It struck me even in my earliest memories of visits to Ayla and Pete on the Peninsula that, compared to my home area, there were substantially less large predators near the coasts. There was never any shortage of fucking deer though. It made total sense—almost no predators, tons of verdant growth. There could never be any risk of overgrazing. Or, so it still seemed. I knew all bets were off these days. If I’d felt ambivalent before, the relative post-melt bareness on Borah at the beginning of June had reinforced my cynicism about what was left of the planet’s intact…

Aside from Glorified G’s disappearance, the remaining days of my first solo assessment had been uninteresting. I got back in early enough on the last Friday of June and considered using that weekend to explore a different part of the Peninsula. But I knew that on Monday I would be going straight back to the second-growth treatment area for the second of three consecutive weeks. It would’ve ordinarily been Bridger’s week since he and I were set to alternate field weeks until his season ended in August, at which point Ian would be taking over Bridger’s trips until the proper…

“Let’s hear it for the woods!” Ian yelled after another round of handclaps, this time from Bridger and not me. “What?” Bridger asked, sliding awkwardly over a wet rock compacted into the trail. “He thinks you’re giving it up for the woods. Like an ovation,” I said. “Yeah, man. That’s your guys’ shtick, right? I know you Sagittarians love communing with the earth and shit,” Ian said. Ian was deliberately trying to get a rise out of me. He and Bridger had asked what my conversations with Tully entailed. I had said they were difficult to boil down, which clearly…

“Callahan, you’re quiet today,” Ian said from somewhere behind me. He wasn’t wrong. I’d gotten back to sleep eventually during the night, but woke at such frequent intervals that it hadn’t felt like I slept. I’d been looking down through our entire walk back to the trailhead. We were probably half-way along. I explained that I’d slept like shit and felt nasty. “Yo, you slept like shit, too?” Bridger asked, audibly bounding to where I was. “Yeah, did you?” I stopped to face my coworkers behind me. Bridger had gotten a little carried away and was face to face with…

If not for the nerve-numbing effects of a long run immediately after I’d returned with Ian and Bridger to the government area, I wouldn’t have lasted an hour alongside my buzzed neighbors without having some kind of a breakdown. Our coworker Ben’s partner Cassie had just outlined the painful process that led her to conclude that I was “actually the fucking GOAT,” right after Bridger had finished giving me shit about only eating grilled vegetables and macaroni and cheese, right after tipsy-but-not-yet-bombed Russ had lectured me on the importance of letting people love me. I knew Ian saw me roll…

I saw that Glorified G’s enclosure was still empty once I could see the cabin. It had been as foggy as any morning in the dense interiors of the Olympics until the sun started breaking through the hazy water vapor. Because so much of my outside time that summer was in the trees, I so rarely needed sunglasses that I had stopped keeping them on me. I regretted it a little that morning, which had all the signs of a bright day to follow.

To say that everything on the Peninsula west of the Olympic Range was wilder than the Neighborhood of Hood Canal felt like a gross understatement. It felt disingenuous, too, to describe something as wild just because it more closely resembled what it looked like before white settlement, which had always been far more disruptive than anything that occurred naturally. All the counterpoints—volcanic eruptions, fires, floods, earthquakes—worked within processes with a prehistoric precedent. Though I didn’t bring it up explicitly on my second visit to Moclips that summer, which I’d decided to make the first Saturday after Glorified G’s return, I…

“MacKenzie, I need your help in this game.” The voice came from the table, where I could hear people had gathered to play cards. And though the permanent law enforcement guy, Adam, was not there as far as I knew, his golden retrievers named Friday and Elaine were. I had been upstairs since getting back from Pete’s late that afternoon. I didn’t know how many life forms had made it into the house since then, but the dogs materialized quietly when I made it to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. Their tails swished with measured anticipation as I…

It was out of character for Ian to forget the key to the cabin. Largely because it was on the same keyring he had, like, nine other keys on, all of which he used almost daily. I guess he’d forgotten it in his rush to start his hitch a day early—hiking in on a Sunday so he could be back late Thursday and make a dentist appointment early Friday morning. He had no trouble, however, remembering the key for Old Taco’s replacement, a 2010 Escape that I avoided like the plague. Legend had it that it got spectacular mileage—some ridiculous…

Beginning the first full week of August, our assessment schedule dropped from weekly to a bi-weekly. From that point in the season forward, all our assessments were conducted in pairs until the trailhead we used to access the second-growth area opened to wider public permit use in early October. After Ian took a turn in mid-July, Bridger had taken the week after to give me one more week off from backcountry duty after my three-week bender of assessments. So my last solo assessment of the summer fell on a week that began in July and ran into the first days…