There wasn’t much up there, not at first. You could see the freshwater spring seeping from beneath the roots of an elderberry, someone’s effort to catch it in a cast-iron kettle and a plastic bucket. Besides that, there was Helen’s tiny camper up in the woods, and the duck shed in a clearing below it. The firepit, where we’d slaughtered drakes the previous fall, had now become some kind of processing area for small game, the traffic cones we’d left there stacked neatly near a flat stone and a five-gallon bucket. The ducks met our truck, falling all over one another, beating their wings and cackling. “Laughing at us already,” Karen said. I unpacked Perley from his car seat and he swung his arms at the ducks, who quieted to pick for bugs in the gravel. Karen stuck out her hand to shake Helen’s, but Helen’s hands were full. She’d already unloaded both of our garbage bags and was lifting out Karen’s toolbox, the first volume of ElfQuest balanced on top.

“Didn’t take you for being into escapist literature,” Helen said to Karen.

“You should read them,” Karen said. “You’re so into living by your wits, survival skills, you might be inspired.”

That first night, Helen cooked for us at the firepit, dandelion greens and duck eggs mixed together in one pan. “To family!” she toasted, bypassing any mention of friendship, of basic compatibility. What followed were heady times, wine and gin. For a week straight, we stayed up late around the campfire each night, singing Perley to sleep with his raucous lullaby, the one about the shipwreck where everyone drowns. Karen sanded and polished her set of dice, and we gambled cheaply. We rolled and called out. Snake Eyes, we called. Dog Paws, the Necklace, Cut Moon. We set up target practice with the .22. Helen’s welcome was as single-minded as everything else about her. At dice, she bought us all in. Each night, she cooked dinner at the outdoor burner. She insisted we move into her camouflaged camper, with its graffiti from some forgotten feud. Meanwhile, she climbed past the camper up to the ridge, where she set up a wall tent to live in.