But he’d always been the one who wanted kids. I made an effort to smile at him. He was attempting to dominate me even out here in the sacred backwoods. We reentered the forest at the edge of the bald. The weather was different in the woods—cold and damp. As we pushed past the rhododendrons, they shook water onto us. Rhododendrons had crept down south during the last glacial maximum. But this wasn’t their favorite territory. As the planet warmed, they were shuffling north again.

“Sure,” I said, “I mean, maybe. I haven’t decided.” I could hear the creek. I remembered Queen splashing out of it, holding the dead heron in her arms.

“You’re allowed to decide?” His lips were chapped and white. He was cold. I could have handed him my sweater the way Sara had handed me hers. “Osha told me no one here ever has kids. It’s part of the culture of the place, she said.”

“Well . . . ,” I said. Isaac was testing me. “Well, that’s because we’re trying to restore the world, not just maintain it—we don’t want to add to the population.”

“It seems like there are a lot of rules.”

“Rules from the people who live here,” I said, quoting Dice. I heard a crunching deep in the hemlock-dark woods. “Wait—shhhh,” I said, and grabbed Isaac’s hand, which was freezing. I was crouching. I squinted, peering into the tangled shadows. What was I so worried about? We’d been on-message—I rifled back through our conversation. Had Isaac implied that we’d known each other in Durham?

Isaac interrupted my panic by laughing. He pulled his hand away. “Look at that beautiful dog!” he said. One of the huge white dogs was trotting toward us, its loose mouth seeming to smile. “I have never seen a dog like that.”

“They kill wolves.”

“Do they?” he said, scratching the dog’s ears.

I said, “Didn’t you see all the warning signs for dogs when you were coming up?”

The dog sat back and looked at me. Its eyes held none of the herbivore calm of the sheep’s. I felt as though the dog’s eyes connected directly to Dice’s. My heart sped up.

A moment later, Dice came up in the woods behind. He moved very quietly.

“Good thing Belu came by, right?” he said, putting his wiry arm around Isaac. “Twenty years ago when I used to be a tracker for the national parks, I found a boy who died just a few feet off the trail,” Dice said. “He was lost for just an hour, probably, when he got hypothermia. It was a rainy day, not any colder than today.” Dice lifted up Isaac’s pastel-blue hand and shook it up and down as though to warm it. Isaac’s wrist went limp, and his whole posture changed; he leaned over, looking up at Dice.