The office that smelled of wet floorboards and hot dogs during the day was a different place at night. Fierce heating dried the wood after the last customer had left, slowly evaporating the puddles caused by skiers dragging the snow in on their moonboots. For a while it made the room steamy and sour. But once it had dried, and the cleaners had done their stuff sweeping up discarded sticky backs from the lift passes, the office was a pleasant and inhabitable room, and when Sam had called Katie he was comfortable. There was, after all, something soothing about seeking refuge from the storm in a commercial rather than a domestic setting, appealing to that childish excitement of bedding down somewhere alien and forbidden.

The first time Sam had been in a church in Calgary he felt that way. He was fifteen years old and the luxury of the interior, the cool but ornate splendour, had astounded him. There had been no sense of God to the young Sam Hunt, just a million opportunities for making tiny living spaces in the dozens of marble and oak corners the building boasted. He sat on the hard pew, imagining creeping into that fabulous building when everyone was gone and unfurling his sleeping mat beneath the high, carved wooden pulpit. It was like a palace. What would it be like to run barefoot on that marble floor in front of the minister? Think of the feasts that could be laid out on those huge stone steps, and the dancing that could go wildly out of control in the vast empty space between pews and altar. The pragmatist in him figured that cooking could be accomplished quite safely on the stone-flagged floors, since the smoke would have ample space to rise and dissipate high above, amongst the barrel-vaulting. Sam knew he could live there like a king.

The Reverend and Mrs Jenkins were delighted by Sam’s expression of wonder and awe as he sat between them that day, his black-button eyes roving over the architecture like a blind man seeing for the first time.

They were not to know his thoughts were on a flight of fancy as to how he would live secretively in such a place, instead of an awakening to the glory and love of their God: but they often misinterpreted their young charge. They never really knew him at all.

The Silver Ski Company ticket office in Stoke was no comparison to the Calgary Church of All Saints on Third Street, but as Sam selected a place to sleep, his instincts were the same as those of twenty years ago. All these interesting nooks and corners to sleep in. Areas to make your own.