River’s End

snorkeling?”
    “No.”
    “You’d like it.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, you’re stripped down to the most basic of gear and you’re taking on a world that isn’t yours. You never know what you’ll see next. You like surprises?”
    “Not particularly.”
    “Liar.” He grinned at her. “Everybody likes surprises. Besides, you’re a naturalist. The marine world might not be your forte, but you’d like it. My friend Mike and I spent two very memorable weeks in Cozumel a couple of years back.”
    “Snorkeling?”
    “Oh yeah. So what do you do for play these days?”
    “I take irritating city boys through the forest.”
    “I haven’t irritated you for at least an hour. I clocked it. Wow! There it is.”
    “What?” Thrown off, she spun around.
    “You smiled. You didn’t catch yourself that time and actually smiled at me.” He patted a hand to his heart. “Now I’m in love. Let’s get married and raise more labradors.”
    She snorted out a laugh. “There, you irritated me again. Mark your time.”
    “No, I didn’t.” He fell into step with her and thought how easy it was to slide back into a rhythm with her as well. “You’re starting to like me again, Liv. You’re not going to be able to help yourself.”
    “I may be edging toward tolerate, but that’s a long way from like. Now here, if you watch the trail, you’ll notice oxalis, liverwort—”
    “I can never get enough liverwort. You ever get down to L.A.?”
    “No.” She flicked a glance toward him, didn’t quite meet his eyes. “No.”
    “I thought you might go visit your aunt now and then.”
    “They come here, at least twice a year.”
    “I got to tell you, it’s tough to imagine Jamie tramping through the woods. That’s one very impressive lady. Still, I guess that since this is where she grew up, she’d slide back in easily. What about her husband?”
    “Uncle David? He loves her enough to come, to stay and to let my grandmother haul him off to fish on the lake. That’s been the routine for years, even though everyone knows he hates fishing. If his luck’s running bad, he actually catches some, then he has to clean them. Once we talked him into camping.”
    “Only once?”
    “I think that’s how Aunt Jamie got her pearl-and-diamond necklace. It was his bribe that she never make him sleep in the woods again. No cell phones, no laptops, no room service.” She slid him a sidelong glance. “You’d relate, I imagine.”
    “Hey, I can give up my cell phone any time I want. It’s not an addiction. And I’ve slept outside plenty.”
    “In a tent pitched in your backyard.”
    “And in Boy Scout camp.”
    The laugh bubbled out without her realizing it. “You were never a Boy Scout.”
    “I was, too. For one brief, shining period of six and a half months. It was the uniforms that turned me away. I mean, come on, those hats are really lame.”
    He was getting a little winded, but didn’t want to break the flow now that he had her talking. “You do the Girl Scout thing?”
    “No, I was never interested in joining groups.”
    “You just didn’t want to wear that dumb beanie.”
    “It was a factor. How’re the boots holding up?”
    “Fine. You can’t miss with L. L. Bean.”
    “You’re starting to chug, ace. Want to stop?”
    “I’m not chugging. That’s Shirley. How come I’m supposed to use your name, but you don’t use mine?”
    “It keeps slipping my mind.” She tapped a finger on the water bottle dangling from his belt. “Take a drink. Keep your muscles oiled. You’ll note here that the vine maples are taller, more treelike than they are on the bottomland. You can see patches of soil through the mat. We’ve climbed about five hundred feet.”
    The world opened up again, with smoky peaks and green valleys, with a sky that was like burnished steel. The rain had stopped, but the ground beneath his feet was still moldering with it and the air tasted as wet as the water he swallowed.
    “What’s this place?”
    “We switched over to Three Lakes Trail.”
    He could see how the river, the winding run of it, cut through forest and hill, the jagged islands of rock that pushed up through the stone-colored water like bunched fists. The wind flew into his face, roared through the tops of the trees at his back and was swallowed up by the forest.
    “Nothing gentle about it, is there?”
    “No. It’s good to remember that. A lot of Sunday hikers don’t, and they pay for it. Nature isn’t kind. It’s