Page 36 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Page twenty-two is visiting."

"Page twenty-two is transfer of kit between teams, permitted at any time, no restriction, no penalty," I say. "It is on the page because they want teams making deals on camera. So make a deal on camera."

Danna Trell looks up from under the bark.

"What do you want for it?"

"The pool under the second bend has trout in it and I have had four out of it and lost thirty in the attempt," I say. "You are a fly fisherman. Your hands do a thing when you talk about water. Come up and show me how to take a fish out of a run without wrecking the run."

Wes Trell takes the flint.

Danna Trell puts her forehead against her husband's shoulder for a second and then goes back to holding bark, and the camera operator at the creek site comes in tight on all of it, and I go back up the hill in the rain.

That is a fair trade and both halves of it are real, and I have made about nine of them in my working life and have never had to explain any of them to anybody.

I will be explaining this one for the rest of my life.

Junie is up on the roof when the sound comes off the trail at four.

It is the wrong sound. It is boots, several sets, and one of them is walking at the speed of somebody who has never once been late.

Delia Prine comes over the lip of the bench in a charcoal shell with the hood down, no pack, no camera on her, with two crew behind her, and one of the crew is carrying a folding chair and a thermos, and the other is carrying nothing at all, which is somehow the worst part.

Executive producers do not come to camp. Nobody has told me this. It arrives all at once, from the way Neve stands up off the stool without being asked, and from the way Bear takes his hands off the rig.

The chair goes down on the wet ground in front of my shelter and Delia Prine sits in it, and crosses one boot over her knee, and smiles at me like a woman arriving at a lunch she booked weeks ago.

"Aluminum," I say.

"Sorry?"

"The chair. Seven eighths tube, riveted, canvas seat." I set the axe down. "Rated two hundred and twenty pounds. It will hold you. It would fold under me like a wet card."

Delia Prine laughs, genuinely, with her head back, and pours coffee out of the thermos into a steel cup, and steam comes off it into all that rain.

"Ghorlan," she says. "I have been so looking forward to this."

CHAPTER 15

JUNIE

DAY 8

Delia Prine comes back up the hill at nine in the morning on Day Eight and asks me to take a walk.

"There's a spot," she says. "Twenty minutes down. You'll like it."

I like it a great deal, which is the problem.

The spot is where the ridge road ends in a turnaround, and in the turnaround there is a side by side with the engine running and the heater on and both doors open, and a folding table with a thermos on it, and a box of pastries under plastic wrap that somebody drove up two ridges this morning for ninety people who are not me.

"Sit in the cab," Delia says. "Take the heat. I'm not going to pretend that isn't a tactic."

I sit in the cab. The heat comes up off the floor vents and gets into my ankles, which have been wet since the drop, and I have a physical reaction to it that I am glad nobody is pointing a lens at.

She pours coffee into a steel cup and hands it to me and sits sideways in the other seat with her boots in the rain.

"You're doing extremely well," she says.