Close to me, the ground creaked under the weight of a body.

Living in the woods, you come to a taxonomy of sound. You learn how entirely alien human movement sounds from anything else. And living with another person, you learn their noises too. Their pace, breathing, the register of their voice. The body in the other room.

I mean that I did not mistake the sound of breaking branches for anything besides what it was. A gait heavier and clumsier than Agnes’s, someone unused to navigating in wilderness. It’s easy to listen for that, the slide of tennis shoes in mud, the complaints of birds signaling the potential threat.

I pushed dirt over the hole, and kept my back to him.

“Hello?”

I stayed where I was, crouching. The earth fell dark on the backs of the mushrooms.

“Hello?” His voice was deep, impatient, with a consistency like tree bark.

“Hello.”

He grinned at me. He was perhaps thirty, with a carved, angled face and sweaty hair hanging over his eyes. He looked like he was trying to look like a hiker. I had not been grinned at recently. Agnes didn’t grin. I examined the several white squares of his teeth, like Chiclets buried in his gums. He was leaning awkwardly against the fence, propping nearly all his weight on it.

“Please don’t lean on that.”

“Sorry.” He steadied his elbow on the post, and the wood creaked. Agnes and I had laid that fence ourselves. Me holding the hammer and her hands steadying the wood. “I’m hurt.” He levered his socked foot up onto another post.

He seemed to have punctured himself, deep into the ball of his foot, and a vivid gem of blood welled from the hole in his sock. I am not a doctor. I could not be expected to know a serious wound. But if he was trying to get himself to the road, he seemed to be in trouble. Briefly, I imagined the hole in shoe, sock, foot, and the things that might pass through it, bits of leaf and twig, the casings of insects, the dirt. We were over a mile, perhaps two, from the kind of road an ambulance could drive on. Agnes and I followed a bike path when we needed to go to town.

“What are you doing all the way out here?”

He gestured to his foot. “I fell on—there was a fucking nail in the path, and I stepped on it. Can you help me, please?”

“A nail?” That looked like a lot of blood for a nail, though I supposed it mattered of what size and where. There had been more buildings in this area, once, and the occasional rusty builder’s nail did make itself known on the ground.

“A big nail.” He gestured emphatically at his foot. “Please.”