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The boon comes up the hill at eight in the morning on the back of two production assistants and a mule.

There is a mule. Nobody has mentioned a mule for seven days.

Neve holds up the sheet.

AUDIENCE VOTE, EPISODE TWO. BOON: OSTVEK AND HALLORAN. BURDEN: TRELL AND TRELL.

Junie says, "The Trells lose what?"

Neve turns the sheet. Fire kit.

"On a wet mountain."

Neve puts the sheet away.

The boon comes off the mule in two parcels, and the two parcels are the whole story, and it takes me most of the morning to get to the bottom of what they are telling me.

Parcel one has a tag on it that says OSTVEK.

In it: a splitting axe, three and a half pound head, hickory handle, thirty-one inches. Forty feet of half inch manila. A second wool blanket. A whetstone.

Parcel two has a tag on it that says HALLORAN.

In it: a rubber hot water bottle in a knitted cover. A bar of chocolate. A pair of dry wool socks.

Junie takes the socks out and holds them up, and her mouth is doing something complicated.

"Well," she says.

I stand on the bench with an axe in my hand that I asked for at a prize table two days ago and did not get, and that four million people have now handed me for free, and I go very quiet, and I stay that way for about two hours.

Here is how I work anything out. I do not go at it from the front. I put a load on it and I look at where it moves.

So I put a load on it.

At ten I stop building and stand still. I stand on the deck with my hands at my sides and do nothing at all for six minutes, which is a long time to do nothing when somebody is paid to point a lens at you. Bear holds for two minutes and eleven seconds. Then he drifts. Then he sets the rig on the tripod and takes his hands off it entirely and gets out a lens cloth.

At ten thirty I sit down beside the trough and talk, out loud, at length, about the difference between a saddle notch and a lap joint, and why the ridge beam on this shelter sits down into wood on three faces, and how a birdsmouth transfers load into a plate instead of hanging off it. Nine minutes of it. Neve raises no card. Bear does not come off the tripod once. At minute four the sound tech takes one side of his headphones off his ear.

At eleven I pick up the axe.

Bear is off the tripod before the head clears my knee. He comes in low and left, which puts the handle and my forearm and my jaw in the same frame, and he holds it there for the entire time I split, and when I set the axe down and step back he stays on the axe for another four seconds after I am gone.

That is the grain.

They do not want the joint. They want the arm that swings.

I take it to Junie at noon, on the far side of the woodpile, with my back to the rig and my head down.

"They are writing me," I say.

Junie stops with the filter in her hands.

"Four million people voted," I say, "and what came up that hill was a tool for me and a hot water bottle for you. Nobody typed that. There was no box on a form for a splitting axe. Somebody four hundred miles from here looked at what the audience made of two days of us and chose a parcel, and the parcel says one of us works and one of us gets warm."

She sets the filter down.

"Yes," she says.