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I set the first pole into the grommet and the arch comes up and I have it in front of me at once.

"Eighty-four inches," I say.

"What?"

"The interior length. Eighty-four inches, and it tapers to fifty-one at the foot, and the peak height is thirty-eight." I run the second pole through. "I am eighty-three inches."

Junie stops with the stake bag halfway open.

"So you fit."

"I fit the way water fits a cup that is exactly full."

"That's a yes."

"It is a yes with no allowance." I set the second arch. The fabric comes taut and the whole thing goes from a pile to a shape, which is the part of any build that costs nothing and pays everything. "A structure is not rated by whether the load goes in. It is rated by what happens when the load moves."

"Ghorlan."

"A tent is a two person tent because two people who weigh a hundred and sixty pounds each can lie in it without touching the wall. You and I do not weigh a hundred and sixty pounds each. You weigh a hundred and eighteen and I weigh three hundred and forty, which is one hundred and two pounds over their design case, and every one of those pounds is on the deck rather than the fabric, so the load is fine." I stand back. "The problem is the volume."

"The volume."

"There are three hundred and ten cubic feet in here. I displace about thirteen." I go and get the wool blanket and the two bags. "That leaves you a coffin."

"That is the single worst sentence anybody has said to me on this mountain."

"There is more."

"There cannot be more."

"The nylon has a shear rating and my elbow does not respect it," I say. "So if I roll, I go through the wall. So I will not roll."

Bear has been standing eleven feet away for the entire assessment with the camera on his shoulder, and the red light on, and now the lens comes down about two inches, which on Bear is a fall from grace.

The storm lands at ten past nine.

It comes up the drainage and hits the bench with the whole weight of nine miles of open water behind it, and the roof takes it and the roof holds, and the batten poles do their work, and rain goes over the eave in a sheet and lands eleven feet out. Inside the tent the fabric drums and then stops drumming, because I set it in the lee of the deck edge, and the noise drops to something a person can live under.

We get in.

There is a technique to it that we develop in real time and that neither of us will discuss afterward. I go in first, because a man of my dimensions entering a small structure second is how somebody loses a tooth. I lie down the long axis, head at the peak, boots in the taper, and my heels find the foot wall and stay there, and my shoulders take up two thirds of the width.

Junie comes in after and stops.

"Right," she says.

"Yes."

"There's a third of a tent."

"There is a third of a tent."

She lies down in it. On her side. Facing me, because there is no other way to fit a person in the space left, and her forehead ends up about nine inches from my jaw and her knees end up against my thigh, and the wool blanket goes over both of us and covers about two thirds of what it is meant to cover.

The rain goes over the eave.

"You're a furnace," she says, after a while.