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sketches and notes, it contained a lifetime of adventures. He opened it near the beginning, to a page neatly titled “Anasazi.” Lines met hatch marks and dots and numbers, the puzzle pieces of their climb.
    Lewis reached for the Bible as if it were his own, and aligned it beside the photo. With the tip of the little plastic sword from his lime slice, he very precisely matched sections of Hugh’s topo with the photo. He looked faintly silly, a fifty-six-year-old man stabbing with what looked like a child’s toy at a treasure map.
    “Remember that expanding flake on the ninth pitch, how it gave us fits? Well, the flake’s gone. It fell off when no one was looking. There’s a bolt ladder now. It misses the flake altogether. We can save hours. They say it cuts out the extra night.”
    “I’m for that,” said Hugh.
    The sword tip moved. “And the vegetated crack on the twentieth pitch, where we used knife blades? You can hand-place three-inch angles now.”
    Hugh let him go on. Beta or not, he was taking nothing for granted, not the bolt ladder, nor the eroded crack on the twentieth pitch, nor the summit. Anasazi had changed, and they had changed. As a young man, he’d used other men’s maps and their prior knowledge to explore the mountains and rivers and deserts. But at some point, conventional wisdom didn’t matter. You had to draw your own maps, make your own rules, and find your own way.
    Lewis went on taking them up the route with his sword tip, pitch by pitch, thrashing out details they’d covered a dozen times, burning off nervous energy that neither wanted to admit to. Hugh let him go on. Just as Hugh had needed to carry water this afternoon, Lewis needed to recite the route yet again.
    Hugh had his back to the door. When a new customer entered, he felt the night chill against his neck. The bartender straightened. Lewis glanced up from the book of maps.
    Hugh turned, thinking Rachel was finally making her appearance. Instead he saw a man, probably half their age, with a long thatch of sun-bleached hair and the wide back and mason forearms of a climber, a Tarzan in old Levi’s. Wearing a white T-shirt and Teva sandals with white socks, he was neat and clean, and a local. Hugh could tell he belonged here. He carried himself directly, with no nonsense, no bluff or mannerisms.
    The bartender said hey, to no response. “Anything?” he said.
    Tarzan shook his head no.
    “Let me get you a beer.”
    The man didn’t answer. He looked straight at Hugh and Lewis and came around the big unlit fireplace with its odd, squat, Soviet-style skiers on the metal plaques of the pillars. “Hugh Glass,” he said to them.
    “That’s me,” said Hugh.
    No logos on the T-shirt, no body art, no excess. It stressed his intensity, that and his eyes, which were Hollywood blue. He was deeply tanned, the way laborers get. The only paleness Hugh saw was at the edges of his wristwatch. The guy probably combed his hair once in the morning when he shaved, then was done with the burdens of image.
    “I’m Augustine,” he said. “With SAR. I got there late. You’d left.”
    After this afternoon, Hugh knew the acronym: search and rescue. “You’re a ranger,” he said.
    “Nope, an eighties hire,” he said. He stood there, not exactly aggressive, but not friendly either. Lewis sensed it, too.
    “That’s a new one,” Lewis said.
    “Back in the eighties, the park service would go to local bars and draft men to fight fires. You got paid by the hour. The term stuck. That’s what they call us now.”
    “You’re a firefighter?” Lewis said.
    Hugh put two and two together, SAR and the hourly pay. “A rescue climber,” he said.
    Augustine nodded, wound tight as a clock.
    “We kind of missed the eighties. And nineties,” Lewis said. “Back in our day, they used to let you guys live in Camp Four year-round.” A gilded role, rescue work marked you as one of the best of the best.
    Augustine’s name tickled Hugh’s cultural