She leans her cheek against my shoulder, peers up the length of my arm.

“It’s much more obvious than the Little Dipper,” I say. “Higher in the sky and way huger. It dominates everything.”

“Hmm,” she says. Her cheek stays against my shoulder, and I don’t want to lower my arm, not if it means she’ll move away. “But the Little Dipper has the North Star in it, doesn’t it?”

I feel my blood quicken a bit at the playful note in her voice. “Uh-huh.”

“Isn’t that the most important star? The one sailors navigate by? The one all the other stars rotate around?”

I finally lower my arm and turn. Our faces are so close that our noses almost touch. Her green eyes are luminescent. It’s such a perfect moment I almost forget to be self-conscious.

“Know what I think?” she says. “I think the Little Bear shouldn’t underestimate himself.”

My breath catches in my throat.

Before my whirling brain can fix on a reply, the hammock dips again and Patrick spills into the netting beside us. His arm slides beneath Alex’s neck, pulling her into him. He’s big enough that if he dangles one leg off the hammock, his foot can touch the ground, and he rocks us, rocks us in the quiet of the night.

Alex has turned her face back to him, sure, but she keeps her arm pressed alongside mine.

We sway for a long, long time.

A splash of bracing cold water brought me back into my body there in the wilds of Ponderosa Pass. A lip of dirt had crumbled away, sending me stumbling calf-deep into a river.

The current was strong, pulling one of my legs out from under me, the weight of the backpack spinning me around.

I lost my footing, found it again, my boots scraping across the mossy bed. Cold water rose to my thighs, but I kept my chest and head out of the water. I bulled my way to the far side and clawed at the clay of the opposite bank, dragging myself up out of the water. For a time I lay there panting and freezing.

Alex’s voice came to me from afar: Would you cross raging rivers?

I would.

I forced myself to my feet and checked the backpack. It was still mostly dry, the plastic bags protecting the perishables and my notebook. Something tingled at my calf, and I tugged up my pant leg. A dark slippery oval clung to my flesh.

A leech.