I PREFER CAMPING WHEN the full moon brightens the midnight world into something warmer, more welcoming. The starlight seems brighter at full moon, even though I know that's not how light works. New-moon light is thin, muted, the distant shrill coyote yipping amplified, every crack of sagebrush an invisible threat. Even the temperature, which can be recorded objectively, felt colder than it should. I wasn't a quarter mile from the campsite Pop and I used every year, but I was on the adjacent BLM land. It's the same runoff stream I was camping next to, the same species of willow along its bank, but the patterns of the limbs, the music they made in the breeze—it was all off, somehow discordant. This landscape should feel familiar, safe, but at new moon it didn't quite.

I only knew I slept because I woke up disoriented and confused around 4 a.m. The inside of my tent was crusted with a layer of frost that sparkled a bit when my headlamp caught it at the right angle. It took a minute before I remembered that I was not a girl-child camping with her pop on land they owned free and clear to count the mating Gunnison sage grouse, but a grown-up lady scientist sneaking alone onto land she sold to pay her pop's medical bills.

If Pop dies, I won't go back to the Farallones. I will be the only one who cares about this lek, and these Gunnison sage grouse will be the only ones who really know me. I study endangered species that love their land so much they'll die without it, and I feel all the same emotions of twelve-year-old me, but lonelier somehow. I'm watching something beautiful pass away, the weight of the inevitable end heavy on my shoulders, and I know my best efforts to save them will never be enough, but I know now that I will stay and try, always and forever.

I was wiggling into my coveralls, which are warm but difficult to maneuver, when I heard the truck on the fire road. I turned off my lamp and grabbed Pop's old field binoculars. It was still dark. I couldn't see much, but I recognized Henson's old Ford. That truck has seen better days. It whines like it needs power steering fluid, and there's a quiet, rhythmic tick in the motor. It has a stocked shotgun rack inside the cab. That truck has all the wrong kind of noise, noise that could disrupt the lek, keep the birds from doing their mating dance.