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campfire, Dad!”
    Petey and he were on the right side of the car. I looked over toward a scorched circle of rocks that had charred hunks of wood in the middle.
    “Old is right,” Petey said. “I bet it hasn’t been used in years.” He looked at me. “I wonder if this is the same place you and I and Dad built
our
campfire?”
    “It’s nice to think so.”
    Jason brimmed with energy. “Where are we going to put up the tent?”
    “How about over there?” I pointed to the right of the old campfire site. “I think that’s where Petey and I helped Dad put up our tent.”
    “Can
I
help, Dad?”
    “Of course,” Petey said.
    There was a moment after I lifted the back hatch and we unloaded our gear when the déjà vu I’d been feeling reached an overwhelming intensity. Everything seemed realer than real. I looked over at Jason and Petey as they pulled the collapsed tent from its nylon sack and tried to figure how to put it together. Jason’s glasses and freckles, his sandy hair at the edge of his baseball cap, his baggy jeans and loose—fitting shirt, made him look so much like Petey had looked as a boy that I shivered.
    Jason noticed. “What’s the matter, Dad?”
    “Nothing. This breeze is a little cold is all. I’m going to put on my windbreaker. You want yours?”
    “Naw, I’m fine.”
    “Big brother,” Petey called. “You’re the expert in how buildings are put together. Do you think you can show us how to put this damned
tent
together?”
    The three of us needed an hour to get the job done.

14
    By then, it was almost 1:30. Kate had packed a lunch in a cooler: chicken, beef, and peanut butter sandwiches, along with soft drinks, apples, and little packages of potato chips. Jason didn’t touch the apples. Otherwise, he wolfed everything down, the same as Petey and I did. We saw fish splashing in the lake but decided to get our poles out later. For now, there was plenty to do, exploring. We put our lunch trash in a bag, locked it in the car, and set out, hiking to the left around the lake.
    “I remember there was a cave up there.” I pointed above the aspens. “And lots of places to climb.”
    Petey yelled to Jason, who was running ahead of us. “Do you like to climb?”
    “I don’t know!” Jason turned to look at us, continuing to run. “I’ve never done it!”
    “You’re going to love it!”
    The lake was about a hundred yards across. We reached the other side and found a stream that fed into it. The stream was swift from the spring snowmelt, too wide to cross, so we followed its cascading path up through the aspens, the roar of the water sometimes so loud that we couldn’t hear one another.
    Even though we were three thousand feet higher than the altitude of five thousand feet we were used to in Denver, the thin mountain air didn’t slow us. If anything, it was invigorating. It was like inhaling vitamins. Stretching my legs to climb over fallen trees or to clamber on and off boulders, I felt such pleasure from my body that I criticized myself for not having taken time from work to do this earlier.
    Across the stream, above us, a deer moved, its brown silhouette stiffening at our approach, then bounding gracefully away through the white trunks of the aspens. With the noise from the stream, it couldn’t have heard us coming, I thought. It must have smelled us. Then another silhouette stiffened and bounded away. A third. Even with the noise from the stream, I heard their hooves thunder.
    Soon we reached where the stream cascaded from a high, narrow draw that was too dangerous to go into. We angled to the left, following a steep upward trail that had hoof marks on it. The trail veered farther to the left, maintaining a consistent level along a wooded slope, so predictable that when a sunlit outcrop above us attracted our attention, we decided to explore. Getting to it was more difficult than it appeared. At one time or another, both Petey and I slipped on loose rocks underfoot. We’d have