I sip water and take a hunking bite out of my sandwich and put pencil to paper. Quickly I mark out a few of the defining features of the landscape, cutting the page in half where the sky and land meet, then I go about adding details. We eat quietly while I draw, until drops of sweat are falling from my nose onto the page, in an extremely gross fashion. I glance beside me to find Jasper in his meditation pose, legs crossed, eyes closed, hands on his knees with his palms facing up. For what feels like a solid hour I sketch, adding shading where the trees and boulders cast shadows across the desert.
“Can I see?” Jasper says finally, peering over with one eye.
“Sure.” I hold up the book so he can look.
He shakes his head, laughing a little to himself. “It’s beautiful. You’re stupidly talented, you know that?”
I didn’t think it would be possible for my face to get any hotter out here but somehow it does. Suddenly feeling shy, I flip the book closed. “Should we keep going?”
“If you want.” Jasper goes about getting his things together, standing and slipping on his backpack.
“Actually,” I say, looking over the landscape once more. “Where are we going? Do you have, like, a spot in mind?”
“Oh yeah,” he says, grinning smugly.
“Holy moly.”
I can’t believe my eyes. After walking for another few hours, until my feet feel about ready to fall off, my shoulders are aching from carrying my pack, and all the moisture in my body has evacuated through my pores, we’ve arrived at the most stunning lake.
“How is this even possible? I didn’t think there were lakes in the desert.”
Jasper simply shrugs, then smiles like he’s pleased with himself. “Pretty special isn’t it.”
“Uh, yah-huh.”
The trail winds down a hill toward the body of glistening water. Boulders rise like mountains on the far side and dot the water like lily pads. On the shore, green vegetation sprouts in bursts of emerald. The whole place is alive and magical and so freaking serene.
“Is this where we’re camping?”
Jasper doesn’t answer right away. He takes in the scenery with a wistful expression, then finally turns to me. “This is the spot.”
We make our way down to the water, dropping our packs by some rocks and heading straight for the edge. Immediately I drop to my knees and splash the cooling liquid on my face and my neck.
“We should set up camp, then we can explore,” Jasper says a few steps behind me.
After investigating the shore we find a spot to pitch our tent at the base of a boulder, near a patch of trees. We set up the tent and unload our sleeping gear and some of our supplies. I’m halfway through rolling out a sleeping bag when I notice Jasper pulling off his tank top.
His body glistens like the water in the sunlight, his muscles seeming even more defined than normal. He kicks off his shoes and pulls off his socks, draping them over a low-hanging branch of a nearby yucca tree, and catches me looking. He grins mischievously.
“Fancy a swim?”
Before I know it he’s dropped his shorts and is running to the water, throwing up splashes as he enters, then diving under. He stays underwater long enough for the surface to return to its placid state, then emerging like a dolphin a moment later. Only it isn’t Jasper who’s emerged—well, it is, just not in his human form. His wolf dog-paddles its way back toward the shore until he’s standing ankle-deep, then shakes his fur, releasing a firework of water. With a yelp in my direction, Jasper takes off around the edge of the lake, and as swiftly as I can I leap up, undress, and shift.
I chase him around the edge of the lake, hopping from boulder to boulder, splashing in the shallows, until we begin to ascend one of the more mountainous rocks on the far side. Jasper wastes no time when he reaches the top, turning sharply, leaping into the air, and plunging toward the water below. His wolf body breaks the surface in a graceful, streamlined dive. I hesitate, pawing at the edge of the rock. It’s farther down than I thought. Jasper is already swimming in little circles, barking up at me.
I huff and growl—Come on, Max, you’ve faced worse than this—then propel myself from the ledge. Much less gracefully than Jasper, I flail about in the air as the water nears, and I do my absolute best to enter in a way that doesn’t shatter all my bones. Cool water envelops me as I break the surface.
For a moment I linger underwater, suspended somewhere between the bed of the lake and the air above. Jasper dives under to meet me and paddles until we’re face-to-face. Two wolves maybe shouldn’t be hanging out underwater like this, but there’s something so calm about the silence, the cool tones, the refracted light squiggling on the sand below. We hover like this for a moment, until my lungs start to burn.
Breaking the surface, I rise gulping for breath, kicking all four of my legs to stay afloat. Jasper pops up beside me and swims around me like he doesn’t have a care in the world. He nips at me and barks, then dives back under like a seal, and I follow. We spend the next half hour or so diving and seeing how far down we can go. The lake is surprisingly deep—I guess it’d want to be in this heat, otherwise it would evaporate away.
When my legs are tired I paddle myself back toward our campsite, wandering out onto the sand and shaking my fur. For a second my ears perk up at a distant sound…a coyote maybe. But it’s so faint it must be miles and miles away. It’s amazing what wolf ears are able to pick up. Jasper follows me out of the water, shaking out his fur and spraying me in the face. I growl playfully and tackle him back into the water.
Later that night, as the sun sets, we build a ring of stones and a fire inside it. It’s totallySurvivorvibes as we sit and eat burgers with the firelight bouncing off the rocks and bathing our campsite in a warm glow.
“The stars are ridiculous,” I say, wiping ketchup from the corner of my mouth.
“They are,” Jasper says, turning his attention skyward. “You want to take a walk?”
