Page 10 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

She comes over. Rain running off the end of her nose.

I put two fingers on the ridge seam. "Water gets to here and stops being water and starts being a path. A path always takes the stitching. Put the fabric over the cord and the cord is a spine. Put the fabric under it and the cord is a gutter aimed at your face."

She studies it a moment.

"Huh," she says. "That's actually elegant."

"It is only elegant if you turn it over."

"You could have just fixed it."

"You would not have learned it."

"I might have preferred that."

"You will not prefer it on day fifteen."

She laughs, once, surprised out of her, and starts pulling stakes.

Behind us, Bear has not moved and the red light has not gone off.

And I understand something with a completeness that arrives all at once, the way a joint goes home when you have cut it right.

They filmed all of that. They filmed me coming down the hill and stopping. They filmed her hands on her hips. They filmed a very large person explaining water to a very small person under a tarp she hung backward.

Nothing in those eleven minutes helps her.

CHAPTER 5

JUNIE

DAY 1

Cold gets in through the joints.

That is the part nobody puts in a montage. It does not arrive at the skin and stay there like a polite guest. It comes up through the hips off the ground, it settles into the backs of the knees, and by two in the morning my jaw has been clenched for so long that my back teeth ache like a bruise.

The tarp is perfect now. That is the humiliating part. Ghorlan re-hung it in about ninety seconds, ridge over the cord, strong corners into the wind, eaves down to a hand's width off the dirt, and it is dry under there in a way that seems almost rude.

The ground is the problem, and the ground is my fault, because he told me to gather spruce boughs for four hours and I gathered spruce boughs for about ninety minutes and then started doing something else.

The something else was decorating.

I want that on the record before anybody else puts it there. I took the flat rocks from the creek and I set them in a line along the uphill eave, which does actually stop splash, and then I kept going, and now there is a small stacked cairn at each end and a piece of driftwood shaped like a heron leaning against the spruce and a row of yellow leaves pinned under a stone in descending size order.

Ghorlan came back with an armload of cedar bark and stopped and looked at the leaves for about four seconds.

"Those do nothing," he said.

"Correct."

Then he stepped around them instead of over them and went to work on the fire.

So the boughs are three inches deep where they need to be eight, and my body has been having a slow argument with the planet since about ten o'clock, and I lie on my side with my knees up in a wool blanket that smells like a horse, and I run the numbers, because running numbers is what I do instead of sleeping.

Here is the count.

Things I have done correctly today: one hitch.