1
REID
The snow crust breaks clean under my boot.
Good. That's what we need to know.
Jace walks ahead of me, three days back from Honduras and already restless. Today it's about the boots. Tomorrow it'll be a new route, a harder ridge line, some faraway place that hasn't seen him yet. That's Jace. The horizon has to keep moving or something in him pulls tight.
Owen walks to my left, quieter, his eyes tracking the tree line with the same methodical sweep he'd give a quarterly report.
It's good to have Jace back.
The Honduras leg ran three weeks. Technically it was a field test: high-altitude jungle terrain, stress-testing the new cold-weather layering system in extreme humidity before we run it in dry cold. He came back with forty pages of handwritten notes, mud permanently set into the seams of three pieces of gear, and the specific, barely-contained energy of a man who has been moving through difficult country and isn't ready to stop yet.
Of the three of us, he's always been the one who needs to go.
Owen and I grew into this land the way the larch does, slow and deep, until the leaving of it would feel like pulling something up by the roots. Jace loves it here. He also cannot stay still for too long. Both things are true, and we stopped trying to resolve the contradiction years ago.
The boots are performing. The sole compound was Jace's push from the beginning, his conviction that we were leaving serious winter market share on the table because every comparable product stiffens and loses traction under sustained subzero use. He wasn't wrong. We're on packed frozen ground at twenty-two degrees and the flex retention is holding, the grip pattern biting clean through the crust without the brittleness that kills confidence on technical terrain. I work my way across the ice shelf at the creek crossing and feel nothing give. Good grip. Good flex. Good.
"The sole compound is going to be the thing that moves units," Jace says, not looking back. He drives his boot into a frozen lip of snow at the trail's edge, deliberate, testing. "Serious cold-weather buyers have been making peace with stiff soles for years because there wasn't a better option. Now there is."
"At a cost." Even on a trail in the woods, Owen sounds like he's chairing a meeting. "The compound runs twelve percent above materials projection. That compresses margin on the base model."
"Margin compresses if we hold the current price point. We don't have to."
"We've modeled price elasticity in this segment."
"We modeled it with last year's customer data. Our position in the market has shifted. The ceiling has moved."
There it is. The particular frequency of their disagreements. Owen is right about the numbers. Jace is right about the product. I've sat in the middle of some version of this argument across four product cycles, and the resolution is always thesame: we find the number that honors both. We're not there yet today.
"The compound stays," I say. "We work the price question separately. But, not now."
We keep walking.
The trees close around us as the trail bends north. Old growth Douglas fir and western larch, trunks so wide that three men linking hands couldn't reach around them. Snow sits heavy on the lower branches. The light comes through grey and flat, late February in the Flathead Valley, and the cold works through the base layer where the wind finds the collar and the cuffs. My lungs register every inhale. That bite. That particular clean sharpness you only get at elevation in real Montana winter.
I've lived in a lot of places. Done difficult work in difficult environments across three continents. None of them settle in the chest the way these mountains do.
Owen lets a beat pass. He's not done discussing business.
"The investment fund representative called again this morning," he says. "They're pressing for a decision."
I feel the shift in Jace before I see it. He doesn't stop walking, but his shoulders stiffen.
True North. Our brand of outdoor gear.
We built it from nothing, and that word is not rhetorical. Twelve years ago we had Jace's field notebooks, Owen's projections on a laptop, and my signature on an equipment lease I wasn't sure we could service. We ran the first season out of a converted barn on the north edge of the property. The second season we hired two people. The fifth season we turned our first real profit and Owen made a spreadsheet about it that I still have somewhere. Now we have forty-three employees, a product line that outdoor industry publications use as a quality benchmark, and an investment fund with nine figures under management telling us they want to buy it.
We are already wealthy men. That fact still catches me sideways sometimes, the distance between the barn and where we are now. The acquisition would push that number past anything I know how to think about clearly.
And still.
Letting go of what we built is harder to calculate than the money makes it sound.
There are reasons to do it. The Wolf Rescue Center runs on what we funnel to it privately. Acquisition capital would let us do more. And Jace has his own projects, things that would benefit from the kind of funding this deal would free up.
