“Sure,” I said, though I was a vegetarian. I just wanted to watch him eat it. I liked how Bay kept transforming things: woods into bedroom, raccoon into nourishment, someone else’s jacket into ours. I wanted to live like that, borderless, every object taken on its own terms.

We hiked a mile in and set up a camp. The blue night glittered through the trees like a chandelier. While Bay hunted, I held stream ice in a bandana. My coat and hood wrapped me in happiness—I was happy again—the night with Bay was better, his caretaking, the strangeness of homemaking in the middle of nowhere. I thought about deer beds near the Eno, the tamped-down meadow grass.

Bay didn’t bring back a raccoon. He heated water on the camp stove for ramen.

“Does Dice shoot oilmen?” I said.

Bay smiled at me. He put a floppy rectangle of ramen on a paper plate for me and crumbled the seasoning over it. “The short answer is no. He’s peaceful at heart. The FBI used to watch him because he gave out too much free food. He fed all kinds of people, thousands, the homeless, protesters, everyone.” He paused. “But don’t you know sometimes people bring violence on themselves? Or maybe you’ve never seen police in riot gear.”

“I’ve gone to a lot of marches,” I said. “My friend lived in a squat, actually.”

“A real good girl,” he said.

* * *

I lay down before he did, and watched his flashlight play over the tent’s vibrating blue walls. When he unzipped the door, my heart jumped. He smelled like diesel fuel. The kind of smell near which you shouldn’t strike matches. He took off his shoes and the space filled with the vinegar smell of unsocked feet. I waited for him to undress, but he lay down in his clothes. His pants, formerly chinos, perhaps, were as waterproof and shiny as an oiled canvas. “Washing your clothes takes all the fight out of them,” he’d said.

* * *

In the morning, I paddled my way out of the sticky Pertex and emerged from the tent caped in steam. My left hand was empty of sensation. On the camping stove’s soft blue flame, Bay boiled organic oatmeal with organic dried cranberries. Food from the rich people’s house. He said he was going to town.

“Am I coming?”

This made him smile, and only later I knew why: I was so eager to let him set the terms.

“Go for a walk,” he said. “You need to get better used to your body. You have the distinct look of a person who doesn’t know anything about her body.” He shook my shoulders. “That’s my personal challenge to you,” he said. “You always stop short, don’t you?”

I loved his touching my shoulders.

“How’s that going for you?” he said, and slung on his backpack.