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I've been running GM diesels in the patch for thirty-one years. Last winter I found out what three bolts on an LML are actually worth. Not what the dealer charges to reach them — what they cost you if you can't. If you run an LML Duramax, you already know which three bolts I mean. My name's Mike. I'm forty-nine. I run a hotshot out of Lloydminster — one truck, one deck — hauling for the oil companies and pulling a stock trailer for our own cattle on the side, down grid roads that go to gumbo when it rains and concrete glass when it hits minus forty. The truck's a 2013 GMC Sierra 3500 dually with the LML. Onyx Black, three hundred and ten thousand kilometres on her, and she's started in every cold snap this country's thrown at her. My dad drove diesel for an outfit out of Vermilion the back half of forty years, and he died in '12 in the recliner with his logbook still in his shirt pocket. What he left me rides in the back seat: a three-quarter-inch breaker bar with a length of pipe over it, the steel gone smooth and black where his hand used to go. Diane — my wife, thirty years, does the books for two outfits in town — tried twice that first year to move it out to the shop because it blacked up the seat. She doesn't try anymore. It works by being where I can reach it. Mornings I'm rolling by half-past five, before the plows are even out. Block heater unplugged, Tim's in the holder, the AM farm report reading grain prices to the dark.