I’m not expecting to fall asleep easily, but I do, and sleep like the dead.
* * *
“So, it’s like grice volleyball,”she says, looking up at the net, breath puffing in front of her. There’s so much wrong with that sentence I barely know where to start.
“Grouse,” is the first thing I say.
“Sure. Grice,” Andi says, grinning at me.
“The plural ofgrouseis alsogrouse,” I say, even though I know she knows this and furthermore, I know she’s only sayinggricebecause she thinks it’s funny, or something, and correcting her is completely useless.
“So, it’s volleyball with grouses,” she says, and I close my eyes and sigh, and she laughs. To be honest, I’m mostly closing my eyes because I know if I look at the way she sparkles when she teases me or the way she turns a little pink when she laughs, I’ll also start smiling and I can’t have that. Not when she’s out here incorrectly pluralizing birds.
“It’s nothing like volleyball,” I say, another thing that I know she knows. “They fly into the net, drop into the pocket, and we get them out and tag them. No one is spiking a bird over the net.”
“Maybeyou’renot,” she says, and I ignore that because I have no constructive response, just grab the pack I brought and hoist it onto my back.
“Now’s the boring part,” I say. “We sit a hundred feet away and check back every ten minutes to see what we get. You brought a book, right?”
“Two,” she says, and follows me as I trudge uphill toward a cluster of boulders that should be far enough away not to scare the wildlife.
The net—which does look a little like a volleyball net, fine—is stretched between two trees maybe ten feet apart, basically invisible in the forest. We’re about a mile and a half from the cabin, relatively near a spring and also a stand of fir trees that the grouse seem to particularly enjoy.
Five minutes later, we’re sitting on an old quilt we brought from the cabin and leaning against a gray granite boulder. I didn’t tell Andi, but in addition to all the net setup, lunch, and a thermos of coffee, I stuffed an extra blanket into the bottom of this pack in case she gets cold. It’s mid-twenties today, so not terrible, and we’re both dressed warmly, but it’s not like we’re getting our body temperatures up by hiking.
The first hour goes by uneventfully. For a long time nothing gets caught in the trap, and I start to wonder if there’s something wrong with it, but then we catch a blue jay, and soon after that, a very indignant titmouse.
“You should put birdseed out to lure them,” Andi says, the fifth or sixth time we’re hiking back up to our hideout.
“It’s not good form to feed wild animals,” I say. “Dangerous to make them dependent on humans for their food, particularly out here where they’re unlikely to encounter more of it any time soon.”
“One snack does not a dependency make,” she says. “Think how much faster this would go with a lure.”
“You brought the GPS, right?” I ask. “You can go back to the cabin, don’t feel like you have to stay.”
“Why? This is fun,” she says, and we’ve both got our hands in our pockets, but she nudges me with her elbow, glancing over, flushed and conspiratorial like there’s a secret only the two of us know, and for a moment every single thought leaves my brain. “I’ve never played a net sport with greese before.”
“It’s not—” I start, and she’s laughing again, but this time she wins and I smile.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
ANDI
I holdmy hand out to Gideon, both of us sitting on the quilt that’s keeping the ground from freezing our buttsallthe way off. I’m glad he talked me into dressing as warmly as possible—which included his sweater that I’m borrowing, something Gideon is demonstratively grumpy about but seems to actually kind of like, which I simply cannot think about right now—because sitting around in the freezing cold is, in fact, a very chilly pastime.
“You take the almonds, I’ll take the dried cranberries,” I’m saying.
“What are the white things?”
“Coconut, I think.”
Predictably, Gideon frowns a little at that, even as he selects several almonds from the palm of my hand. “What kind of bougie trail mix has coconut?” he asks, popping them into his mouth.
“Sorry, should it have only had acorns, wild blueberries, and whatever suspicious mushrooms you can forage for yourself in the dead of winter?” I ask, tossing the rest of my handful into my mouth. Dried coconut and cranberries are perfectly good in trail mix, thank you very much.
“First—”
“Here we go,” I tease, and Gideon’s lips twitch like he’s trying not to smile, a facial expression I’ve become an expert on.
