Smoke Signal

The match went off on the first try, which I'd been counting on, because a man who can't light a fire with one strike in front of Nia Delgado might as well pack up his gear and walk back down the mountain. I cupped the flame into the tinder I'd spent ten minutes prepping, feathered shavings the size of eyelashes, bark dried against my jacket, and fed it slow until the smoke went white and the flames caught hold. Behind me there was a rock ridge and Nia leaning against it with her arms crossed, one boot flat against the stone, watching me the way a health inspector watches a kitchen.

"Show-off," she said.

"Fundamentals," I said. "Some of us learned them."

She was thirty-nine and built like she'd been designed by somebody with opinions about cardiovascular fitness, and she'd been my personal nemesis since a barbecue three years ago where we'd torn into each other over whether cutting switchbacks on a downhill trail was a sin or a lifestyle choice. She was a ranger in Cibola and I was a firefighter out of Albuquerque, and for two years the Iron Ranger Challenge had been our annual appointment to find out which one of us was less full of it. So far the results were disputed. By her, anyway.

The campfire crackled and I sat back on my heels and made the mistake of looking smug, because she came off the ridge and dropped her pack by the fire ring and said, "Enjoy it, Perry. Day one is the fire. Day two is where people like you fall apart."

"People like me," I said.

"Firemen. You're all cardio and confidence and no map skills. You navigate by parking lots."

I let that one go, which she hated, and she made a little annoyed noise and went off to string a bear line like the forest was her personal living room. Which, technically, it kind of was.

Now, the water bottle. Here's what I found about two hours after that, when the sun was going down orange behind the ridge and I went for a drink and came up with a bottle a third lighter than it should've been. I turned it over. Pinhole, down near the seam, so small you'd need to hold it against the light, and I don't mean I suspected her, I mean I found a sliver of thorn wedged into the plastic like a tiny little spear tip, and I knew exactly who'd done it. She'd done the same thing to my cooler at that barbecue, except that was ice and a lot funnier because nobody was on a mountain.

I held the bottle up, found the thorn, pulled it, and then I did nothing at all. No speech, no marching over to her fire to file charges. I just poured what was left into my smaller bottle, capped the leaky one for camp use, washing and the like, and did the arithmetic. Nineteen miles left tomorrow, October dry air, and me rationing while she'd be sipping her full bladder whenever she pleased. So I got quieter. If you know me you know that's worse. People at the station say quiet Perry means either somebody died or Perry's about to win something.

She noticed. She noticed everything, that was her whole personality, and around dusk she squinted at me over the map she was pretending to read and said, "You're sulking."

"I'm hydrating strategically."

"You're rationing," she said, and her eyes went to my water bottle and then back to me, and I watched her figure out that I'd figured it out, and I watched her decide not to apologize, because she'd sooner apologize to the thorn. "Huh," she said, and that was the entire conversation, and then she went back to her map and I went back to burning dinner.

The overnight issue was this. The Forest Service runs the challenge, and the rules say every competitor beds down at a designated rest spot, one per team, marked on the map with a little triangle, and the triangle on my map happened to be the same triangle on her map, because the course designers, in their wisdom, had matched the two most incompatible people in the Cibola National Forest on a two-mile stretch of shared trail. The rest spot was a flat clearing off Rattlesnake Bend with room for maybe three tents, one of which was already pitched, staked, and guyed out like a small performance venue when I came trudging in at last light.

Her tent. Of course her tent, on the only flat ground, in the best spot for morning sun, positioned so anyone pitching beside her would be sleeping in a drainage ditch.

"Absolutely not," I said, dropping my pack.

"Finders," she said, not looking up from her boots, which she was unlacing with the leisurely pace of a woman who had been waiting for this exact moment.

"The rest spot is shared. Rules say shared."

"The rules say you get a rest spot. Nobody says which square footage of it is yours. You're welcome to the slope by the juniper."

The slope by the juniper was maybe eight degrees off level, which at my age, forty-four next birthday, and after nineteen miles, meant waking up in a heap at the downhill corner of your tent like laundry. I stood there weighing my options, which were the ditch or marching another six miles off-course to disqualify myself, and while I stood there the camp host came up the trail with a lantern, a retired ranger named Doss who ran the checkpoint at the bend and had clearly heard the whole thing from fifty yards, because that's the kind of clearing it was.

"Evening," Doss said. "You two are the last ones in. Rule twenty-six, in case either of you slept through the briefing. One tent per team, and as of this year, you're both Team Nine."

There was a silence with a lot of weight in it.

"That's new," Nia said.

"That's this year," Doss said, with the serenity of a man holding a clipboard. "Budget cuts. One tent per team, one team per spot, and the forfeit for a solo pitch is a four-hour penalty. Shared or forfeit, folks. Dinner's at the checkpoint till eight." And he strolled off with his lantern, whistling, a man who had enjoyed his job for thirty years and enjoyed it even more tonight.

We looked at each other over the fire ring. Her tent was a one-person model, a real one-person model, not one of those generous two-person numbers with a divider, and I watched her do the same math I was doing, and for once in three years of sniping I got to see Nia Delgado genuinely stuck.

"Four-hour penalty," she said slowly, "puts you out of the running. I'd win."

"Or you could sleep next to a fireman and risk it."

"I could also pitch you that ditch and take my four hours on your misery, but that punishes me too, so." She chewed the inside of her cheek, then jerked her chin at her tent. "Fine. You get the zipper side. You snore, I'm unzipping the whole thing in October, and you can explain the penalty to your badge."

"Deal," I said, and went to get my pack, and somewhere between the juniper and her tent flap I noticed I wasn't even mad about the water bottle anymore, which was its own kind of warning sign, and I ignored it, because tomorrow was nineteen miles and the dark was coming down fast.

The tent was exactly as bad as advertised; it was a nylon sock with a zipper, and two adults who each had their own sense of personal space did not fit in it so much as interleave, like two decks of cards shuffled by an angry dealer. I got the zipper side, which meant my shoulder was against the door and my nose was six inches from the flap, and Nia got the wall side, and between us there was maybe a hand's width of vacant nylon that we both pretended was a sovereign border. She killed her little penlight almost immediately. "Saving the battery," she said, like I'd asked, and I said fine, and then we both lay there in the dark being extremely awake.

The problem was her sleeping bag, which was narrower than her, or maybe the problem was me, because at some point in the first ten minutes my knee drifted, or the floor drifted, or physics drifted, and it came to rest