You sit on the packed snow like a person who has decided not to be a legend tonight.

The notebook’s first page gets a heading: Cinder Notch knocks. Time. Temperature. What they do. You mark three booms. When a gust shoves the spruce, nothing matches. When the thermometer’s needle sits lower than Priya’s afternoon note, a boom is more likely. Cold contracting ice and soil can crack—a frost quake, a cryoseism, a door-slam with no door.

Ellis crouches, headlamp under the chin for drama, then thinks better of it because eyelashes are already frosting. “If we don’t go in, how do we prove they’re tommyknockers?”

“We prove what they are,” you say. “Tommyknockers is a name. Names aren’t evidence.”

Ellis huffs, but watches. One knock is only a tree shedding a plate of ice; you hear the slide. Another keeps a deep note, even in still air—rock, or ice in rock, the kind old stories called a warning spirit. The warning can stay. The spirit can be updated.

Ellis wants to rattle. You want watch-don’t-enter, which is a duller sentence and a smarter night.

Ms. Solano’s scrapbook lives in the trailhead box, a metal trunk with a courtesy lantern. The tarn below the cabin is doing something else entirely: a long singing groan, not a knock.

You write the temperature in numbers big enough to see with mittens on. A frost quake is not a quake that wants a city. It is soil and ice shrinking too fast, cracking like a giant knuckle. The sound travels. Your ribs travel with it. Ellis wants to put a face on the knuckle. You put a time-stamp. The spruce drips a slow clock of melt where your lamp warms a branch, which is a smaller weather, and you note that too so you do not later call it footsteps.