ur integrity stands--even though
it was tried more than a hundred years ago."

He dropped out of sight over a small hummock and whipped down the side
of a slight depression in the slope, his skis whispering over the dry
snow and sending up a churning crest of white from their tips.

Alec chuckled and poled after him into the basin. The two young junior
hydrologists worked their way up the opposite slope and then again
took the long, slow traverse-and-turn, traverse-and-turn path through
the thinning trees and out into the open wind-driven snow field above
them.

Just below the ridgeline, a shelf of packed snow jutted out for a
dozen yards, flat and shielded from the wind by a brief rock face.
Troy halted in the small island in the storm and waited for Alec to
reach him.

He fumbled with mittened fist at the cover of the directional
radiation compass strapped to his left wrist. The outer dial rotated
as soon as the cover lock was released and came to a stop pointing to
magnetic north. The detector needle quartered across the northeast
quadrant of the dial like a hunting dog and then came to rest at
nineteen degrees, just slightly to the left of the direction of their
tracks. An inner dial needle quivered between the yellow and red face
of the intensity meter.

"We should be within a couple of hundred yards of the marker now,"
Troy announced as his short, chunky partner checked alongside. Alec
nodded and peered through the curtain of sky-darkened snow just beyond
the rock face. He could see powder spume whipping off the ridge crest
twenty feet above them but the contour of the sloping ridge was
quickly lost in the falling snow.

[Illustration]

The hydrologists leaned on their ski poles and rested for a few
minutes before tackling the final cold leg of their climb. Each
carried a light, cold-resistance plastic ruckpac slung over their
chemically-heated light-weight ski suits.

A mile and a half below in the dense timber, their two Sno cars were
parked in the shelter of a flattened and fallen spruce and they had
thrown up a quick lean-to of broken boughs to give the vehicles even
more protection from the storm. From there to the top, Troy was right
in his analysis of DivAg. When God made mountain slopes too steep and
timber too thick, it was a man and not a machine that had to do the
job on skis; just as snow surveyors had done a century before when the
old Soil Conservation Service pioneered the new science of