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"Somebody cut our filter."

Stitch lowers the reflector.

That is my first read and it is free. Coby's face does the thing a face does when it has been handed content: eyebrows up, chin down, mouth already half open on the follow-up question. Stitch's face does the other thing. Stitch goes flat and slightly gray and looks at the reflector in his hands like it has become embarrassing.

If either of them had done it, Coby would have filmed it, uploaded it in his head, and named the segment. He would already be selling me the reaction. Instead he is asking me a question with real air behind it.

"Cut?" he says. "Like cut cut?"

"Like a knife."

"That's a health thing." Stitch has a low, worried, entirely sincere delivery that makes him the only one of the two I would trust to hold a ladder. "That's like, giardia. That's a medical pull."

"It is."

"We've got a spare." Coby says it too fast, and then his eyes flick to the camera, and then a small war happens on his face, and he says it again slower, for the record. "We've got a spare, and I want that on tape, because we're going to give it to them and I want the audience clear on who we are."

"You don't have a spare," Stitch says.

"We have the backup pump."

"The backup pump is in the case that got wet."

"The backup pump," Coby says, in the tone of a man laying his last card on a table he has already lost, "is in the case that got wet."

There it is. Nothing here. I stay two more minutes for the shape of it, because leaving fast tells people they were a stop on a route, and on the way out I ask the question sideways.

"Anybody come through here on the eleventh?"

"After the Flat? Everybody's on the ridge trail." Coby waves a hand at the muddy scar running north. "Arbogasts went through. Deet, anyway. Marisol I didn't get."

"What time?"

"Golden hour," Coby says, with total confidence, because that is a unit of time he actually uses.

The Arbogast site sits under the biggest hemlock on the north face, and it is the only camp on this mountain that a person could hand back to the forest without apologizing.

Marisol has a drying rack over the coals with three small fish on it. Three. On Day 12. I would commit crimes.

"Halloran," she says.

"Arbogast."

Deet is at the far end of the log with a knife and a length of yew, taking curls off it, building the third of the four gate stakes their fish trap uses. The curls fall left. His thumb rides the spine and the blade runs away from him toward his off side, and the pile of shavings sits by his left boot, and I logged all of this on Day 5 without meaning to, the way I used to log a man tapping twice on the table before he folded.

"Word came about your filter," Marisol says.

"Word travels."

"Coby travels." She turns a fish. "We boil anyway. Always have."

"Deet mentioned." I sit down on the wet log without being asked, which is a small rudeness that buys me eleven minutes. "You told Stitch that, day before yesterday. Six seasons carrying a pump and you gave up on it."

Deet's blade keeps moving. "Filters clog."

"Right." I let it sit. "So which was it."

"Which was what."