I left the house around 6pm, still without any sign of Pete and Elliott, but I knew they couldn’t have been far from Challis at that point. Normally, I wouldn’t have felt the need to let anybody know where I’d be in the event that we might miss each other. And I suppose it wasn’t necessary in this case. Pete and Elliott were both acute observers and knew as well as anybody what to look for to guess at my whereabouts within a reasonable confidence interval. When I was at the Challis house, my running shoes and hydration pack lived…

“What if you had come all the way up here and I was like, ‘Oh man, I forgot the ashes?’” I said it as Elliott offloaded his pack and began to crouch down next to me. “I mean, I would be pretty fucking irritated, but since I’m sticking around Challis, it would just be something stupid that you’d never live down.” We’d each done Borah many times in our lives, together and independently. Proximity had made it easy from a logistics standpoint. The drive was about 30 minutes since our house was closer to the trailhead than Challis proper. Finding…

I hadn’t managed to figure out if Elliott was up on Dad’s Sasquatch dealings before we left the Borah trailhead for the house. When I asked Pete who else knew, he hadn’t mentioned Elliott. But since Elliott and Dad’s last conversation seemed to have covered everything under the sun, it didn’t seem entirely improbable that the detail had come out then. Nonetheless, Pete had packed away the Sasquatch files before Elliott and I got back. Pete was in the house once I’d come in from checking the garage for Dad’s material and I didn’t know if I should initiate conversation…

I ultimately took Pete’s tip on the therapist/astrologer once I was out on the Peninsula. She went by Tully, and though I had initially contacted her through a personal email, I did look her up through official channels where she was listed as Maeve Tully. From that, I found out she was indeed licensed to practice psychiatric medicine in the state of Washington.

I got back to the government area and had just made it into my room when I heard two sets of feet beelining for my door, their turnover so fast it sounded like a single organism scuttling across the floor with an uneven gait. Bridger and Ian, two of my fellow seasonals, were outside my door before I could finish commenting that they were like dogs. “We were taking bets about where you were,” Ian said. “You must understand this has been a long and suspenseful process for us,” Bridger said. “I’m confused. Do you expect me to report my…

Bridger and I were the novices, so our respective first four-day assessment trips out to the second-growth area were accompanied by Ian, who was tasked with showing each of us the ropes. Those ropes, from what I gathered about an hour into the drive to our trailhead on my first hitch, consisted mostly of the sacred art of shooting the proverbial shit. That notion felt unspoken until there was enough daylight that I could see a sun-stained note taped to the glove compartment in the cab of the government rig, a 1999 Tacoma. It simply read, “GO EASY DON’T FIGHT…

Ian and I had returned on a Friday from four uneventful days in the backcountry. I defined uneventful minimally: We hadn’t been impaled by any trees or limbs during a day of high winds, Glorified G still seemed to like me enough not to bite or spit on me when I approached his enclosure, the cabin hadn’t caught fire, I hadn’t murdered Ian out of frustration or vice versa, and Ian hadn’t come onto me again. Once we returned to the government area, I opted out of what promised to be a debaucherous start to the weekend: a trip north…

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…