“They’re just black bears,” he says. “As long as you don’t go near the cubs, they’re—”
“I know, I know, it was a joke,” I say, because I also partly grew up in the Blue Ridge and am well-versed in our ursine friends. “Are there anyactuallydangerous animals out here?”
“A few,” he says, grabs onto a tree trunk, and leans past it. “Hold on.”
I realize he’s leaning out over a steep hillside, and that it’s the same one we climbed up last night. It looks much scarier from this direction, and also completely different. I’d never have recognized it. Truthfully, the landscape in the snow looks so strange and flat that I didn’t even realize I was about to fall right down it.
“Oh,” I say, helpfully.
“This is why I wanted to come alone,” he says, but it’s more matter-of-fact than annoyed.
“So no one would know if you fell and broke a leg?”
“So I wouldn’t have to worry aboutyoufalling and breaking a leg,” he says, putting down the pack that he’s carrying and opening it. “I’m fine.”
It’s at least the third time I’ve heard some variation on that from him in less than twenty-four hours, and it’s starting to sound like a mantra. I wonder if Gideon ever worries about himself. How often he considers thathemight be in danger. Whether he takes himself into account at all, or whether anyone else ever does. Whether anyone else ever really has.
“It’s a tie-down strap!” I say as he pulls a long, red strap with metal buckles from the pack.
“Yes.”
“Itoldyou.”
Gideon gives me a long-suffering look and wraps the strap around the base of a tree, securing it with the ratchet. He’s knotted it every eighteen inches or so, and he tests it by leaning his weight away and pulling as hard as he can.
It makes his pants—which are thick and very practical and not sexy pants, like, at all—go tight around his thighs, which… I notice.
“Okay,” he says, swinging his pack back onto his back and buckling it across his chest. “I’m going first. When you come down, hang onto the strap. I think you’ll be fine anyway, but it never hurts to take an extra precaution.”
“Did you only bring it because I came along?” I ask, and Gideon just gives me a look and starts down the slope without answering.
We both get to the bottom without incident, though there is one part where I slip and slide several feet, banging one knee in the process. When I get to the bottom Gideon frowns at me—what a surprise—and watches disapprovingly while I brush myself off.
“Want me to take a look?” he offers.
“At what?”
Another disbelieving look, which Gideon seems to hand out like candy on Halloween.
“The knee you just smashed into a granite outcropping,” he says.
“I didn’t smash it and it was a rock, not an outcropping,” I say. “I’m fine.” It hurts, and it’ll definitely bruise, but I’ve survived bruises before and I’ll survive them again. Gideon sighs and starts walking.
The ground here is a little trickier, a slope that’s rockier and has more fallen branches than before, so we go silent for a while. Gideon won’t quit glancing over at me like I’m going to collapse at any moment, and I wish he’d quit it.
“You didn’t answer me,” I finally say afterare you going to survive this short walk in the woodslook number two hundred and thirty-eight. “About what dangerous animals are out here.”
“In theory or in practice?”
I don’t know what that means. “Both?”
“In theory, mountain lions,” he says, stepping over a large rock. Something crunches underfoot. “If you come up against a hundred and fifty pounds of big, angry cat, you don’t stand much of a chance. But they hardly ever go after humans.”
“Oh,” I say, and look around at the snowy forest. I don’t see any mountain lions, but I’m not sure that counts for a lot. Cats are notoriously sneaky. “Hardly ever.”
“Practically speaking, hogs,” he says.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
