So she continued on. She paused occasionally to hunt, but she didn't need to hunt often, because this was the season of migration. The northern elk were moving across the tundra in countless numbers, headed north from their wintering grounds in the thick forests of the southern foothills. One of the massive creatures could feed Flame for quite some time, and the meat kept well in the cool of her steadily growing tunnel. Though it wasn't really a tunnel any more. It widened out, and she was hollowing a large central chamber, with an arched ceiling, as spacious as she could manage to make it. At the high point she could rear back on her hind legs and reach up and only just touch the ceiling. She might have made do with something smaller, but this was to be her home, her true home, for the rest of her long life. She wanted every possible comfort, and that included space to bring friends, if she so wished. So though she knew it would be rare that any of them would journey so far, she prepared all the same.

There were many decades of life yet ahead of her. Who knows what that time would bring? Better to do the job right the first time than to have to redo it later.

So the weeks passed as the main room grew a few slow feet at a time, melted and dug out of the frozen soil.

When at last the chamber was as large as she wanted, she returned to the top of the hill. Her burrow was far, far below, and this next job would take a good while, but the tunnel she needed to make now would be small. She tested the wind, watching and feeling how it blew. The patterns would change, she knew, but the spring pattern could tell her much about what the rest of the year was likely to be like. She picked her spot then, where she thought it would be likely to draw properly all year round, and where it should be directly above the chamber below, and started digging her chimney. She went straight down, digging the tunnel no wider than it needed to be for her to fit in it. This was even slower work, for she couldn't just fling the dirt behind her, it had to be lifted up and out, and there was a long ways to go, much further than her first gently sloping tunnel. But several weeks later she broke through into the main chamber, and she grinned to herself. She had come out exactly where she meant to, at the chamber's edge, where she could eventually build a proper fireplace.

She rested then, for a while. The basic necessities for living were there now. The rest she could finish at her leisure. But she knew very well that if she left it too long it might be put off forever, so it was only a few days later when she began again. She dug out a rectangular doorway. She intended to eventually get proper carpentry done, and put in real doors. That would make her den quite unlike the dens of her youth, but though she still considered herself a firecat, she had picked up a few ideas from the civilized races of Aretha, and she wasn't going to live in a rough hole of bare dirt. She wanted wooden floors and plastered walls and real doors and furniture and possibly even a kitchen with a stove and whatever other conveniences she could have built in.

But all that was for later. The digging must come first. A large bedroom was hollowed out, then a second, smaller room for guests. Another chamber would be the kitchen, and then a final sloping passage slanted down deeply into the earth. Down there would be a basement, and since heat rose, the fires and stoves that would warm the rest of her house would not warm it, so she could store things there and they would stay chilled, literally kept on ice in the frozen earth.

By the time she began digging out her cellar the first snow was flying. She was well insulated against the cold, but she had made a few trips to bring as much firewood as she could from the foothills to the south, and the main chamber was warmed by a cheerful fire most nights. Fire and warmth were comforting, and comfortable, and it felt good to have one here. She would not keep it burning always, she had never been the sort to be strict in the worship of the Eternal Flame and she was even less so now, so far from home. But fire was her heritage, and she took comfort in the flickering flames.