Short, squat and heavily muscled from decades of swinging a pick. His beard is a wild copper-brown rope, braided with three thin strips of green leather and threaded with tiny copper washers — each washer is stamped with the mark of a mine claim he once worked. His skin is weathered like hammered bronze and dusted with a permanent film of copper ore, so close up his skin seems to glint. His face is lined with radial scars around one eye from a shard of flint; that scar is almost ceremonial in the way he touches it when thinking. He wears a dented iron miner's cap fitted with a crude reflector — the reflector sometimes gleams clean to a bright shine, sometimes it is smeared with soot. He moves like a mass that thinks before it moves: deliberate, low, and always balancing his center of gravity as if anticipating a shifting floor. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny carved wooden songbird tucked inside his apron that he polishes with the same meticulous care he uses to tend his pick — an oddly delicate habit on such a handsomely callused man.