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"Marisol."

"There's a thing my father used to say about people who won't take." She comes into the light. Her right hand is out of her jacket now, unwrapped, and it is worse in the open than it was under the sock: two fingers gone tight and shiny, a red line starting up the inside of her wrist toward the elbow like a road on a map. "He said it's the cheapest way in the world to stay above somebody. Refuse the fish, keep the high ground."

"That's a hell of a thing to say to a starving woman."

"It's a hell of a thing to be right about." She holds out the stick.

Ghorlan takes it. He does it without ceremony, the way he takes a tool that is handed to him, and says, "Thank you," and that is all, and something in her shoulders comes down about an inch.

"I go down tonight," she says. "Medic's coming up at eight. Deet called it in himself." She works her jaw. "He'll finish solo. They let you finish solo, you just can't place."

"You could have hidden it four more days," I say.

"Sure."

"Why didn't you."

Marisol Arbogast looks at Ghorlan for a second and then back at me, and the firelight does what firelight does to a face that has spent fifty years outside.

"Because a man came into my camp this morning and said a true thing out loud in front of a camera and took nothing for it," she says. "Made everything else in the clearing look pretty stupid."

Then she goes, and the dark takes her in about four steps, and I sit holding a green stick with four fish on it that I did not earn, in a camp that has no food in it, and whatever moves in me is nothing at all like gratitude and lives right next door to it.

We eat two of the fish and hang the other two.

Then it gets dark, and the fixed rig on the alder puts out its small red eye, and Ghorlan sets the last piece of the day, which tonight is a single length of split cedar shimmed under the shelter's north bearing point, because the frost heaved the ground an inch and he will not sleep under a load path that has moved.

He taps the shim home with the flat of the hatchet. Two strikes. It seats.

"Trestle-word," he says.

Thirteen nights. Thirteen times I have sat on this log across from him and offered up something small enough to spend. The tarp corner. The knot. The morning I let the fire go out and blamed the wood. Little counterfeit coins, one a night, and every night he takes them and does not test the metal, and every night the not-testing goes into me a half inch further than the night before.

"Mine first," he says. "I told Deet Arbogast to get his sister's hand looked at. That was correct and it was also convenient, because it meant I could give a hard thing a soft ending, and I wanted the ending soft, and I wanted it soft because Junie was standing beside me. I dressed a kindness in a warning so it would cost me less to say. That is my error."

The red light does not blink. The red light never blinks.

"Yours," he says.

Here is the exact shape of the thing in my throat. I have folded a hand that was good because a man breathed wrong. I have sat at a final table for eleven hours with two hundred thousand dollars in front of me and a stomach full of hotel coffee and never let my face do anything. And I sit here on a wet log in the dark, nine ounces of fish in me, and the muscles at the front of my neck lock up like a cheap gate.

Nine days left. Three of them with no food. He gave away the only card we had this morning because a joint you will not admit to is a joint nobody checks.

Fine.

"I never field-dressed an elk," I say.

The rain has stopped. That is the thing I will keep about this night. The rain stopped an hour before and nobody had bothered to mention it, and the drainage below us is doing that low hollow breathing noise, and there is no other sound at all.

"The application requires verified field experience. I wrote down that I dressed an elk in the Bitterroots with my uncle when I was nineteen. I have an uncle. He sells countertops." My hands are shaking. I put them under my arms. "Casting never checked. Casting wanted me, and I could tell casting wanted me in the first ninety seconds, and once you can tell that, everything after it is only a question of how much to take."

"The diaphragm," he says.

"A forum. Two in the morning, three weeks before we flew out. A man with a username about ballistics wrote four paragraphs about cutting the diaphragm free along the ribs and the way the smell changes, and I took the smell detail because it was the only one nobody could have gotten from a video." My teeth are going. I lock them. "I told it on camera in a hotel conference room on Day minus two and I told it beautifully. That's in the sizzle reel. That is the reason four million people ever became aware I exist."

He does not move.

"There's more."