"Can I see it?" I ask. "The shot."
He looks at me. Considering. "I don't usually show work in progress."
"Fair enough."
A pause. "I'll show you this one."
He pulls the camera from the bag and turns the screen toward me, and I stop walking to look at it properly. Two great grey owls on a dead snag, both facing the same direction into the morning light. The image is so still it feels like held breath. The detail inthe feathers is extraordinary — the kind of thing that takes either extraordinary equipment or extraordinary patience. Probably both.
He's standing close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him in the cool morning air. I'm very aware of that and I look at the camera screen and not at him.
"Shaw," I gasp.
"Yeah."
"This is remarkable."
He takes the camera back. Looks at the screen himself for a moment before he puts it away, and I catch something in his face — not pride exactly, more like quiet recognition. He just receives it. Doesn't shrug it off or perform modesty.
I like that more than I should.
We keep walking.
Somewhere around the two-hour mark I realize I've told him things I haven't said out loud since I got here.
Not deep things. Just the texture of the last six years. The way a consulting career hollows you out so slowly you don't notice until you're standing in a glass-walled boardroom watching yourself give a presentation and wondering who that person is. The way the marriage ending wasn't a catastrophe but an exhalation. Two people releasing each other, both okay, and that somehow being almost harder to explain than if it had been a disaster.
He listens. Doesn't offer analysis or silver linings. Just follows.
At one point I say: "I think I stayed in both of them, the job and the marriage, because I was good at them and I confused being good at something with wanting it."
He's quiet for a few steps. Then: "That's a long way to go before you notice."
"Six years," I say.
"Yeah."
No judgment. Noyou should have known sooner. Just acknowledgment that it happened and it was a long time and here I am now.
The trail leads us to a viewpoint I haven't been to before: a rocky outcrop above a bend in the valley where the whole of Silver Ridge is visible below, small and tidy in its ring of mountains. We sit on the rocks and I don't say it's beautiful because it obviously is and some things don't need confirming.
He doesn't say it either.
We eat the granola bars I'd shoved in my pocket and drink from his thermos — he offers it without fuss and I take it without fuss. We're not doing anything. We're just two people eating granola bars on a rock above a valley.
He asks about where I grew up. I tell him about Prince George, my grandmother, the land. He listens.
"She'd like it here," I say, meaning my grandmother. "She approves of places that make you slow down."
He looks at the valley. "It's good country."
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
We start back down mid-afternoon. By the time the trail meets the lower junction I've been walking with this man for four hours and it has felt like one.
Main Street is quiet in the mid-afternoon lull. We come off the trail at the edge of town and slow without discussing it, the way you do when you're not ready for something to end and you're hoping the other person isn't either.
We stop at the corner where the street meets the trailhead. There's no reason to stop here. We stop anyway.
