You do not give the mine your feet. You give the cabin your ears.

The room is a dry island. The lamp makes a circle that ends at the rug. Beyond the glass, Cinder Notch is a moving dark of spruce.

The stovepipe does it when the wind hits, a vowel so regular you could hum along. Then the logs join in: ticks, tiny pops, heat making old wood remember it used to be a tree. Then a chew-chew in the wall, busy and rude, not in threes, not in any ghost’s polite meter.

The knock from the hill comes a third time. It is not in the cabin. It is in the rock. It does not say words. Your brain tries to put words in anyway. That is a thing brains do, Priya told you: they hate a blank and will paint one if you let them.

A pale face seems to hang in the window.

You raise the lamp.

It is not a face. It is frost grown into feathers—hoarfrost, ice crystals that sprout from moist air onto cold glass—and a dark spruce behind it that wanted to be hair. Then the chew happens again, lower, at the porch.

Two sounds, then. Pipe. Wall. Night trying to be a choir.

You could hunt the knocks inside, the way you catch a dripping faucet: by looking.

You could take the lamp to the spruce line, stay on the packed path, and see what has ear-tufts and what has hop-prints.

You hold the lamp below your eyes so the window cannot turn you into a ghost for anything watching outside. That is manners. It is also how you keep your night vision, which is a science word for not being blind when you step out later. The chew-chew pauses, then continues, professional as a carpenter who has never heard of tommyknockers.