“How old are you, Ms. Fuller?” Sawyer suddenly asked at the second switchback.
Nellie glanced back, surprised by the random inquiry, and the fact that Sawyer had reverted to calling her Ms. She hadnoted the casual way she’d addressed her as Nellie over the phone this morning. “Thirty-four.” She adjusted left. “You?”
“Forty-six.”
“Really? I would have guessed younger. Twelve years and you’re keeping up just fine.”
She immediately cringed to herself at her clumsy response; she hadn’t intended for it to sound so backhanded.
“Was that a compliment?”
“It was just an observation.”
“From you,” Sawyer said, “I’m beginning to understand those may be the same thing.”
Nellie stepped over a root mass and didn’t answer, mostly because she was smiling and didn’t particularly want to advertise it. The wind moved through the upper canopy in a long, slow pass, and the light shifted. Somewhere to the north, a pileated woodpecker hammered a fast, insistent rhythm against a dead snag.
“The bird,” Sawyer mused. “Is that normal? It sounds stressed.”
“It’s completely normal.” Nellie chuckled. “Excavating carpenter ants, probably. Old snags.” She glanced up through the canopy to find it. “That sound means significant standing dead wood. Which means the forest is old enough to have generated it, which is actually useful?—”
“The woodpecker is evidence?” Sawyer sighed, no shortage of skepticism in her drawl.
“What the woodpecker indicates is evidence. There’s a difference.”
Sawyer considered this with more apparent attention than Nellie had expected her to give it. “People who answer so smugly are usually building up to telling you something you don’t want to hear.”
“That’s a very cynical read.”
“That’s twelve years on you.”
Nellie dropped her head back and laughed, shooting her escort a mentaltouché.Sawyer did not appear amused in the slightest, but her eyes did widen slightly as if she was stunned that her retort had been received as comedic. Nellie couldn’t help but revel in the softening of the woman’s features, feeling as if she were glimpsing behind a curtain few managed to get anywhere near.
She was also becoming very conscious of the fact that she was learning things about Sawyer Alburn’s expressions at all. That had not been on the survey agenda.
Memories of the previous night kept surfacing in peripheral ways—the woodstove crackling, the soup going cold in her own bowl while she’d listened to Sawyer talk about Singapore, about her parents that she’d mentioned once and hadn’t circled back to, information which had landed somewhere in Nellie’s chest and stayed there. Sawyer had sat at her kitchen table like she was slightly surprised to be doing it and utterly disinclined to leave. Nellie had noticed both things and had chosen, so far, to file them underinconclusiverather thansignificant.
They hit the first riparian zone at the three-hour mark. The terrain dropped into a narrow, sheltered gully where the stream moved quieter and slower than it did lower on the property—older water through older ground, with the unhurried quality of something that had been doing this long enough to stop rushing. Red alder and willow overhung the banks.
Nellie stepped straight into the mud without breaking stride, feeling it close around her boot to mid-ankle.
“You’re just going in?” Sawyer asked from the bank.
“Yes.”
“Into the mud?”
“That’s where the interesting things are.” She was already crouching, scanning the exposed root systems along the near bank. “You don’t have to. You can stand there if you want.”
“I wasn’t—” Sawyer stopped, looked at the mud, then stepped in.
The mud made a deeply satisfying sound. Sawyer looked at her boot then continued forward. “What are we looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I—” Under the bank overhang, half-buried in the seep moss, she spotted a salamander. A large one, dark brown and river-stone flat, with the broad head and the muscular stillness she’d have recognized in her sleep.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, hello.”
She forgot about Sawyer. Not entirely—some part of her registered the presence, the sound of breathing two feet to her left—but she set it aside. She pulled the field camera with two fingers, clicked to macro, and began.
