“We wear white,” the man said. “It’s kind of a rule we made.”

The coats and blankets the women wore around their shoulders, the people milling about the campsite by the stream—everyone was in white. They blended with the landscape, though their whites were dirtier than the snow. Maybe it was camouflage. Maybe they wore white to sneak up on people, to steal from them without being seen.

I had been to Skate State. I had seen the Occupied Forest. I had grown up with The Church—and with growers and sellers, who were their own kind of community, a den of watchfulness, resourcefulness, and trickery: a den of thieves. I had even assembled my own group of sorts on the road: the waiter, the scavenger, the grower, the mama and child. Maybe this was how we made it, sticking together in the families we made.

But something was off about this group in the valley. There was none of the busyness of camp. Nobody was cracking ice in the stream or melting buckets of snow for water. I didn’t smell wood smoke or food. I didn’t see tents. Nobody was even rummaging through the pile of our stolen things, looking for salvage they could use, their favorite canned foods, coats that fit.

“You have our stuff,” I said to the man in the sheepskin.

He seemed dismissive. “We picked up some junk.”

“It’s not junk. We’re using it. We need it, and it’s ours.”

The man cocked his head. He had a red beard and a tattoo on his neck, small and black, right on his artery. It jumped when he spoke. It made me feel squeamish. “Really? You weren’t there.”

“We were sleeping,” Dance said. I could hear the exasperation in his voice. “You came into our camp and took our things.”

“I didn’t see any names on anything. Did you, ladies?”

The women shook their heads. Were they high? They giggled; they had blank and bright faces.

“It was all tied down in her truck,” Dance said.

“We’re ridding ourselves of our material things.”

“Well, we’re not,” Dance said. “It obviously belonged to someone.”

“Do you own this park? Did you pay to camp here?”

“No. Look, man. We’re just trying to survive this, same as you.”

The man laughed, a little rough sound. I watched his breath disturb the air. “That, friend, is where you’re wrong. We’re not trying to survive it.”

They had no food. They had no fire. Bones had been tied to the support beams of the shelter house, what looked like a groundhog skull. And I smelled something.

Gas.

“They took the fuel cans, Dance.”

The man was staring at us, standing too close.

“What do you want us to do?” I asked him.

“Nothing.”

“You have our food, our fuel. You can keep that,” I told the man.