Page 6 of Mountain Man's Firefly Girl
3
BREANNA
Ishowed up at Wildwood River Co. at 6:45 with my sampling kit, a headlamp, two mesh collection nets, a digital thermometer, a waterproof notebook, and the absolute certainty that I was going to keep this professional.
The kit was organized the way I organized everything—labeled, compartmentalized, each piece in its designated pocket. I'd prepped it all at the inn that morning, sitting cross-legged on the bed while the coffee Bobbi had left outside my door went cold because I forgot about it.
I was good at forgetting about things when the work was in front of me. Coffee. Meals. Sleep. The fact that a man had looked at me across a diner booth last night and said "I know what I like" while holding my eyes long enough to make my neck flush…
I was forgetting about that. Actively. With effort.
Bishop was at the dock with a two-person raft pulled up on the bank—not the commercial rigs I'd seen stacked on the racks yesterday, but something smaller, more maneuverable. He was checking the oar locks, moving through the inspection with the same calm I'd seen in everything he did.
He was wearing a faded T-shirt that fit him in ways I was not going to catalog, along with shorts and river sandals. He looked like he'd been doing this his whole life.
"You're early," he said without looking up.
"Fifteen minutes isn't early. Fifteen minutes is on time."
He glanced at me then. Down to the sampling kit, the nets, the headlamp around my neck. Up to my face. Something like approval—the look of a person recognizing someone who showed up prepared.
I loaded the kit and kept the notebook and thermometer out. He held the raft steady while I stepped in, and his hand came to my elbow—brief, firm, gone before I could decide whether it bothered me.
It didn't bother me. That was the problem.
He pushed off, and the river took us.
The first twenty minutes were spent on the chute—the Class II section below Hadley Bend that kept casual paddlers off this stretch, he said. He read it without hesitation, finding the line through the rocks the way a person followed a path they'd walked a thousand times in the dark. The water was fast and loud, whitewater folding over ledges and kicking spray across the bow, and he navigated it with an ease that made it look like the river was cooperating with him rather than the other way around.
I held my notebook and didn't write anything in it. I was too busy watching him work.
Then the chute opened up and the river changed.
The current slowed. The banks widened. The water went from white and churning to dark and smooth, catching the last of the light in copper and amber. The canopy opened on the south bank where he'd said the hemlocks had come down, and the sky above it was enormous, going from blue to gold to the deep rose-orange that meant sunset was twenty minutes out.
Hadley Bend. He'd described it from memory, and he'd been exactly right.
I pulled the thermometer out and dipped it over the side. Seventy-two degrees. Exactly what he'd said.
"This is it," I said, and my voice came out quieter than I intended.
Bishop shipped the oars and let the raft drift. He didn't say anything. He just let me look.
I opened my notebook. Started recording—GPS coordinates, water temperature, time, sky conditions. The margins were perfect. Better than perfect. If thePhotinuspopulation here was anything close to what the habitat predicted, this site would anchor my entire field study.
"The bank on the south side," I said, pointing with my pen. "Where the hemlocks came down—what's growing there now?"
"Bee balm. Joe-pye weed. Black-eyed Susans. Some goldenrod coming in, but it's early for it. The grasses are mostly river oats."
He seemed to list them from memory, without effort. Not a botanist. Just a man who'd spent twelve years paying attention to a piece of the world and remembering what he saw.
"River oats are good," I said. "The stems give the adults vertical structure for perching and signaling. And the wildflower mix means pollinator activity, which means prey insects for the larvae." I caught myself. "Sorry?—"
"Don't."
I looked at him.
"Don't apologize for knowing things," he said.
