The trees were bare, of course. No leaves had come back. No leaves were coming. But some of the trees had boughs. I looked closer. The boughs were affixed to the trees, lashed with ropes: props, like the cover the women had used to disguise the truck when we had first pulled into the camp. Below the fake boughs were wooden platforms. They were tree stands, the kind hunters would use. Lobo had chopped down stands like these from poachers perched in our woods without permission.

“Mica said some of them want to move up there permanently,” Grayson said. “Eventually move into the trees. Make sure those trees never come down.”

“When did you talk to Mica?”

“This morning. I couldn’t sleep. Dance snores.” Grayson dipped his finger in the stream and began to brush his teeth with water. We had left our toothbrushes—along with everything else—in the tiny house. “So do you.”

After we had finished washing up, I helped Grayson up the bank. On the climb, his cast snagged on a root. His jaw tightened and he tried not to wince. “It’s fine,” he said.

“You keep saying that. But it keeps not getting better.”

“The doctor said it would take a long time to heal, remember? We’re on the road. These aren’t ideal conditions for healing.”

Giggling and crackling leaves: Jamey and the women were headed down to the stream. Jamey had her hair different, braided in a mermaid tail, away from her face. It made her look even younger. Her eyes glinted with purple liner, extending across her temples, which I noticed for the first time were freckled. She carried a shower caddy, like she was going to wash up in a college dorm, with a loofah and shampoo bottles. One of the women held Starla. Someone had painted the baby’s face with pink and blue stars.

“Good conditions for her, though,” Grayson said.

I thought I was prepared for anything. I had been raised to expect bad men, men sick with drugs, the unpredictability of the harvest, the sheriff. But nothing could prepare me for gas stations closing, the pharmacy running out of meds, the cold that kept coming, the snow that would not end. The swiftness of this change. College kids, living in the trees to try to save them.

Grayson found coffee for me in a stoneware mug, and on top of a hill, I found Dance. He was chopping wood, his coat stripped off and tied around his waist.

“Is that for us?” I asked, nodding at the pile of wood he had already split.

“No.”

“You defecting?”

“Just trying to say thank-you to these people.” He swung the ax down onto a log, which wobbled but held. “For the beds they offered us last night, and food, and safety.” He swung again and splintered it. That aching crack as the wood creaked open, revealing an orange heart that was almost red.