Part 2
The sound woke every man on the cookhouse floor at once.
It was not loud, at first. A crack, high up, and then a hiss, like wind in the trees, getting louder and louder. Then a roar that filled the whole gulch, that shook the floor under them and rattled every pan on Bertha's shelves, and the cookhouse window went white.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Nothing but the roar. Then it stopped. Just like that.
Snow dust hung in the air outside the window, glittering in the dawn light, and slowly settled.
Bertha was already at the door.
The bunkhouse was gone.
Where it had stood, there was nothing but a great gray-white mound of broken snow, twenty feet high, packed hard as plaster, stretching across the bottom of the gulch. The blacksmith shop was gone too. One end of a log roof beam stuck up out of the snow at an angle, like a finger pointing.
The men came crowding out of the cookhouse behind her in their stocking feet and stood and stared.
"Cap'n," somebody whispered. "Cap'n's in there."
Bertha turned around and looked at them.
"Then we dig," she said. "Now. Fast. A man under the snow has a quarter of an hour, perhaps a half, perhaps more if there's air. Get shovels from the tunnel. Get the long drill steels from the shop, if you can find the shop. And boots. Run."
They ran.
She had been nine years old in 1833, but she remembered everything the old men of her village had done. She told them as fast as she could say it.
"Spread out. In a line, across the snow, an arm's length apart. Push the steels down, slow, as deep as they'll go. When you hit something soft, call out. Don't walk on it more than you must. Listen. If you hear anything, a voice, a knock, anything at all, shout."
They spread out in a line across the mound, seventeen men with drill steels, pushing them down into the snow, pulling them out, stepping forward, pushing them down again.
"Here," shouted Gus Fjellman. "Something here."
They dug like madmen. Four feet down they found a man's arm, and then a head, and then Tom Pascoe, one of the old Cornishmen, gasping and blue, but alive, packed in the snow next to his bunk. They hauled him out and wrapped him in blankets and carried him to Bertha's stove.
Then the second one. Then the third. Then a fourth, Harry Trevail, whose leg was broken, but who was cursing so loud they found him by the noise.
Four.
There was no sign of Jory Penhallow.
The sun came up over the ridge. The men had been digging an hour. They were soaked through, gasping, their hands bleeding. Some of them stopped and leaned on their shovels and looked at Bertha, and she saw in their faces what they were thinking.
"Where did he sleep?" she said.
"Far end," said Tom Pascoe from the doorway, through chattering teeth, wrapped in a blanket. "By the stove. Always by the stove, the Cap'n."
Bertha looked at the long white mound. The stove end would be down the gulch now, with the slide. Not where the bunkhouse had stood. Below it.
"Downhill," she said. "Twenty yards. Thirty. The snow carries things. Probe there."
They moved the line down the slope.
It was Bertha herself, in the end, pushing a long steel into the snow with her own two arms, who felt it stop against something hard. She pushed again. It rang. Iron.
"The stove," she said. "Dig here."
They found him under the stovepipe and a broken roof beam, in a little pocket of air the size of a coffin, six feet down. His face was gray and his beard was white with frost and his left arm hung wrong. But when they pulled the beam away and the daylight hit his face, he opened his eyes.
He looked up at the ring of faces around the hole. Then at Bertha, kneeling at the edge in the snow with her gray braid come loose.
"Mother," said Jory Penhallow. His voice was a croak. "I'm late for breakfast."
They carried him into the cookhouse and laid him by the stove with the other four, and Bertha set his arm and splinted it with a bread board and strips of flour sacking, and poured hot coffee into him a spoonful at a time.
All five lived. Every one.
Penhallow lay by her stove for two days before he could sit up. He did not say very much. On the second evening, when the cookhouse was quiet and the men were out shoveling, he turned his head on the folded blanket and looked at her.
"There's no trees on that slope," he said. "You said that. Two winters I looked at it every day, and never saw it."
"No," said Bertha. "Nobody does. Until they must."
"My father was forty years in the tin mines," said Penhallow. "He used to say, the rock will tell you, if you listen. I never thought it was true of snow." He shifted his splinted arm. "I'll not forget it, Mother."
They built the new bunkhouse in the spring, back among the spruce trees on the knoll beside the cookhouse, where the snow had never come down. Cap'n Penhallow chose the place himself, with his arm still in a sling, and walked every foot of it, looking up.
And he made a rule at the Wren Mine. It was never written down, but every man there knew it, and every new man was told it on his first day.
When Mother Vogel says floor, it's floor.
The next winter, on a heavy, windless night in January, Bertha came to the bunkhouse door and said it. And the first man through the cookhouse door that night, with his blanket under his arm and his pipe in his teeth, was Jory Penhallow.