While we were fooling around with the radios, Ramón Llewellyn was telling the others what we found up the other branch of the fjord. Joe Kivelson shook his head over it.
“That’s too far from the boat. We can’t trudge back and forth to work on the engines. We could cut firewood down there and float it up with the lifters, and I think that’s a good idea about using slabs of the soft wood to build a hut. But let’s build the hut right here.”
“Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?” the mate asked.
“Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream. There may be something better up there.”
Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:
“I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job. We need parts, and we haven’t anything to make them out of or with.”
That was about what I’d thought. Tom knew more about lift-and-drive engines than I’d ever learn, and I was willing to take his opinion as confirmation of my own.
“Tom, take a look at this mess,” I said. “See if you can help us with it.”
He came over, looked at what we were working on, and said, “You need a magnifier for this. Wait till I see something.” Then he went over to one of the lockers, rummaged in it, and found a pair of binoculars. He came over to us again, sat down, and began to take them apart. As soon as he had the two big objective lenses out, we had two fairly good magnifying glasses.
That was a big help, but being able to see what had to be done was one thing, and having tools to do it was another. So he found a sewing kit and a piece of emery stone, and started making little screwdrivers out of needles.
After a while, Abe Clifford and Piet Dumont and the other man returned and made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe was warmed a little, he said:
“There’s a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn’t too hard to get up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a big bowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom, once. The wind isn’t so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom or whatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place to make a camp, if it wasn’t so far from the boat.”
“How hard would it be to cut wood up there and bring it down?” Joe asked, going on to explain what he had in mind.
“Why, easy. I don’t think it would be nearly as hard as the place Ramón found.”
“Neither do I,” the mate agreed. “Climbing up that waterfall down the stream with a half tree trunk would be a lot harder than dropping one over beside the one above.” He began zipping up his parka. “Let’s get the cutter and the lifters and go up now.”
“Wait till I warm up a little, and I’ll go with you,” Abe said.
Then he came over to where Cesário and Tom and I were working, to see what we were doing. He chucked appreciatively at the midget screwdrivers and things Tom was making.
“I’ll take that back, Ramón,” he said. “I can do a lot more good right here. Have you taken any of the radio navigational equipment apart, yet?” he asked us.
We hadn’t. We didn’t know anything about it.
“Well, I think we can get some stuff out of the astrocompass that can be used. Let me in here, will you?”
I got up. “You take over for me,” I said. “I’ll go on the wood-chopping detail.”
Tom wanted to go, too; Abe told him to keep on with his toolmaking. Piet Dumont said he’d guide us, and Glenn Murell said he’d go along. There was some swapping around of clothes and we gathered up the two lifters and the sonocutter and a floodlight and started upstream.
The waterfall above the boat was higher than the one below, but not quite so hard to climb, especially as we had the two lifters to help us. The worst difficulty, and the worst danger, was from the wind.
Once we were at the top, though, it wasn’t so bad. We went a couple of hundred yards through a narrow gorge, and then we came out onto the old lake bottom Abe had spoken about. As far as our lights would shine in the snow, we could see stubby trees with snaky branches growing out of the tops.
We just started on the first one we came to, slicing the down-hanging branches away to get at the trunk and then going to work on that. We took turns using the sonocutter, and the rest of us stamped around to keep warm. The first trunk must have weighed a ton and a half, even after the branches were all off; we could barely lift one end of it with both lifters. The spongy stuff, which changed from bark to wood as it went in to the middle, was two feet thick. We cut that off in slabs, to use for building the hut. The hardwood core, once we could get it lit, would make a fine hot fire. We could cut that into burnable pieces after we got it to camp. We didn’t bother with the slashings; just threw them out of the way. There was so much big stuff here that the branches weren’t worth taking in.
We had eight trees down and cut into slabs and billets before we decided to knock off. We didn’t realize until then how tired and cold we were. A couple of us had taken the wood to the waterfall and heaved it over at the side as fast as the others
