Three fish, a collection of different berries, and a squishy cactus-like plant that is delicious if you don’t mind getting poked a couple times in the face.

We eat quickly in the morning, then cover as much ground on the never-ending sandbar as we can. Lassie recounts his twenty-three hours with Opik. How Opik climbed a tree and came down with these delicious nuts. How he massaged Lassie’s foot and chanted, and how Lassie could almost put weight on it without flinching. How Opik used a stick to catch the fish. Not like I had. He would wade into the water and he would lightly tap the river, creating tiny little rivets, the kind a bug might make, which apparently attract the fish, and then he would cane the fish with the stick, paralyze it, and snatch it with his hands.

By my best estimate, we’d covered six miles each of the past three days, plus the eight to ten we made before we met Opik. As it stood, we were getting enough food to get by and I was confident if we continued at the same pace, we would arrive back at Fairbanks within ten days.

My confidence was boosted even higher ten minutes earlier, when Lassie had pointed out something floating between three logs on the opposite side of the river. It was bright yellow. A flag. One of the flags from the bridge.

We were on the right track.

We continue running up the sandbar for another mile, then watch it gradually disappear into the river.

Opik takes my hand. I think he senses my anxiety of walking through the tall grass, where anything could be hiding. Like, say, for instance, a moose. It was one thing to be on the sandbar where you had a clear vantage of everything around you and anything rushing toward you — not to mention the river was there as a last resort — but in the trees and thick brush, I feel like an antelope on the African savannah.

We move through the brush, weaving in and out of the trees, over thick roots, under rogue branches, between bushes, over rocks.

It’s 3:43 a.m. when we see it.

The breath is pulled out of me.

It is overgrown to the point it appears to be part of the forest. It is covered in grass, and trees are growing on top of it. But there is no mistaking it.

A log cabin.

::::

The cabin is in ruins.