They all did their share of hauling wood, stomping branches to break them and dragging them back to camp. At first they each built their own firewood piles, a competition, and Kyle’s pile grew to remarkable height before Mara realized he was gathering wood from around the clearing and not the deeper forest.

“You should get wood from farther away first,” she told him. “We’ll be here a long time. Save the closer stuff for when we lose strength.”

“I don’t plan on losing strength,” said Kyle.

But Mara wondered if he already had, because rather than gathering distant firewood, he promptly sat down by the lake instead. There he turned his attention to the sedentary task of building traps, whittling en masse the tedious and delicate trigger mechanisms of figure-four deadfalls. The traps were sized to crush small rodents, and each one required three perfectly balanced sticks that supported each other through interlocking notches but crumbled at the lightest touch.

The cameras loved this process, and circled while Kyle worked. “I’m going to get protein for my team,” Mara heard him say. Lenny asked about the importance of protein for survival, and Kyle launched into a speech that Mara did her best to ignore. He had her knife and she thought about asking for it back, just to be petty, but reminded herself it was not really hers but theirs, and besides she had other things to do.

She was still intent on foraging, a task well-suited to searching far for dry hardwood. Despite the fact that Mara had not picked their campsite herself, she found no location that struck her as better. The lake stretched a half mile across, its shore alternately high-banked and sandy, with the creek to the west and, based on a dip in the trees, what seemed to be another outlet on the other side. The meadow was high enough to stay dry, flanked with south-facing slopes that rose into steeper hills Mara did not explore. Twice she saw the bears, though always from a distance; she did not see the deer again.

In parts of the forest, the ground grew soggy, and she found a bog not far north, a maze of mud and tussocks in tangles of fallen trees. An upturned stump hung with moss as if it had been draped in tinsel. Mara gathered the moss to cushion their beds in camp; an armful weighed almost nothing. But it was full of tiny beetles, and when she noticed them crawling onto her, she dropped it again. She supposed she could have smoked out the beetles and used the moss anyway, but she didn’t feel like it anymore. In the bog’s muddy edges she found tracks of the coyotes who chirped and screamed all through dusk and the nights’ first hour of darkness. She thought it seemed ripe for wild parsnips and made a mental note to check back.

In the mornings, Mara met Tom in the birch grove for protein bars, encounters whose brevity suited her more than him. When he had a few minutes he reminisced about growing up in the woods, and she listened politely, feigning interest in the peeling birch bark he had made boxes from as a kid, or the tadpoles he’d once raised in an outdoor tank. He pointed out a column of mushrooms growing up a trunk. “Artist’s conk,” he said. “If you touch the surface, it leaves a mark.” He stomped a conk from the tree and drew a heart on its belly with a twig; the heart remained there, crisp and brown, surrounded by the ghosts of his fingerprints. One evening, boldly, he slipped Mara a square of salted chocolate by the lake. The taste lingered on her tongue all night.