He goes back inside.
I stand there a moment longer with the evening air on my arms. Shaw Garrison. The ridge.
It's not just what he looks like, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of it. It's the quality of moving through the world like he'd chosen every part of his life on purpose. Like nowhere else to be wasn't a mistake. That was the point.
I used to feel like that about my work. A long time ago, early in. Before it became a machine I kept feeding.
I'd like to feel like that again. About something. I don't know what yet.
That's the actual question underneath all the rest of it.
two
Shaw
I'moutbeforedawn.
That's how it always starts; the thermos filled in the dark, the truck rumbling down the gravel track before the sky has decided on a color. The blind I set overnight is forty minutes up the trail, tucked into a stand of spruce above a meadow where I've been watching a pair of great grey owls for the better part of a week. Patient work. The kind most people can't do.
I've never had trouble being patient.
I check the blind, swap the memory card, and sit for two hours in the early grey light waiting for the female to return to the nest. She doesn't. I'm not frustrated. She'll come when she comes and not before, and there's no amount of wanting that changes that. I eat the sandwich I brought, drink half the thermos, watch a red squirrel work through the spruce boughs overhead with furious efficiency.
By mid-morning I'm on my way back down, the trail familiar under my boots in the way that only comes from years of the same route in all weathers.
I round the bend above the lower meadow and stop.
There's a woman sitting on the flat rock I use as a rest point. She's facing away from me, toward the open sky above the valley, watching something. No pack. No map visible. Just sitting, both hands loose in her lap, completely still.
My first instinct is mild irritation. Strangers on this trail are usually lost or loud or both. I wait for her to hear me and startle.
She doesn't.
I follow her line of sight. Hawk up high, working a thermal in long, slow circles. Red-tailed. Male, by the size. She's tracking it the way I'd track a shot — not watching so much as reading, anticipating the turn before it happens.
I stand there longer than I mean to. Long enough to notice that her hair is loose down her back and the morning light is doing something particular to it, the kind of particular I'd normally be reaching for my camera for. Long enough to register that she has the posture of someone who is genuinely, completely at rest.
I've photographed wildlife for fifteen years. I know the difference between an animal that knows it's being watched and one that doesn't. She knows. She just doesn't care.
When I finally move forward she says, without turning: "Morning."
"Morning," I say.
She keeps her eyes on the hawk. I keep walking and then she says, still watching the sky: "Nice shot. By the creek, maybe twenty minutes back. The light came through the canopy just right."
I stop.
She'd heard my shutter. Through dense spruce, at a hundred metres minimum, she'd heard a single frame fire and knew exactly what it meant.
I turn and look at her properly. She's turned to look at me too, and up close she's beautiful. Dark eyes, direct. A mouth that looks like it's got something wry waiting behind it. She's watching me the way I was watching her a minute ago and then she turns back to the hawk like neither of us did anything remarkable.
I walk the rest of the trail with that sitting in my chest like a splinter. The kind of thing you keep touching to see if it's still there.
I don't think about her again. Or I try not to.
I develop the creek shots in the afternoon, standing in the red dark of the back room with the smell of fixer sharp in the air. The light had been better than good. A barn swallow cutting through a shaft of sunlight between the firs, wings half-folded, the kind of image that takes days of waiting and one-fortieth of a second to catch.
I review it on the screen and it's not what I was looking for.
