She hoped she wouldnt run into Mark. She hoped he was prospecting up the creek somewhere.

It had been a long, still night. Neither of them had slept, but they hadnt talked, either. Rebecca had said all she was going to say, and Mark was still confident he could change her mind. It was the second of September. Wyanet Chouinard and the Nushagak Air Taxi would come on the sixth of September. Four days, if she counted today. Shed made it through three months. She could make it through four days.

The brush opened up at the creek, where a small slope of reddish dirt fanned into a narrow gravel bank. The rocks were round and flat, and many of them gleamed white and sparkled in the early morning light. Quartz. Quartz and gold were found together, Mark said. She thought of the half dozen tiny vials filled with dust and the one nugget the size and shape of a kidney bean back in the cabin, the fruit of a summers labor, and shook her head.

She filled the jerry can. The fireweed was still there, still blooming. She used the paring knife to cut the stalk just below the last set of blooms, feeling slightly guilty as she did so. It had been perfect just as it was.

She sat down on the bank with her elbows on her knees and looked at the fireweed. She knew a little about herbs thanks to Amy Kvasnikof, who worked at Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage and who had come to Pedersen, Barcott, Tsonger, Jefferson and Moonin for help in a divorce case. Rebecca had worked on the case with Pete Pedersen, and she and Amy had become good friends.

Amy was from Nanwalek, what they used to call English Bay, and she had learned about Alaskan herbs at her grandmothers knee. Fireweed leaves could be used to brew tea for indigestion, and dried fireweed root could be ground and mixed into a paste with bear grease and used as an ointment on sores or bug bites. It had its culinary purposes as well; young fireweed made for fine salad greens, and the tea didnt have to be medicinal.

Amy had given Rebecca a book, Eleanor Vierecks Alaskas Wilderness Medicines, and Rebecca had brought it with her, thinking she might spend part of the summer looking for the herbs listed there. The book described the herbs in alphabetical order, each with a black-and-white drawing of the plant, and at the back of the book there was a glossary and a couple of lists, one A Therapeutic Use of Alaskan Plants. Under A it had Aphrodisiacangelica. Under B it had Baby bathrose leaf tea.

Baby. Babies. Rebecca stared hard across the stream, at the trunk of a cottonwood lying on its side. She wanted babies, at least one, preferably two. Shed always wanted them. Shed talked to Mark about it before they got married, and he had said sure, just not right away. “Lets give ourselves time to play first, he had said, and grinned, leaving no doubt as to what kind of play he meant.