“We don’t need help,” said Ashley. “We need the crew to get their act together.”

“Really?” said Mara. “Maybe you should tell us more about the crew, Ashley.”

“Do you know something about the crew?” Bullfrog’s voice was deep and sudden. “If you know something, say it. Fuck. Every one of us. This is no time for fucking secrets.”

Mara waited. But Ashley just shook her head, eyes shining in the darkness.

THE MORNING BROKE WITH AN INTENSITY MARA HAD RARELY SEEN, A THICK AND pressing heat. Bullfrog and Ashley lit the signal pyres in the clearing. They threw in boughs of fresh white pine, which sparked and sent up sheets of flame. The moisture darkened the smoke into black columns.

In the shelter, Mara cut the dressing off of Kyle’s wound and saw movement.

It took time to realize what she was seeing. Inching maggots, clustered tight, and the skin around them red. The way Kyle was positioned, he couldn’t see it. Mara tried not to make an expression, but he knew.

“It’s bad,” he said.

“Not that bad.”

“Stop it,” he said. “Tell me.”

“It’s just healing.”

“Mara.”

“I’m serious!”

“Don’t do that. Just tell me.”

“It’s looking inflamed,” she said. “And there are maggots.”

“Maggots? Really?”

“I’ll take them out.”

“Don’t. I think they help, actually. They eat the dead tissue. It’s not like we have something else to try.”

Mara gave him an aspirin and a cookie, and he swallowed both. “Try to rest,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

She went to the bog and tried to remember everything she had learned about plant medicine. She recalled bits of knowledge. As a kid, when she skinned her knee or tweaked an ankle, her parents would sit beside her and pull two books from the shelf. One, a medical guide, with which to identify her grievance. She’d flip tissue-thin pages past photos of genital warts and severed limbs to settle on abrasion or laceration or sprain. The second book was a guide to medicinal plants. It was yellowed and brittle. Mara’s mom said old plant guides were better, because they were written back when people actually used the knowledge.

When she cut herself with her pocketknife, for instance—a laceration—Mara had to find yarrow. Millefolium, million leaves, named for the leaflets that clustered almost as densely as the white buds above them. Its traditional name offered a clue: Soldier’s Woundwort. A blood stopper. She knew where it grew, in the ditch between the mailbox and the road, right at the edge of the property. She’d chew the leaves into a paste, the sharp herbal taste of them, and apply the paste to the cut until it stopped bleeding. It felt like she had really done something, some ancient practice, although probably the bleeding would have stopped by then on its own.

Her mom always said that plants helped the body heal. That there was chemistry in plants that humans would never understand, and couldn’t approximate in a lab. Ancient chemistry, if you knew how to use it. Unlike modern medicine, she said, which isolated one substance and pumped you with it until you got better or died, or just as likely stayed sick forever. Mara’s mom believed that modern people were sick in ways they didn’t realize, every one of them walking off-balance, a balance that could only be fixed with nature, with the remedy of plants and time.