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stepped up to her. They could see three dozen elk at the far edge, grand animals deep brown and small as dogs in the distance. Vonnie was breathing and he was breathing, two campers.
    “Are you okay?”
    “I haven’t been out in a while; it’s good.” She put her hand on her sternum. “But I can feel it.”
    Now the elk were gone. “Let’s go up and see if Clay has set up.”
    After dinner the night before, she had laid her pad and sleeping bag under the pines at the Cold Creek trailhead, and he asked her if she wanted in the tent.
    “I’m good,” she said. “I’m traveling light, but I’ve got a bivy sack if it gets cold.”
    “You want a hot rock?”
    “I’m good.”
    “That’s a great sleeping bag you’ve got there, lady,” he said to her. “Kent get it for you?”
    “He did.”
    “And the jacket?”
    “Yes.”
    “He knows what he’s doing with that gear. How is he?”
    “You mean since your scrape?”
    “Yes, I do. I apologized and paid for that.”
    “Kent is fine. Jackson’s a good town for a lawyer.”
    “That’s a terrible thing to say about a town, but it’s deserved in the case of Jackson Hole.”
    “Mack, don’t start. At all.”
    “Just tell me. Did he change your name?”
    “He calls me Yvonne.” He had planned on saying something to that, but when he heard it, he could not. He sat and pulled his boots off. Before he had crawled into his tent, he saw Vonnie go over and look under his truck, checking to see that he’d slid his familiar cooler there and then she stood in the luminescent dark and walked quietly over to the trailhead sign and retrieved her mail.
     
     
     
    By the time they reached the top of the meadow, the last bees were out working the field, and Vonnie had rolled her sleeves in the sunshine. She walked to the primitive plank step-stile in the Forest Service fence and leaned there on the old weathered logs. It was a cross-timber fence built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, so huge and simple it would be there forever. Across the green lea they could see the large white lodge tent where the trail reentered the pines. Mack pointed. “He’s in the same place.” He could see that the familiar sight made Vonnie happy. “You want to do it?” Mack asked her.
    “No, you like to.”
    “No, you—you don’t get out much.”
    “Okay,” she said, stepping up past him. “Hello the camp!” she called. “Hello the camp!” She smiled and made a megaphone of her two hands and called again, “May we! Approach! The camp!”
    They saw Clay come out the canvas flap in his blue Utah State sweatshirt and wave. He hollered, “You better, Vonnie. Bring that rancher with you!”
    “You better tell him it’s Yvonne,” Mack said.
    “Leave it,” she said, not looking back, her punctuation. “Let’s go have some coffee and get the weather report.” They helped each other step up and over the stile, and Mack followed Vonnie across to Clay’s encampment. They leaned their packs against a big pine and went in the warm tent. Half the floor was pallet planking and half was green grass. Clay had two cots and a small woodstove. They all shook hands.
    “Home sweet home,” Vonnie said. She pointed at Clay’s coffee cup, pen, open journal.
    “And welcome to it,” Clay said. “Sit down. Tell me what to write in the book; my journal suffers from a bit of the same old.” He gathered his papers and set them on the one shelf.
    “We didn’t know if they’d hired a new kid.”
    “No, it’s this old kid. Six years now. The money’s good and I do love these hills.”
    “I forgot,” Vonnie said and she went out and came back with a loaf of bread in a paper sleeve. “I brought you some sourdough from Lucy’s in town.”
    “I’ll take it,” Clay said, “if you’ll trade for coffee.”
    “With cream,” she said. He lifted the blue enamel coffeepot from the steel stove surface and poured three tin cups, and he lifted a glass jar of half-and-half