From David’s belt hung one of those elaborate multipurpose pocketknives with assorted tools tucked in with the blades. Another device hung from his belt on the other side.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“A position locator. I like to know exactly where I am.”

Yeah. Me too.

After a half-hour of small talk, in which I played some verbal poker with David, doing my share of bluffing, the rain broke. The next moment the sun came out, just in time to begin to sink, its enormous size tripling the duration of a normal sunset. I saw ahead of us, disappearing into the sunset, the strange long shadow, but I was still unable to identify what caused it. I lost myself in the twilight, a stunning bird’s-egg blue with tints of green and red. That red sun was an unyielding reminder that I was an alien, a stranger, a pilgrim in this world. So too were the awesome double and triple rainbows I now watched slack-jawed. They had not only reds and yellows and greens but blues and at least three colors I had no names for—and all this on the verge of nightfall!

As the sun set and the frogs and crickets struck up their chorus, David pulled out of his pack an amazingly compact tent of paper-thin but, he assured me, extremely durable fabric. Victoria took out a similar smaller tent from her pack for her and the twins. We set up camp alongside some firs.

Quon built a fire, apparently a delegated area of expertise for him. And while the fire worked on producing some good coals, Quon skinned a small animal on a flat rock, slicing it up, then putting it in a small metal pan he’d pulled from his pack, alongside some red onions. I didn’t ask what animal had sacrificed his life for our meal, nor did anyone volunteer. Dinner wasn’t a chimichanga with sour cream, guacamole, and salsa, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked. On the cuisine scale, it fell somewhere above airplane food.

Quon had loaned me a tin coffee cup, a bowl, and an ancient aluminum spoon, worn and beaten. I wondered how many other travelers had used that pathetic old spoon. When we cleaned up at a nearby stream afterward, I washed the bowl and spoon and brought them back to Quon.

“Keep them,” he said. “You’ll need them.”

We gathered back around the fire and warmed our hands as the evening grew cool and the air slightly damp.

Mason, true to his word, brought me a pair of loose-fitting khaki pants and a thin, light gray sweatshirt much like his own. After changing behind one of the tents, I gladly threw my rags into Quon’s fire.