She cast off the lower flap-fastenings and entered.

The man still blew into the stove, unaware of his company.

Frona coughed, and he raised a pair of smoke-reddened eyes to hers.
"Certainly," he said, casually enough.

"Fasten the flaps and make yourself comfortable." And thereat returned to his borean task.
"Hospitable, to say the least," she commented to herself, obeying his command and coming up to the stove.
A heap of dwarfed spruce, gnarled and wet and cut to proper stove-length, lay to one side.

Frona knew it well, creeping and crawling and twisting itself among the rocks of the shallow alluvial deposit, unlike its arboreal prototype, rarely lifting its head more than a foot from the earth.