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Eventually, I asked if I could at least go gather evidence. That’s when I got the evidence bags since I am, technically, an officer of the law.
June holds out one hand, and I give her a pair before snapping some on myself. She crouches, looks up at the camera, then gingerly unscrews something and lifts the dark green, very heavy duty camera off its mounting pole.
I cross my arms over my chest and wait while she opens the casing, fiddles with something, shakes it, and then pulls a small, flat rectangle out.
“Evidence bag?” she asks.
I hold it open, and she carefully deposits the camera, still holding the memory card. I seal it.
“Okay,” she says, and pulls some electronics from an outside pocket of her pack. “Moment of truth.”
She slides the card into the card reader, then connects it to another cord that she connects to her phone. Faintly, something whirs to life, and for a few minutes, June watches her setup intently.
Then she sighs a sigh of relief.
“It worked,” she says, and unplugs the card reader, removes the memory card. I offer another evidence bag and she puts it in. “Now we just have to find them.”
We stand huddled together, and I watch over her shoulder as she scrolls through pictures of the forest. The camera trap is motion-triggered, so the pictures are usually of animals — mostly squirrels — doing something. There are some deer. There’s a bear. Two bears. A hawk, some rabbits.
Then, suddenly, there’s a pant leg. June holds her breath and taps that picture, flips to the next one, then the next one.
It’s exactly what I expected. Two people, midday. They have a chainsaw. There are several pictures of them standing, discussing, gesturing at each other.
Then they take the tree down. The man is the one wielding the chainsaw, but just from the way they’re standing, the way the woman is pointing, I can tell who’s in charge.
“Gotcha,” June whispers, then pauses on a picture, zooms in with two fingers.
It’s her, the woman who runs the historical society, who was a total jerk to June and me when we visited. She’s standing there in all these pictures, sour-faced, utterly disrespectful of this tree, of the forest, of nature and of the earth—
“I’m so glad you stole her pen,” June says. “Good. Fuck her. You hear that? Fuck you, Marjorie.”
I kiss June on the top of the head.
“We did it,” I tell her. “The long nightmare is over.”
She shuts her phone off, leans back into me.
“There’s one more tree to check on,” she says. “I assume the Forest Service wants both its cameras back, right?”
“We could pretend it got mauled by a bear,” I suggest.
“Oh, come on, Levi,” June laughs. “A little hiking never killed anyone.”The sun is starting to fade as we get to the other tree we camera-trapped, and thankfully, this one’s still there. I heave a quick sigh of relief when I see it ahead of us, stretching mightily for the heavens.
June collects the camera, and we put this one in an evidence bag too, just in case, though I’m sure the most interesting thing on it will be a bear. Maybe a mountain lion, but I swear those cats have some sort of sixth sense even about cameras, given how well they manage to avoid them.
We set up camp there, below the massive tree. I cook while June sets up my backpacking tent, fills it with our sleeping bags, and then we eat in the light of a tiny lantern.
“I brought a treat,” June says as we finish, and reaches into her pack.
“Is it my whiskey?” I ask. “If so, I also brought that treat.”
“Nope,” she says. “My treat is perfectly legal and won’t lead to the dissolution of society.”
She tosses me a packet of hot chocolate.
“I don’t think my whiskey’s that good,” I deadpan. “Or that bad, honestly.”
“Keep trying,” she says, filling the pot with water again and lighting the camp stove.
We drink hot chocolate and she leans against me in the cold night. I think about the last time I made hot chocolate on a camp stove, about June in the thunderstorm, about her hunting me down on my mother’s front porch and striking a deal with me.
“Do you like nature now?” I ask, remembering what she told me that first evening.
She’s silent a moment.
“I think I do,” she says, sounding slightly surprised. “I totally forgot that I was trying to do that.”
Another pause. She sips her hot chocolate.
“Am I different?” she asks.
I look over at her.
“When I moved back, I decided to reinvent myself,” she says, her voice sounding like it’s in a confessional. “It sounds kind of stupid to say out loud, but I was just so tired of myself, and tired of being someone whose life wasn’t working out, and I felt something had to change so I figured it may as well be me.”
