appeared among the ponderosa. The pines dwindled. Then they moved through a pure stand of spruce again. Abigail realized they hadn’t been following a trail since breakfast.
In the early afternoon, they arrived at a small lake, and Scott told everyone to shed their packs. Abigail leaned hers against a rotten stump. Without the weight, she felt like she might float away. She knelt down on the shore and splashed water in her face. The arctic shock of it stole her breath. She sat on the grassy bank and drank from her water bottle. Tall spruce trees rimmed the bank, and the surface of the lake sent back a perfect reflection of the trees and the sky. The water glowed a deep green. She looked through it down to the lakebed, saw a cutthroat motionless among the pastel-colored stones.
Jerrod came over and brought her a bagged lunch—sandwich, apple, Clif Bar.
“How you holding up?” he asked.
“Feel like I’m breathing through a straw, and my hips hurt from the pack.”
“I’ll adjust the straps again before we leave. You’re doing very well.”
She shielded her face from the sun and looked up at Jerrod. She liked his face. She could tell that beneath the beard he was handsome, taller than Scott, even more well built. But she wondered about the scars, two bare patches curving up from the corners of his mouth in the shape of crescent moons. Staring at him, she wished she could see his eyes again. They seemed different—she’d noticed it at the trailhead before the sun came up and drove everyone into sunglasses. They reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, their density and depth, like they bore some great burden beyond the intake of the present.
Jerrod left to take Emmett and June their lunches. Abigail unwrapped her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. She ate, watching the llamas graze the bank.
They made camp at eleven thousand feet in a glade just spacious enough to accommodate five tents. They were only a few hundred feet below the timberline and the forest had transitioned into a withered-looking collection of blue spruce and alpine fir, crippled by years of extreme winters. Scott insisted that everyone change out of their wet clothes to avoid hypothermia. Within half an hour, they raised the tents. The guides showed everyone how to inflate the Therm-a- Rests and arrange their gear inside the vestibules.
With still a few hours of light left, Abigail emerged from her tent, bundled in long underwear, fleece pants, a vest and parka. Emmett and June stood watching Jerrod construct a campfire ring from a pile of rocks. Lawrence snored in his tent. Scott dug through a giant compression bag filled with what Abigail could only hope was real food, not that granola-bar shit.
She walked up to him, said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. What do we do about that?”
“I haven’t unpacked the toilet yet.”
“Really? You have a portable—” His grin stopped her.
“You’ve never spent a night out in the woods have you, Abigail?”
“No.”
“Well, no worries. There’s a bathroom behind every tree.”
She smiled seductively and raised her middle finger.
Abigail found a bit of privacy behind a blue spruce. The air nipped her bare ass. The ground steamed. She glanced at her watch—6:30 P.M., still on Manhattan time, and it made her homesick to think of Viv and Jen. Any other Sunday, she’d have just finished working out and showering, in a mad rush to meet them for cosmos at the Zinc Bar. But so far, this trip had been nothing like she’d expected. The thin air, the cold, ten fucking miles, and the hardest still to come. She thought she’d be in her element out here, but she hated everything—the Clif Bars, the smelly, bitchy llamas. And there was something about the light beginning to fade and no warm bed to climb into that depressed the hell out of her.
FOUR
A
bigail leaned against a fir tree. Down in the gully, Scott worked his way upstream, just past a fork in the channel. She watched him sidearm cast, the bright green line sailing in an S over the rocks, glistening like a spider-web in the late sunlight, delivering the fly into a small pool. He’d hiked up his fleece pants, and he fished shirtless in a fly vest, knee-deep in the water. Abigail descended quietly to the bank, stood for a while listening to the stream’s drowsy prattling.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said without looking back. “But there’s a secret to it.”
“What’s that?”
“Not caring.” He suddenly raised the rod. It dipped. A trout shot out of the pool and splashed into the main current, Scott holding the rod high now, the line taut, the bamboo arcing toward the water. He brought the fish out of the stream, a twelve-inch cutthroat, its crimson gill slashes palpitating in the fading light. Scott carefully unhooked the fly, then swung the fish against a rock. It shivered out. He slipped it into a canvas bag.
She said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you jerk on the rod before it moved?”
“Yeah. I’m impressed you noticed. See, by the time you feel the tap, it’s too late. He’s already checked it out, realized it’s bullshit.”
“So how’d you know?”
“Caught him rising to my elk-hair caddis, saw it vanish, pulled to set the hook.”
“No idea what you just said, but it was a lovely thing to watch.”
Scott climbed onto the bank, sat down on a carpet of moss. He opened a small box containing an assortment of flies, Abigail now close enough to read the tattoo that wrapped around his arm above the bicep: MARIA 2.11.78– 5.15.04 R.I.P.
She bent down to the stream, cupped a handful of freezing water, and as she brought it to her mouth, Scott yelled, “No!”
