“I had no idea there were animals that big in Kansas.”

“Rumor has it there’s a black bear out here. That it came up from Oklahoma, looking for a mate.”

“There’s bears in Oklahoma?”

“There’s all kinds of shit where you wouldn’t expect it.”

I’d never seen a bear in the wild. Once, right after my parents divorced when I was seven, my dad took me to the Sedgwick County zoo to see a bear. They had a grizzly with some sort of skin disease that made its hair fall out, and people from all over were flocking to see it. My dad told me the bear would be bald, and so I pictured an otherwise normal-looking bear but with a halo of blank skull like my uncle Bill’s. When we got there, I was shocked to find that the bear was bald all over. It looked like a monster, with squinty eyes and horrible, pinched cheeks. The skin around its belly hung loose, like an empty trash bag. It was hot outside, and for a moment I genuinely wondered if it was melting. The bear kept trying to hide from the visitors, but it had nowhere to go, and the kids around me kept pelting it with fistfuls of popcorn and sand. I couldn’t sleep for a week, and my dad had to remove all of my teddy bears until the terror passed.

“Have you ever seen a hairless bear?” I asked Jackson.

He slowed his gait and turned to look at me. “Actually, yeah. I have. When I was little. It was at the zoo. My dad drove Charlie and me all the way to Wichita.”

“We must have seen the same one, then.”

“Huh. I haven’t thought about that in years. Someone should have put that thing out of its misery.”

“I thought it was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. I had nightmares.”

“About a bald bear?”

“Sure,” I said, nearly catching up to him. “It was spooky.”

He laughed, glancing back to shoot me a smile. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Scared of a bald bear. That’s like being more afraid of a naked Nazi than a regular Nazi.”

Just then, a branch snapped somewhere close. Jackson stopped and then started walking slowly, his movements gaining stealth. I thought of the ex’s calico, how she took on a primal fluidity in the presence of mice and laser pointers, slowly bringing herself to the ground where, pupils dilated, she would wait patiently for the moment to attack. Jackson turned to look at me and pressed a finger to his lips. He looked like the type of man you saw in adventure movies, the type of man that women like me—women who got pedicures and appreciated the appeal of small dogs—never had a chance with. It was incredibly attractive, especially coming after the professor, who spent his time writing papers that nobody but his colleagues ever read.

We were at the edge of a clearing, a cluster of pawpaw trees separating us from a half-moon of tall grass. The air was hot and heavy. Jackson leaned close enough that I could smell his deodorant. “Over there,” he said. “Two o’clock.”