If they insisted on building a cabin before the freeze, with no help, no logs, no money, and only 8 weeks, then they would die. The mathematics did not lie. He had known another stubborn settler like that in 1868, a man who would not listen, a man who built a brush-and-bark shelter and said he would improve it in spring. They found his body in March. Wolves had gotten to it before the ground thawed enough for a proper burial.

“Two girls cannot raise walls before the freeze,” Mikkelson said again. “You will die out there, and no one will find your bodies until spring.”

The sisters walked back to their 40 acres in silence. The cutover country stretched around them, all stumps, brush, and the splintered remains of hopeful plans. Mikkelson’s verdict circled in Sylvi’s head like crows. No logs. No help. No money. 8 weeks. Land without shelter was simply a place to starve. But where else could they go? Milwaukee had nothing for them. The towns had nothing. Their parents were dead. Their savings were gone. The 40 acres, however miserable, were all that remained in the world that was indisputably theirs.

They could, of course, dig a dugout. Mikkelson had been right about that much. People had survived winters in dugouts. A hole in a slope, roofed with what brush and timber they could drag over it, earth and sod packed above. Damp, dark, and close to the ground like a grave one occupied in advance. But surviving is not the same as living, and dugouts did not promise even survival with any certainty.

Sylvi stopped near the edge of their claim where Astrid had stacked some cedar rounds 2 days earlier. The wood was cut into short lengths, perhaps 12 to 16 in, split and piled neatly beneath bark slabs to keep off the rain. Firewood. The one resource their useless land possessed in abundance. The stack was stable. It had not shifted though the wind had touched it and weather had passed over it. Sylvi looked at that woodpile and felt something begin to move in her mind.

“Astrid,” she said. “Tell me again what Grandfather said about the mountain farms. About how the poor people built.”

Astrid looked at the stacked rounds and understood at once. “Kubbevegg,” she said. “Chunk wall building. He saw a storehouse built that way in the mountains above Bergen when he was a boy. Short pieces of wood stacked with clay between them. It had stood for 50 years.”

Could such a method work here? Astrid bent and lifted 1 cedar round. Perhaps 15 lb. She could hold it in 1 hand easily. A conventional cabin log might weigh 300 lb or more and require 4 men just to carry, 20 to raise. This piece required 1 hand. The land around them was buried in exactly that sort of “worthless” wood: cedar scrub, poplar, stunted pieces the loggers had left because no mill wanted them.

“We would need mortar,” Astrid said slowly, thinking through it. “Lime mortar, not clay. Clay would crack in hard frost.”

“Where do we get lime?”

“From limestone. Burn limestone with wood and you get quicklime. Slake it with water and you get lime. Mix it with sand and sawdust and you get mortar.”

Sylvi remembered the gray outcropping she had seen along the creek on the south boundary. Limestone. Free. There was enough there for many batches if they could break it and burn it. They looked at each other and then at the stumps, the twisted timber, the scrub, the firewood stack, the creek, the land everyone said had no resources. They did not need long straight logs if they abandoned the assumption that walls must be made from long straight logs. They did not need 20 men if the building units weighed 15 lb instead of 300. They needed short rounds, mortar, and a frame. Those things might actually be possible.

“Mikkelson says we will die,” Astrid said.

“Mikkelson has never built a wall like this,” Sylvi replied. “No one here has.”

“Then how do we know it will work?”

“We do not,” Sylvi admitted. “But we know the alternatives.”

Dugout or death. Those were the alternatives Mikkelson had offered. This, however uncertain and untested, constituted a 3rd option. And a 3rd option, even one that might fail, was still more than they had that morning.

Sylvi began cutting rounds on September 10, a week after the bank had failed and taken their savings with it. The work settled quickly into a rhythm so brutal that rhythm itself was almost the only comfort. She swung the axe from first light until she could no longer see. 14 hours a day, shoulders burning, hands splitting and bleeding, every strike converting the worthless timber of their land into building units no expert in the county would have recognized as such. She favored cedar when she could find it, remembering their grandfather’s insistence that rot-resistant wood mattered most. When cedar ran thin, she used poplar. Even some oak, though its weight worried her.