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"Both partners across," he says. "The barrel across. Nothing in the water. Nothing you carry over on your back, so no barrel bearers, no piggyback, no heroics. Build a crossing or find one. Fastest time takes it."

Coby Renn puts his hand up. "Can we film the barrel?"

"You can film the barrel, Coby."

"Can the barrel have a name?"

"Go," Cade says.

Ghorlan is at the material pile before Cade's arm comes down.

And I stand still for eleven seconds, which is the only skill I brought up this mountain, and I look at five other teams instead of at the gully.

Wes and Danna Trell go straight at the poles and start lashing a ladder, which will work, and which will take an hour. Rooney Pike picks up a plank and holds it out over the gap and puts it down again. Margaux Farrow starts digging a ramp for reasons that are hers alone. Coby lies down at the lip and gets a hero shot of the creek.

Marisol Arbogast looks at the gully for about four seconds. Then she turns her back on the whole pile and walks upstream.

"Ghorlan."

"I have it."

"Ghorlan, Marisol just left."

"I have the crossing." He has three poles up on his shoulder and he is laying them out in the mud in a shape, and the shape is beautiful, and I have started to be able to tell when a shape is beautiful, which is a thing this mountain has done to me. "Two stringers, cross braced at the midpoint, planks pinned across the top. It will hold nine hundred pounds and it will hold it wet."

"How long."

"Thirty-five minutes."

"Marisol left. She went upstream."

He straightens up with the poles on his shoulder and looks upstream, at nothing, at trees.

"There is a downed cedar," he says slowly, "at the bend."

"Is there."

"There is always a downed cedar at a bend."

We are eleven minutes into a thirty-five minute build when the Arbogasts cross a cedar log four hundred yards upstream with the barrel rolling ahead of them like a dog, and come back down the far side, and stop the clock.

Nine minutes. Nine.

We take second at thirty-one, because Ghorlan cuts his own estimate by four minutes and I run planks until my arms go, and when the barrel comes over the last plank and lands on the far lip, the plywood makes a noise it has never made for us.

The Trells finish at fifty-eight. The Farrows at sixty-six. Rooney and Ovid do not finish, and Coby and Stitch do not finish either, but they get eleven minutes of Stitch falling in the creek, which is worth more to them than a placement, and both of them are aware of it.

Second place gets the table.

The table has nine things on it, and the Arbogasts pick three, and then it is our turn to pick two, and this is the first time in six days that anybody has offered me a choice.

Ghorlan says, "The axe."

I look at the table.

There is an axe on it, three and a half pound head, and I understand exactly what a man who builds could do with it. There is also a cook pot, and a bag of rice, and a tarp, and a coil of paracord, and a squeeze filter in a blister pack.

"Pot and the filter," I say.