On the fifth morning, if my count is right, from the day I wakened in the truck, it stopped. We heard talking outside and calling back and forth. The steel rear-doors were unbolted from the outside and flung wide open.
One by one we crept to that open end of the steel box, some on hands and knees, and jumped or crawled down onto the ground. Twenty-four of us did. Two dead men, the old corpse and a new one, the one who had not got his drink of water for two days, were dragged out.
It was cold outside, so cold and so glaring with white sunlight on white snow that to leave the fetid shelter of the truck was very hard, and some of us wept. We stood bunched up beside the great truck, all of us naked and stinking, our little whole, our night-entity exposed to the bright cruel daylight. They broke us up, made us form a line, and led us towards a building a few hundred yards away. The metal walls and snow-covered roof of the building, the plain of snow all around, the great range of mountains that lay under the rising sun, the vast sky, all seemed to shake and glitter with excess of light.
We were lined up to wash ourselves at a big trough in a frame hut; everybody began by drinking the wash-water. After that we were led into the main building and given undershirts, gray felt shirts, breeches, leggings, and felt boots. A guard checked off our names on a list as we filed into the refectory, where with a hundred or more other people in gray we sat at bolted-down tables and were served breakfast: grain-porridge and beer. After that the whole lot of us, new prisoners and old, were divided up into squads of twelve. My squad was taken to a sawmill a few hundred yards behind the main building, inside the fence. Outside the fence and not far from it a forest began that covered the folded hills as far to northward as the eye could see. Under the direction of our guard we carried and stacked sawn boards from the mill to a huge shed where lumber was stored through the winter.
It was not easy to walk, stoop, and lift loads, after the days in the truck. They didn’t let us stand idle, but they didn’t force the pace either. In the middle of the day we were served a cupful of the unfermented grain-brew, orsh; before sunset we were taken back to the barracks and given dinner, porridge with some vegetables, and beer. By nightfall we were locked into the dormitory, which was kept fully lighted all night. We slept on five-foot-deep shelves all around the walls of the room in two tiers. Old prisoners scrambled for the upper tier, the more desirable, since heat rises. For bedding each man was issued a sleeping-bag at the door. They were coarse heavy bags, foul with other men’s sweat, but well insulated and warm. Their drawback for me was their shortness. An average-sized Gethenian could get clear inside head and all, but I couldn’t; nor could I ever stretch out fully on the sleeping-shelf. The place was called Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm and Resettlement Agency. Pulefen, District Thirty, is in the extreme northwest of the habitable zone of Orgoreyn, bounded by the Sembensyen Mountains, the Esagel River, and the coast. The area is thinly settled, without big cities. The town nearest us was a place called Turuf, several miles to the southwest; I never saw it. The Farm was on the edge of a great unpopulated forest region, Tarrenpeth. Too far north for the larger trees, hemmen or serem or black vate, the forest was all of one kind of tree, a gnarled scrubby conifer ten or twelve feet high, gray-needled, called thore. Though the number of native species, plant or animal, on Winter is unusually small, the membership of each species is very large: there were thousands of square miles of thore-trees, and nothing much else, in that one forest. Even the wilderness is carefully husbanded there, and though that forest had been logged for centuries there were no waste places in it, no desolations of stumps, no eroded slopes. It seemed that every tree in it was accounted for, and that not one grain of sawdust from our mill went unused. There was a small plant on the Farm, and when the weather prevented parties from going out into the forest we worked in the mill or in the plant, treating and compressing chips, bark, and sawdust into various forms, and extracting from the dried thore-needles a resin used in plastics.