Within another couple of hours we reached the timberline – and got quite a surprise when we did.
Several hundred feet of the edge of the forest had been chopped down. There were dozens upon dozens – maybe even hundreds – of large trees that had been hacked off at the base. The only things left were smaller saplings.
And when I say ‘hacked off,’ I mean it; there were no clean cuts from an ax or saw to be found. If I had to guess, the skiris had used crude stone tools to whack away at the base of the tree trunks until they were suitably weakened enough to fall or push over. The stumps often had messy, jagged spikes of wood jutting up from them, like the trees hadn’t been severed cleanly.
Someone was building something. And judging by the amount of wood they’d taken, it was something large.
At the edge of the timberline, the mountain still continued upwards – but at that point the slope became the bottom of a gorge. There were high mountains on both the right and the left that formed cliff-like walls.
The tracks of the four skiris we had been trailing had been obliterated – or rather, they became indistinguishable from the ruts the trees had cut as they were dragged across the snow. The mountainside looked like a raggedy-ass ski slope that had been horribly groomed, with thousands of small branches and pine boughs littering the ground.
Whatever this logging operation was for, I doubted it was far away. It just wasn’t feasible to drag giant tree trunks very far, no matter how many abominable snowmen you had doing the lifting. And I didn’t like being this close just as darkness was falling.
I suggested we backtrack deeper into the woods and find cover for the night. Fieria agreed. We hiked almost an hour back down into the forest, found another hollow to hunker down in, and slept in shifts while the others kept guard.
The next morning we journeyed again to the timberline. From there, I suggested that I go scout things out alone.
“We all go,” Fieria protested.
“No – I can climb those cliffs and get a better look,” I said, pointing at the high, rocky peaks surrounding us on both sides. “If we all go up the center where they dragged the trees, there’s nowhere to hide. If the skiris see us, they’ll chase us and we’re dead. But nobody will be looking for me up there.”
That is, I hoped nobody would be looking for me up there.
“Let me go with you,” Lelia pleaded.
“I’m just going to look around,” I promised. “I can move quicker on my own. As soon as I see what we’re dealing with, I’ll come right back.”
Lelia wasn’t happy with that answer, but she knew that she would only slow me down if she went with me.
Fieria finally agreed, and I set out on my own.
“If you hear any skiris coming, RUN,” I ordered them as I set out. “I’ll meet you at the tall pointy mountain. Hide there.”
Lelia nodded sadly, and she and the other women watched as I set off for the cliff.
The right side of the gorge was really just the first slope in a series of mountain peaks that stretched far into the distance. The left side of the gorge looked like the end of the mountain range – like maybe there was a huge drop-off on the other side.
I chose to go up the right side of the gorge because it looked like it had better terrain, and because I thought the higher slopes would give me a better view.
Ten minutes into the climb reaffirmed the wisdom of doing it alone. Since I didn’t have to belay Lelia and tie her off at anchors to keep her safe, I could move quickly and efficiently with just my ice axes and crampons.
The mountainside was a fairly easy climb. It alternated between 70- and 80-degree slopes, with plenty of cracks and jagged surfaces.
Within two hours, I was over 600 feet from the bottom of the gorge, and I had a pretty good view of everything around me on the left side of the cliff.
What I saw astounded me.
The slope where the trees had been dragged from the timberline continued for another half mile up into the gorge.
The slope leveled off into a plateau… and atop the plateau was a fort.
Like, an honest-to-god fort straight out of the Wild West. Or at least an attempt at one.
The massive logs that had been felled back in the forest had been stacked in a crude rectangular shape, about 80 feet long by 60 feet wide.
Now, I was no expert on forts, but from what I’d seen in movies, they were generally made of logs standing upright, placed into holes that had been dug in the ground and then bound together with something – maybe tied together with ropes.
But if you don’t have ropes… and if you don’t have shovels… and if you’re can’t dig holes in frozen, rocky ground… you might have ended up with something like this: a lame-ass log cabin without a roof.
Since there were no saws to make the logs a uniform size, longer trees jutted out from the edges of the fort.
And since the trees tapered from wider to thinner, there were lots of gaps in the wood.
One of the short sides of the fort had a crude doorway, created by using much shorter logs on either side of the opening.
The whole thing had a very 10,000 BC feel to it. It looked like it could topple over like a house of cards, if you hit it right.
But it wasn’t the fort that blew my mind.
It was what was inside its walls.
There was a human.
A man, dressed in what looked like combat fatigues and a parka.
He had a heavy red beard underneath his knit ski cap, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. Looked
