Sawyer looked at her watch. “Nine minutes.” She picked up the secondary pack from the porch step without being invited. “Lead the way.”
Nellie opened her mouth, closed it, and turned toward the tree line.
She’d planned to ask, directly, before they left. About Sawyer’s guilt the day before, about what it meant, about whether she was still feeling it—or anything else for that matter. She had rehearsed it three times on the porch. What came outinstead, as they hit the first understory, was: “Watch the root at ten o’clock.”
Sawyer stepped over it cleanly. “I see it.”
Nellie marked this in the category of small, private victories and kept walking.
The route cut northeast through mixed timber she hadn’t fully sampled yet—Douglas fir transitioning through a stand of western red cedar that smelled, in the damp autumn air, like the inside of her grandmother’s blanket chest. Nellie moved at her usual pace, the ground reading like a familiar language under her feet, and beside her Sawyer walked with a controlled, ground-eating stride that didn’t usually come from a penchant for treadmills.
Nellie noticed the quietness first. Not the forest’s quiet, which was consistent and various and full of information, but Sawyer’s quiet. Sheepish almost. The counterpoint of dry observations and precisely-timed questions she’d come to expect had gone, replaced by an attentiveness without particular focus. She was walking and thinking, and she wasn’t disguising either.
Nellie, who had spent eight years learning how landscapes concealed things, noticed this the way she noticed buried drainage. Gradually. Then all at once.
She wanted to ask. But asking required knowing what she was asking about, and knowing what she was asking about required being willing to hear the answer, and Nellie wasn’t ready to go on record about wanting to hear it.
Instead, she waited.
“Where’d you grow up?” Sawyer suddenly asked, apparently electing to fill the silence with something other than what was eating her from the inside.
Nellie stepped over a submerged root, tested the far side with her boot toe, and said: “New Mexico. Small place. We didn’thave a yard, so my mom commandeered a plot in the community garden two blocks over.” She glanced back long enough to confirm Sawyer had navigated the root, then kept moving. “She grew food mostly. Tomatoes, squash, beans. Sometimes she’d sell seedlings at the spring plant sale to cover the garden plot fee. Sometimes she’d take the extra crops to the food pantry on the same street.”
“I suppose you’d call her a nurturer?”
The question landed neatly, exactly where the thought had been going. Nellie hadn’t expected Sawyer to aim at it that accurately. “She used to say the difference between a plant sale and a food bank was just geography. Whoever turned up to either place was somebody trying to make something grow.” She stepped through a gap in the ferns and heard Sawyer follow. “She was better with strangers than my dad. She had this theory that plants taught you to pay attention to what something actually needed, not what you expected it to be.”
“She sounds like someone worth knowing.”
“She is,” Nellie smiled. “Lives with her sister in Albuquerque now. We FaceTime on Thursdays. She thinks I’m in some kind of extended camping situation and hasn’t quite processed that the van is on purpose.” She ducked a low alder branch and held it back without making it obvious she was doing it. “I let her maintain that interpretation because the alternative involves a whole conversation about my life choices.”
“And your life choices have been?—?”
“Excellent. Defensible. Not currently eligible for her unsolicited input.”
She glanced back at Sawyer and expected the flat look she’d gotten in earlier weeks when she’d been flippant about something that turned out to matter. What she got instead was something considerably less manageable: Sawyer listening, really listening, with the easy, somewhat placating smile,she sometimes had when nothing in the vicinity was more interesting than what was being said.
Nellie turned back to the slope and kept walking, abruptly aware that the back of her neck was warm.
She talked more than she’d planned to. It happened when she was moving through terrain that occupied the part of her brain usually devoted to social self-monitoring—her feet and eyes busy with the ground, her scientific mind parsing habitat, and the rest of her simply talking. She told Sawyer about the six months she’d spent sleeping on a colleague’s fold-out in Portland during the Oregon campaign, working two part-time jobs to cover the sampling equipment the university wouldn’t provide. She described the morning she’d found the protected wetland marker, crouched in three inches of cold water at seven a.m. with a hand lens she’d bought at a garage sale and laughing so hard at the find that her field assistant had briefly panicked.
Sawyer asked four questions across the full climb. Each one landed precisely at the point where Nellie’s momentum was running out, and each required actually listening to everything that had come before it. Not the social kind of listening, where you gather enough material to deploy the next comment. The real kind, which was rarer than people pretended, and which Nellie had not expected to find here, between a root cluster and a rocky switchback, in the company of a CEO who ran on treadmills facing blank walls.
The sheepishness didn’t leave. It sat at the edge of everything Sawyer said. Nellie wanted to poke at it the way she poked at interesting soil composition. She didn’t. She talked about the Oregon campaign instead, and then the Cascades solo count, and let the impulse settle back down.
It did not settle all the way down.
The ridge opened ahead of them through the last stand of hemlock—the rocky outcrop she’d been targeting all week, flat-topped and broad, with a clear sightline northwest across the canopy. They came out of the trees side by side, both breathing heavily, stopped at the rock’s edge and looked out at the valley below.
The upper drainage unfurled in a long green V, the forest canopy continuous from here to the northern boundary and beyond. Nellie had grown up in the high desert. She’d been seeking forests for almost twenty years. She still sometimes forgot to breathe for a second.
Beside her, Sawyer was looking at it too. Not the way she’d looked at things in the early weeks—the assessing, categorizing look, the one running a calculation behind it. She seemed to be in awe.
“You said you’d been in territory you couldn’t navigate without other people’s expertise exactly twice in your career,” Nellie said.
Sawyer turned her head a fraction, eyebrows raised. “Did I say that?”
“On the climb. When I was telling you about Oregon.” Nellie kept her eyes on the valley. “You said twice. I’ve been wondering what could possibly have landed you so out of your depth.”
