Same finger.
Same neat little nail.
Different terrain last night.
Christ.
“And the depth on the right-hand column doesn't match the left. They didn’t just change direction. Something broke the pattern.”
The guide blinked.
That hadn’t gone the way he expected.
I stayed in the shadows. She shouldn't have been able to catch the shift. Those were light prints, obscured by cross-winds, but she’d found the exact moment the herd’s logic broke.
Another look. She was right. The spacing tightened, the front prints angling sharply toward the brush.
The guide looked up, his face a silent plea for an intervention.
Any decent ranger would have stepped in. Instead, I watched her turn a simple tracking lesson into cross-examination.
That voice.
Against my mouth last night.
I stepped out of the shade. “She’s right.”
Juliette didn't look back at me. She studied the dirt, her finger hovering over a blurred indentation. “How can you tell? The edge is smeared.”
“Because they’re impala, Juliette. They’re the professional neurotics of the bush. They panic for sport.”
Sweat gathered at the hollow of her throat. I forced my attention back to the tracks before memory got creative.
She finally looked up, her mouth giving nothing away beneath the sunglasses. “That feels like an underdeveloped theory.”
The impala would be crushed to hear their survival instinct was a rounding error.
I crouched beside her, the heat from the red dust rising between us. I pointed to the marks. “Two toes. Narrow split. Light weight. That’s the whole story.”
“And the variance in the soil displacement?” she asked, pointing to a jagged break in the crust.
“A rock, Juliette. It stepped on a pebble and had a momentary crisis of identity.”
She stared at the tracks like she was about to put the entire ecosystem on a Performance Improvement Plan.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
She leaned back on her heels, considering the dirt as if it had failed a stress test. “Hm.”
I nodded, moving on.
“The group’s bottlenecking at the trailhead,” Juliette observed, checking her watch with a frown. She pointed to a steep, grassy bank that bypassed the main queue of guests. “If we take that secondary slope, we cut the transit time to the river by 10 minutes.”
“That’s not a path,” I said, stepping out from the trees. “That’s a silt drainage.”
She didn’t spare me a glance. Just adjusted her sunglasses, her eyes fixed on the bank. “It’s a fifteen-degree incline with established root systems, Nick. It’s an efficiency gain.”
