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The deal dies in about ninety seconds.

Rooney keeps his cord. Margaux keeps her hooks, and gives Junie two of them for nothing, which Junie tries to refuse and does not manage.

And here is the thing.

Nobody scores it. There is no camera. Neve stayed at the north site with the rig, and the east bench has one operator who went down to the creek forty minutes ago to get water shots, and there is not a lens within three hundred yards of any of it.

She gained nothing. She could have taken Rooney's cord herself for a hook and a half and he would have shaken her hand and thanked her.

On the trail back up I go about a mile before I say it.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"You could have had the cord."

"Yeah."

"You did not take it."

She steps over a root. Her boots have stopped being catalog boots. The tag is still on the left heel, gone gray, hanging by two staples now.

"It was a bad deal and he didn't understand it," she says. "That's not a bluff, that's just taking money off a guy who can't read the board. There's no game in that."

"That is a rule you have."

"That's a rule I have."

"Nobody filmed it."

"I clocked that," she says, and something goes across her face fast and is gone. "Which is sort of my whole point, isn't it."

We go the rest of the way up in the rain, and I carry the rock, and my legs come up on time now and I have not eaten anything.

Half a mile from the site she stops on the trail with one hand out to slow me.

There is a rabbit sitting in the ninth snare. It has been dead an hour, maybe two, in a loop hung off bent grass and a single twig, with no support and no lintel and nothing about it that would make a living thing stop to admire the work.

Junie does not say anything at all, which is the most generous thing anybody has done for me in four days.

"Say it," I tell her.

"Nope."

"You are going to say it eventually."

"Absolutely I am," she says. "Tonight. In front of the camera. It is going to be your trestle-word and I am going to make you say the whole thing about the lintel."

CHAPTER 11

JUNIE

DAY 5

The rocks go in at six forty.

Three of them, fist sized, buried in the coals since before light, lifted out with two green sticks and dropped into the trough. The trough is a length of alder that Ghorlan burned hollow on the second night with a coal and an amount of patience that should be illegal, and it holds about two quarts, and it is the entire reason we have water that has boiled since production took our pot.