Back at the campsite we put up tents, laid out sleeping bags, and ate food that didn’t need to be cooked. The sun fell and then the temperature. The students split up into little groups, laughed, drank beer and other things. It was nearly cute how they attempted to hide the booze from me. They paused at the occasional howl of a coyote.

“Professor Wells,” a male voice called to me.

“Yo!”

“Is it true there are lions out here?”

“Yes, there are cougars out here,” I said. “But you’ll never see one. You might see some coyotes and even a tortoise, but the lions knew we were here before we did.” I looked around at them. “If you do wander off, don’t go far. It’s easy to get disoriented out in the desert because every direction looks the same. We don’t need to spend any of our time searching for a lost one of you. If you’re by yourself out there, you might just see a lion. Worse, he might see you.”

Later, when things were finally quiet, after Hilary had retired to her tent, I decided to take a walk around, to be alone, to enjoy the desert, and to be sure no one had wandered off and become lost. The full moon made it easy to see, placing doughnuts of shadows around the greasewoods. The light also made it easy to imagine that one knew where one was. The sky was black, deep, infinite, the very thing that scared the Greeks and all the other ancients.

If I had heard their breathing, I would not have walked closer, but I had not heard them, and so I found myself observing, unobserved myself, two students fucking. I stopped dead, and as I turned to fade back into the darkness, I saw that the young woman was Rachel, and just as I recognized her, she saw me. She was sitting on the man but made no move to get up, offered no reaction that might have alerted her partner. I froze, watched as she watched me, watched as she pushed harder down onto the man. She would not look away from me. Actually, she stared right at me; turns out there is a qualitative difference. I stood there for more than a few seconds. I watched her eyes, her mouth, and worse, she saw me watching. I felt the beginning of an erection. We looked at each other for a few seconds, seconds that should have felt more awkward than they were. Then I escaped, turned away. I had a feeling of first jealousy, then anger. Neither feeling was appropriate, nor did either make any real sense to me, at least no sense that I wanted. I returned to the camp and crawled into my sleeping bag, set off some yards from the students’ cluster of tents. I drifted off to sleep looking up at Gemini, Orion, and imagined I could just make out the faint Monoceros. It struck me, as it always struck me, how little I knew about the stars. No matter how much I read, I never knew more. I lay there with the stars and some shame.