“We’ll have to reconfigure our things a little,” Camellia said, hopping out.
She had a bounce in her step as she went around behind the pickup and climbed right up into its bed. Then she found a seat and unzipped the gigantic duffel. “There’s room for some of the food we picked up in here, and we can stuff the rest into our backpacks. Here, hand me one of those grocery bags from up front.”
He did, and then watched as she fit things into the packs like she was playing Tetris. She moved the soft items—bread and chips and the like—into their smaller packs, the ones that held their clothes, and zipped them in with care.
“That should do it,” she said, passing his backpack over the side. “We can take turns carrying the big one. She pulled her own bag’s strap over her shoulders, then hopped out of the truck again, reaching back for the larger one.
He beat her to it. It wasn’t all that heavy, which surprised him since she’d said it had “everything they’d need.” He hoped she was right.
He locked the truck, then followed her. She’d spotted a wooden stand, covered to protect it from the weather, with a book on a chain, and several pens in a cup. “SIGN IN STATION: TENT CAMPING.”
Beside the station, there was a faucet labeled “potable water.” He paused to fish his empty canteen out of his pack and filled it. “Hand me yours,” he said. “Save our bottles for when we need them.”
Camellia did, and he filled it, then passed it back to her. “There should be another tap near our site,” she said, pointing at one of the smiling blue droplet symbols that dotted the map.
She wrote her name in the sign-in book and passed him the pen.
He leaned in, wrote his first name, then stopped with the pen hovering over the page.
Camellia said, “Your last name doesn’t feel real to you right now, does it?”
“Trouble,” he said. “It’s just a fancy word for trouble. At least my first name means something.” He lifted up his arm as he said it, and he saw her notice the bracelet there.
“Wait…is that the bracelet from Cilla’s journal?” He nodded. “How?” she asked. “It was so tiny!”
“A Native fellow had a stand outside the gas station the other day. Looked to be a hundred years old. Said his name was Turtle.”
She repeated the name softly.
“He was selling jewelry. I got the notion to show it to him. Well, that old man took it right outta my hand and started picking its strands apart. Then he grabbed a couple lengths of cord and somehow wove them into what was already there.” He turned his wrist slowly, showing off the intricate braids and knots, then twisted it back to the moonstone with the wolf head engraving. “Wolf means something to me. It was attached to me when the river spat me out.”
“Oh, no, that’s not what the river did,” Camellia said. “The river gave birth to you. Your second birth.”
He didn’t meet her eyes, but her words touched him so much his throat got tight. She had a perspective that was lighter than his, more positively focused.
He was still staring at where he’d written his name in the book.
“Even without a real surname, you know who you are.”
“An Indian who’s never gone camping?” he asked, meeting her eyes at last. “Native American, I mean.”
“I think you get to say Indian if you want to.”
He lowered his head. “I don’t even know what tribe or clan or anything about my people.”
“We’re going to find out, Wolf. We’ve barely got started.”
“You really think there’s anything here to find?” He looked around, like there would be an answer out there amid the scrub brush and boulders.
“You know what?” she asked. “Just leave your last name off. And when we find your origin story, we’ll come back here and you can write it in then. Now let’s get a move on, so we can set up camp before dark.”
He nodded and put the pen down. “I like the idea of coming back here to write my real name, if we find it.”
“When we find it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wolf
