What the Slide Left Buried

Book One of WHERE THE SNOW CLAIMS GROUND

Elias Mercer has stopped believing in the government contract in his pocket, but he still needs the money it will pay him. Eleven days into a route survey above the Sierra crest, an early storm takes the choice away from him entirely: a slab of packed snow the size of a rail car breaks loose above his crew's line, and he does not walk out of what follows. He is buried alive under snow that is already hardening to ice, and the only person within a day's ride who knows how to find him is not looking for him at all.

Netsuwa Blackwater is searching that same slope for someone she loves more, and finding a half-dead surveyor from the outfit threatening her people's winter ground is not the rescue she wants to make. She digs him out anyway, sets his shattered leg with pieces of his own survey gear, and shelters him through four days of storm in a snow-cave built to hold one person, not two enemies who cannot yet call each other anything else. What she learns about the true purpose of his survey, and what he decides to do with that knowledge once the storm breaks, will determine whether the ground her family has always known stays hers, or becomes a line on someone else's map.
Neither of them asked for this. Neither of them can walk away from it now. When the weather clears and Elias is faced with filing the truth or burying it, what will he choose, and what will it cost the woman who saved him to find out?