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called out their requests for fried eggs as they walked in through the screen door. Ren forced herself to eat one egg scrambled on toast, knowing she’d need the fuel for the rest of the morning. She was aware of the others chatting, scooting chairs back for coffee refills, checking backpacks. Her mind and her stomach were too unsettled to enjoy the food or conversation.
    Ed and Paul were taking forever to finish their last bites of runny yolks. The sun was over the horizon, the pink streaks in the sky already fading.
    â€œGo on and take Ren up, Silas,” Ed said suddenly. Or maybe not suddenly—she hadn’t been paying attention. “She’s been twitching to get up there.”
    Silas was drying his hands as he turned to her. “Suits me. You ready?”
    She was. They walked down the main road, passed a flattened scorpion, rubbed Zorro on the head when he came running, then rock-hopped over the creek Ren had driven through the day before. After one more creek crossing, they reached a wide-open stretch of dead grass to their left, which gave way to a steep, rocky incline. A thin path zigzagged up the hill, past stones and cactus and occasional bushy juniper.
    â€œElk trail,” Silas said, starting toward it. “Watch the poop.”
    They walked steadily, Silas setting a quick pace that Ren matched. The air was still cool, but the sun was bright and her thighs felt a pleasant pull with each step. It had been a year since she had last done real fieldwork. She’d spent a month near Farmington the previous summer, and since then she’d spent only a day here and there at various sites, checking and authenticating ceramic finds. She’d missed the physicality of a dig. She’d missed the intense awareness that came from being outdoors, the consciousness of your own body and its specific place in the broader surroundings. A lack of attention in the office meant a missed deadline or a late meeting. But here there were cactus spikes and sidewinders, dehydration and spiders and gorges and uneven ground ripe for turned ankles and lost footing. There were scorpions and coyotes and bobcats and the boarlike javelinas. When she first met Ed, he spent an entire lunch insisting there was such a creature as a vinegaroon, a type of what he called whip scorpion that sprayed acetic acid. She didn’t believe him for days: That was before she learned that his encyclopedic insect knowledge rivaled his talent for straight-faced fibs. Now she’d seen vinegaroons—not actually toxic—along with black widows and giant centipedes and one bark scorpion. It made you feel more real, the nearness of disaster. There was an intimacy created with the ground around you, with the sounds in the air, with your own skin and muscles and hands and feet. It made you see things more clearly. And, really, if you kept your eyes open, if you saw the right things—the snake sunning on the rock, the slick spot of gravel in the middle of the path—you were safe. But you had to know how to let it all seep into you until you could feel a nearby snake in your fingertips, without even looking.
    Silas paused, looked back over his shoulder as he stopped. She shuffle-stepped to keep from running into him. Her hand landed on his shoulder blade.
    â€œYou’re fast,” he said. They resumed the pace. “Paul and Ed are always bitching at me about racing to the top.”
    â€œI like to get where I’m going,” Ren said.
    They hit a plateau, then the path curved around the edge of an overhang. Rocks shifted under Silas’s foot as he stepped, and a sprinkle of stones fell into an arroyo below.
    â€œWhen I see a hill, I want to run up it,” he said.
    She waited for the rest.
    â€œThere was this hill way behind our house when I was growing up, back behind my dad’s tool shed,” he explained. “It seemed huge at the time—Mount Everest. This was when I was really small,