maxim about hands for her pleasure in the trick. Delk's ewe speech was left to echo through the action.
+
+## Final readings and decisions
+
+- **Codex fresh read.** “He had an extraordinary supply of afternoons he could tell you about while you stood halfway into your coat” made Delk particular. The tongue and lamb made the wait lived. “A beak like a spoon” made the warning a private grievance in his own voice. The fork in the cliff, the rind, hemp and cut grass carry the place across the elapsed time. The hands maxim sounded broader than the trick, and “the ice on the far side creep closer” had the reader diagramming the crucial exit. They would publish with that hesitation. Delk's uncertain whereabouts felt earned.
+- **Claude fresh read.** The open-door darkness, the image of Delk unable to go in and the comic thumb carried the voice. The buckle speech and the change gesture kept Delk present. The ice and emergence felt close in sound, taste and touch. The borrowed distance to the “far side” and the moving black fleck made Marlis's choice hard to follow. The coat-pocket joke and the trailing explanation of the spoon joke were also hard to parse. Claude initially asked for revision because Marlis had no clear intention about Delk after coming out.
+- **Final exchange and repairs.** The writer replaced the shelf and fleck with a single lit crack. Marlis feels its wall brush her sleeve twice, while the rock in the other direction can raise her shoulder and the runoff can be heard farther on. “The crack was still wide enough when I drew my arm in” was the keeper's evidence that she gives up a real chance. Both fresh readers followed her weight and felt water give way to air at her wrist. She now plans to ask when the Vessicks last saw Delk, then watch the hand giving her change. Both readers agreed that this gives the longer route a cost while leaving his whereabouts open. The opening joke now names the call and payment. She imagines Delk laughing into his sleeve, heightening the silence that follows. Both readers would publish the revision. Claude missed the removed maxim and noted a small uncertainty about which hand first touches the wall. The coordinator found the free elbow and sleeve sufficient to orient the turn. The action makes her judgment without repeating the lesson of the fall.
+
+**Final Decisions.** Yes at 0.98 native confidence, with Yes 0.99, No 0.01 and source ambiguity 0.00. Proceeded with zero restarts after contextual rereads. The undamaged fall, loss of count, still-open crack, rings and hours on the flank make the prompt consequential from the wager through the last light.
+
+## Art and rating
+
+The built-in ImageGen tool made separate sheets for Marlis and Delk and paintings of the packers' crossing, the crevasse and the lower valley. Bess Gault and Hadran supplied sheet layout and oil handling. The Caelorum snowy shoulder supplied mountain texture and the buried bridge supplied a model for opaque paint in a confined space with distant light. The lower valley keeps the forked cliff and lowers the ice line. The cover uses the accepted Marlis sheet, crevasse and lower valley, with Marlis's planted hand and daylight within reach. Faces, apparent ages and clothing colors were chosen for this package. The finished prose and inspected cover rate Teen for sustained conscious entrapment and claustrophobic danger.
diff --git a/stories/young-immortals/outline.md b/stories/young-immortals/outline.md
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+# Outline
+
+## Promised experience
+
+The prompt gives the same fact two consequences. “Nothing can hurt them” makes young immortals brash, and eventually makes older immortals cautious because they can stay stuck for “a VERY long time.” The reader should get to enjoy that bodily confidence, feel how little it buys once escape is impossible, and see what living through the interval does to someone's next decision. “Sticky situations” leaves room for a wry beginning even if the wait becomes frightening. No relationship, setting, length of confinement, or outcome is specified.
+
+## Takes considered
+
+- **The Rattlejaw.** A young immortal throws away the advantage of a rope to win a race across a glacier, then goes down-valley inside the ice. Play the fall, the confinement and the escape in their order, long enough for the prize she wanted to belong to a vanished world.
+- **The Darning Scar.** An older immortal does the bargaining at a fair where the laws allow a debtor to be held until a particular tree bears fruit. She must bid on a young rival's time with her own while the gardeners openly discuss the blight. The auction would give other people too much of the power the glacier story lets the immortal exercise and lose.
+- **Mothbank Head.** Start late, with a keeper writing directions for a light that goes dark once a century. On the night he intends to leave his post, a young immortal swims out to touch the exposed bell, and his furious account of the last swimmer gradually becomes a first-person history. The performance could be comic and eerie, but the listener would get the suspense and the confinement would reach us after the fact.
+
+## Provisional direction
+
+Marlis has caught up in miles with Delk, her maddeningly good climbing partner and an older immortal. She wants to make him acknowledge it. She wagers she can reach the far cairn before dusk, first across the ice. He uncoils enough rope to keep his feet on rock while she crosses the snow. She leaves it in his hands and goes straight across. She survives a fall without a mark. The glacier closes around her, and Delk's search passes out of earshot. She stays awake, able to feel the ice and unable to move it. It takes centuries for the flowing ice to carry her down to where it can melt her out.
+
+Spend the central scene with Marlis inside. Her talent for finding the next hold finds ever smaller purchase, until it comes down to whether she can move a tooth against the tip of her tongue. When a thaw opens room to move again, she wants to rush into the first light she sees. She can see sky through the crack and has just enough room to risk it. The gap narrows, opens a little wider, then begins to narrow again. The other way is still dark, but she can feel bare grit in the melt running along her shoulder. She gives up the sight of the sky and lets the water make room to move toward the ground. She still wants to get across. From ground she can stand on, she chooses a route that costs her the daylight she has waited for.
+
+## Craft plan
+
+- **Teller.** Try a close third past with the momentum of a woman always mentally a step farther than her foot, and a first-person past Marlis can tell with the leisure to implicate herself. The longer the wait, the more narrowly she attends to the same inch of ice. At the first chance to move, let desire get ahead of judgment again and stay with the effort of resisting it.
+- **Marlis.** She can look at a wall and see a line almost no one else can find. She wants Delk to see an equal, and a victory now would spare her having to ask. She speaks at a rush in invitations, boasts and unnecessary particulars, composing an anecdote in real time so that the other person is already a party to it. She won't take a second look while somebody is watching.
+- **Delk.** He wants the pleasure of a good crossing with a partner he can keep. He once missed a whole summer a hand's width from a dropped belt buckle, caught behind a boulder on a route he thought he knew. He can tell when conditions have changed under a familiar surface and is proud enough to hate being hurried into guessing. He talks in things and distances, gives unglamorous reasons in full, and leaves a silence alone. No existing or supplied characters are used.
+- **Place.** The Rattlejaw, a valley glacier with a shoulder of black rock above the tongue, gives this story moving confinement and a way out governed by the same ice. The Dryhooks, a broken limestone escarpment, could pin someone but would leave the release up to a searcher or an earthquake. A slip at Fleam's Head, a tidal headland, would offer the escape of a predictable tide. On the Rattlejaw, late-summer travelers and packers follow a ridge of dark debris that leads from the near rock flank toward a cairn on the far wall. Where the ridge bends, a snow bridge makes a tempting diagonal toward the cairn. Before dusk there is a grit crunch, the hard sweet smell of sun-warmed rope, melt ticking through a channel, slate suspended in blue ice, and a pop that comes up through the soles. A cleft opens and pinches where the ice crosses a rock step. After the intervening centuries, the old crossing is a bare stripe on the valley wall. [NPS on crevasses](https://home.nps.gov/articles/crevasses.htm) and [NPS on ice flow and glacier debris](https://www.nps.gov/glba/learn/nature/glaciers.htm).
+
+## Scenes and ending
+
+1. **Late summer, toward dusk, at the debris line (25%).** Marlis wants Delk to take the wager and watch her win it. He wants her on the rope and points out where he can brace on rock while she tests the snow. She leaves without tying in and takes the diagonal across a roof of old snow. After the fall, she sees the rope lowering toward her as a blue seam closes between it and her hand.
+2. **Inside the moving ice (55%, long scene).** At first she resents being unable to answer Delk. Let her invent the first thing she'll tell him as she tries to get a sound out. The remark gets funnier and more preposterous, and the last of his actual knocks comes in the middle of it. Stay for the first interval she can no longer count. At the lower tongue, give the two ways equal room. Through one, Marlis can glimpse a whole piece of sky when the ice shifts and can almost reach where she could begin the climb out. The narrowing gap makes that chance urgent. She turns her head away from it before it closes and listens to meltwater seeping around her shoulder. Stay as she waits out the thaw and inch by inch angles into the dirty hollow the water is making beside the rock. The long scene ends when she can choose where to put a whole hand.
+3. **The bare flank below the old crossing, another late-summer evening (20%).** She finds the cairn by the split in the far wall, high above a long stripe of freshly exposed rock. A line across the lower tongue can still get her to the other flank before dark. She sees each move she would take and wants to take it. She puts her hand on the first of the exposed rock steps, a route long enough to put her across after dark. End on the last reflected light leaving the shortcut while she still has hours of climbing ahead. Load it with her earlier demand to win before dusk, the light she reached for inside the glacier and the first bare stone that held her weight.
+
+Summarize the years in which nothing she can do changes her position. Leave the origin of immortality and the history of the valley outside the scenes.
diff --git a/stories/young-immortals/prompt.md b/stories/young-immortals/prompt.md
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+# Prompt
+
+[WP]  Young immortals tend to be reckless and brash, knowing that nothing can hurt them. The older they get, the more cautious they become, because they learn that, because \*nothing\* can hurt them, they can get stuck in some rather sticky situations for a VERY long time.
+
+## Supplied reference images
+
+- None
+
+## Audience and content
+
+The request specifies no audience, intensity, or content limits of its own. General is the starting target under the collection style guide.
diff --git a/stories/young-immortals/ratings.md b/stories/young-immortals/ratings.md
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+# Content rating
+
+- **Rating:** Teen
+- **Content notes:** A fall into a glacial crevasse, prolonged conscious entrapment, claustrophobic peril, and separation from a companion. The cover shows Marlis inside the crevasse.
+- **Reason:** The sustained, close portrayal of confinement and isolation may be intense for younger readers. The prose and cover handle the danger without graphic detail.
+- **Reviewed:** Finished prose and selected cover, 2026-11-14.
diff --git a/stories/young-immortals/story.md b/stories/young-immortals/story.md
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+---
+title: "The Rattlejaw"
+created: 2026-11-14
+canon: false
+---
+
+# The Rattlejaw
+
+When you dislodge a stone on scree you're supposed to shout *Rock!* so the people below can get out of the way. When Delk and I had a slope to ourselves I used to bet him supper I could keep quiet longer than he could. It was generally Delk who paid. I liked to wait until he was well downhill and then roll a stone the size of a turnip straight at him. Since nothing could so much as bruise either of us, I thought this ought to make the game more enjoyable for him. “Next time just put it in my coat pocket,” he said once. “I'll shout ‘Rock!’ and you can pick the place for supper.” I suggested lunch. There was a good deal of day left.
+
+We went up to the Rattlejaw toward the end of summer, when the last of the evening sun came in through a fork in the far cliff and fell on the white stone at the top of the packers' cairn. I had a handsome picture of Delk finding me yawning with my hand on the warm stone, as if I'd been there long enough to fall asleep.
+
+We stood on a ledge where the packers brought their ponies down to the ice. From our side a black rib of rubble curved a long way uphill before it bent back toward the cairn. The ponies kept to the rubble. I could see where a strip of old snow bridged a cleft between two parts of the bend, and how many steps it would save me.
+
+While I knelt to tie my new bootlace a pop came up through the knee I had on the ice. On a warm evening there was no end to the noises the Rattlejaw made. The smallest ones were my favorites. They came from places people had walked over all their lives on the strength of never having heard a thing.
+
+“Let me get there first,” I said. “You can come up to the cairn and find me doing anything you like. Asleep. Taking supper out of my pocket. Say what you'd most dislike to find me doing and I'll have a go at that.”
+
+Delk had already taken the rope out of his bag. He laid it on the stone between us. Most of it was brown with use, but the last coil was still the gold of cut straw and smelled of warm hemp. “If I brace here I can let you out as far as the end of the snow,” he said. “Come put your fingers in this first.”
+
+I got down on my belly and put a finger through the crease he'd found where the snow met the ledge. The snow was that thin. I leaned over the rock to see how far down the next bit of ice was. A thread of water came out of the snow, turned at a stone that would have fit comfortably in my pocket, and went ticking down the crease. I picked up the stone to see if it would be any louder going down. Delk held out his palm and I gave it to him instead. He set it back in its wet little seat.
+
+He had first come over the Rattlejaw before the packers were even running ponies on this side of the range. I knew because four generations of Vessicks had sold him his lunch in the same yard. They were all in the habit of making change between the same two fingers, a trick he said he'd taught the first one. Once in a while he would wave me into the yard ahead of him so he could see if I could make them laugh. I could, though nobody there could be made to laugh so readily as Delk himself on a good day.
+
+“Are you going to make me wear the thing all the way to the cairn?” I said.
+
+“Only till you get to the stones again.” He looked straight out at the snow I'd been watching. “I know there's a nice flat bit right out in the middle. I went after a ewe once because there was a nice flat bit where she was. The ewe climbed right over me and went home, and I lay with a boulder against my leg, looking at my buckle. There were three birds on that buckle. The third one had a beak like a spoon. I used to think I'd get a bit of wire and scratch it to a point if I ever got my hands on it again.” He lifted the end of the rope. “That took me most of the summer. Come on, Marlis.”
+
+I did want to know how he'd got out, and would ordinarily have asked. He had an extraordinary supply of afternoons he could tell you about while you stood halfway into your coat. I looked over his shoulder at the white stone. By the time he was done with me there would be one set of footprints over the snow and a rope running back to him, and if I put my hand on the cairn in the sun he could say he'd got me there. The really maddening thing was that he wouldn't say it.
+
+I asked him what he thought he could see down the crease. When he bent to look I picked up my end as if to tie it on, slipped it back onto the ledge, and went off across the snow.
+
+The surface was pocked and firm, with a rind of last night's freeze still on it in places. It crunched beautifully underfoot. Delk called from the ledge and I was so busy thinking what a good story I was about to give him that all I took in was the sound of my name. I was going to call back and ask whether we were playing for supper.
+
+Then the snow to the left of my next step sagged away in a smooth oval. I tried to put my foot farther to the right and the rest went down under me.
+
+On the way down I struck ice hard enough to hear it ring. I came to rest sitting upright on a slant of blue ice, with one hand in my lap. There was some snow in the eye of my boot where the lace went through. I picked it out. The boot was still on and my toes could all go about their business inside it. Already I had an idea of how to get up. There was a shelf a jump away with a scalloped edge I could have put the ends of my fingers over. Above that the wall bulged over me. For the last few feet I would need Delk.
+
+When the gold end of Delk's rope came turning over the rim, I stood up and reached to catch it, thinking I could give the whole line a good tug and make him call my name again, but the wall cracked by my ear and the ice under my boots slid sideways. I went down with it. A slab broke off the wall and tipped over me. I lost sight of the gold end first. The rope itself went on turning gently in a slot of blue.
+
+* * *
+
+I tried to get a shoulder under the slab. My boots went on sliding until my soles met ice. I pushed back with both legs. My shoulders rose and I thought I had it, but the slab had come to rest against the far wall and all I'd found was the last inch between it and me. I still had room to throw my head back and call to Delk. I got his name out three times. I heard it come out thinner each time, and on the third I was so angry at it I would have bitten it in two.
+
+It grew dark slowly, the way it does in a room when you have left a door open onto another room. I heard an iron point strike, scrape, strike again. I tipped my head back to try his name again. My chin met ice, and the rest of his name went into my collar. I could feel in my throat how loud it ought to have been.
+
+I had a fine thing to say when he got to me. *If I'd known we were going to take our time, I'd have brought a candle. It's practically level from here to the cairn.* There was a place to pause in the middle, so he'd have time to decide whether I'd be idiot enough to try it.
+
+That evening the blows went on for minutes at a time. I pushed with the foot I'd laced up through every one of those stretches until the foot stayed exactly where I'd put it. The next time I tried I couldn't tell whether I'd pushed at all. I felt the knot of the lace against the top of my foot.
+
+By the time the light above me went out altogether I'd arranged for us to be dining like packers under the ice, with two nosebags to dip into and a table Delk could lay out with the spoon from that bird's beak. The joke got worse and better each time I thought of it. It gave him so much work to do when he got there. I could see him laughing into his sleeve so I wouldn't think too well of myself.
+
+I wanted to say *Delk* loud enough for him to hear before I went on to the rest. The tip of my tongue still reached the backs of my front teeth. I was putting it up there again when I heard a single hard blow.
+
+I kept quiet for the next one, saving the whole of what I was going to say. I was careful about that because his chisel made so much more noise than I could. There was the small, irregular crackle a great way off that had been going on since the first fall. I had to shut my eyes to keep from listening to it. I opened them again and waited with my tongue against the back of my teeth, where it could stay comfortably for the length of time it took an ordinary person to draw a breath. I entertained a number of opinions about how long Delk ought to take to raise his arm.
+
+It took a long time to let my tongue down.
+
+I thought he might be bringing the rope in. I could see him on the ledge taking it up hand over hand in the dark, and then I could see him looking back at a light in the valley. By then there ought to have been a light over the door in the packers' yard. It was put there to keep latecomers from barking their shins against the hitching rail. Delk had the length of that rail by heart and could walk it in the dark. I tried to put him there, with the light over the door and his rope loose in his hands, but I couldn't get him to go in.
+
+I began to count the mornings by taking a walk in my head. From the yard where we'd bought lunch, there was a stretch of path among alders, a split stone in a sheep pasture, and a rise where a tuft of black wool used to catch on the fence and travel along it a little on windy days. I'd get to the split stone and turn around because I couldn't remember if I'd passed the alders, or I'd find myself on the ridge still trying to spend the coin Delk had given me in the yard. I did worse with my eyes open. Once I watched what I made out to be a pale square of dawn for as long as I could hold the thought of watching, and when I began the walk again I found it occupying the same place in front of my eye. It went with me when I turned my eye.
+
+There was only one morning I could be sure of and it belonged to the day I'd fallen. A fly at breakfast kept trying to get onto the inside of my cup. I could make that fly walk clean around the rim. I could turn the cup in my hand and the fly would always walk the same way.
+
+There was a piece of slate in the ice beside my mouth. I knew it first by a corner that brushed my upper lip whenever I tried to say something. Later I could rest against it without speaking. It worked along my cheek to the corner of my eye. The first time I felt it there I wanted to shove away and get clear. When the slate moved on, there was a fresh patch of cold to learn.
+
+Once there was a sound under me that went on until I could feel it in all my teeth at once. I thought the whole side of the valley was coming away. It left me with my left ear folded against my head. The ear stayed folded. When the ice shifted a little again I felt the tip of it stir and then the rest came slowly unfolded, a sensation I was glad to have to myself for as long as it lasted.
+
+I caught myself looking forward to coming up against the slate again, and by then I could no longer have said which way it had gone. I tried to think of a thing I knew that took a year. A lamb used to take a year to become the sheep on the hill, and a pine would make a ring, and the packers from the yard would put up the red shutters in time for snow. I could say those things in my head and get from one to the next, but I couldn't make a lamb any older than it was at the beginning of the thought. If I wanted to see it bigger I had to remember a different lamb.
+
+At last there was water on my face. The drop ran in at my ear where the ice had drawn back. I made what I meant to be a rude noise at the second drop, and heard it faintly come back. There was a space about the size of a folded coat beyond my head. When I lifted my chin, a new drop ran across my mouth and I could follow it over my skin clear to my shoulder. It tasted of ground stone. I wanted another so badly I shoved my cheek hard into the ice.
+
+In the next stretch of thaw I got my right thumb free. If I hooked it over a lip in the ice I could pull until one shoulder rose. I had expected to be able to do anything as soon as I could move. The first time my shoulder came back down I lay there for a while with my thumb sticking straight up. It looked as though I were signaling to someone that I'd found the place entirely to my liking. I drew a breath to laugh and the cold went down so far inside me I forgot what I was laughing at.
+
+Light came in through a crack in the ice above my head. An ice slope led up to it, and through the crack I could see a long white thread of cloud. A small fly went across it with its legs down. There was sunshine on bare rock just beyond the crack. I'd have my feet on it if I could get a shoulder through and squirm the rest of the way after it. I tried Delk's name up into the light. I shut my mouth to listen for the short scrape of his chisel.
+
+Water ran down the slope and around the back of my neck. I followed it down with my hand and found a hollow in the rock below my shoulder. I spread my hand on the gritty bottom and leaned on it till my shoulder lifted. The rock held where it was. I reached past the hollow and felt water run by my fingers where the rock sloped away under the ice. I heard it drip farther off in the dark.
+
+I slid my hand up the ice slope until I was reaching through the crack into the sun. All I had to do was get my head through after my arm and turn. I stretched my hand across to one wall, with my elbow well out from my ribs, and felt the other wall brush my sleeve. I thought my elbow had slipped until I felt the ice draw back. There had been room for my shoulder the whole time. I had my free elbow under me, ready to push, when I felt the ice on my sleeve again. I waited until it let go.
+
+The crack was still wide enough when I drew my arm in. I put my hand back on the rock below me and went down on my side where the water went. I'd only moved as far as the width of my hand when my boot hung up. The water ran into my sleeve and I found it was warmer than the ice. I held the underside of my wrist in the current and tried again, with more of my weight on the rock. The boot came with me. The first of the wind came up against the inside of that wrist. I reached into it as far as my arm would go.
+
+* * *
+
+I had come out where there was still evening sun on the rock. I lay flat on it. One ear was full of water and when I turned toward the warm stone the water ran out and the wind went up inside it.
+
+The open part of the valley had got much bigger. There was a wood on a rise below me where I remembered nothing but the pitched and dirty snout of the Rattlejaw. Beyond the wood somebody had planted rows of pear trees right down to a line of sun on the river. The wind smelled of resin, and after several breaths I got to the smell of cut grass behind it. I sat up and reached around to see how far my arm would go. My fingers came to rest against a wet scrap of coat at my other shoulder. I brought the arm back around and did it again.
+
+There was still a river, at least. There was still a fork in the far cliff. At first I couldn't believe the pile of stones up there was the packers' cairn. It stood at the top of a stripe of bare rock twice as high as the tallest trees below me. The ice had reached that high the last time I saw it. The white stone was gone. About half of the pile was still there, with a long scatter of stones underneath it on the ledge.
+
+I had gone up and down parts of that valley with Delk for the better part of my life before I went into the ice. He had done the same thing without me for longer. I looked for the ledge where we had stood that evening and found it by the dark rock above it, clear across a tumble of boulders that had been under the glacier. It would have taken me hours to get back to the place he had put the rope. From there he could have watched the ice draw down away from him until all he was looking at was rock. I wondered how much of the rock he'd seen. I put my hand down beside me to stand up, and stayed where I was, bearing down hard on the stone. A woman in the valley had brought her flock down to the river that evening, and from where I sat I could hear her call it a little at a time out of the trees. One white back after another moved out into the light.
+
+I could still cross the Rattlejaw. Below the fork, the rock on the other side slanted gently into the ice. Between it and me the lower tongue was broad and clean, with a long lip of gray ice and just beyond it a strip of old snow. I got up to see better and took a few steps out. The snow had that hard, stippled look it gets when it has thawed and stood all night in the cold. I could see how to use it. I could be most of the way across before I lost the sun, and I'd know how to finish even if the other wall went dark. I wanted to get to the Vessicks' yard. If the door was still there I'd ask when they'd last seen Delk. I'd set a coin down on the table for a bowl of something hot and watch the hand that gave me my change.
+
+There was a path around the lower end of the ice. It went up the flank by rough steps in the rock and would take hours. I went down to the path, where a spruce with its roots lifted lay across the ground the ice had covered. Two young spruce stood upright in the earth between the roots.
+
+Someone had cut through the fallen tree, and I put my hand on the fresh yellow wood. I counted rings with the point of my nail, starting at the bark. I got to fifty and stopped to see how far I'd come. I was a quarter of the way to the middle.
+
+I put one foot up on the first step and looked back into the valley. I still wanted the ice. The first long stride over it would have swung my whole body into that clean light. I could hear what the snow would do under a boot. I put my weight on the foot on the step and reached up to see if the next hold would take me.
+
+From there I could watch the last of the sun on the shortcut. It was the color of the rope when I saw it turning. I took my hand off the rock and put it higher, and the light went off the ice altogether.
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