1.

The man with dead grouse piled in the bed of his pickup will call you brave. Do not interpret this as anything but what it is, which is a threat. You know there’s grizzlies in this area, don’t you? he will say. Brave of you to be up here alone.

Be cordial. Say thank you. Bury the anger in your voice only deep enough so that you’ll be able to dig it up later. Don’t let him find it. Give him only the satisfaction of your stuttering tongue. He will twist your yielding like a grouse’s neck and think his muscled wrists strong. Let him.

He wants you to be angry. That’s why—when the two of you met on the trail, you pulling slash across a tread that shouldn’t be there, him rattling down on a mountain bike with a hunting bow strapped to his broad back—he immediately pulled his phone out and began recording. You leftist environmental extremists are infiltrating the government, he said. Locking up these lands. You want it all for yourself.

He wants you to be afraid. He asks for your name and, because you already have a nameplate pinned to your uniform front, you give it to him. Don’t think about the fear rippling like broken thunder inside your chest. Continue to call him sir.

Remember the canister of bear spray clipped to your side, swinging against your right hip, but how could you think of anything else since the moment he skidded pale grains of quartz against your boots, twisted his face into fury, and spat, What the fuck? As you walk a quarter of a mile back down the trail with him right beside you—berating you, arguing with you, recording you—don’t think about what killed the grouse in his truck bed, how your back is now turned to an armed, angry man.

Do step back into your Forest Service rig. Do remember that the man’s truck is parked facing a shut gate. He will have to turn around. This will give you a few minutes to drive ahead, for the dust to settle back into the washboards and the trace of you to be gone. Remember you know this place better than him. Remember when he said there weren’t any goddamn elk in this country and you replied you’d seen plenty of droppings and tracks just that morning. Remember when he scoffed that it was nearly impossible to reach Bull Lake and you told him you’d made it there twice this summer. Remember how his eyes looked like he was falling.

Start the engine and drive away without looking back. Do not think about the fist thrumming with hot blood around your throat. Drive, but don’t continue down the way you came, the only way out. Turn onto a side road, a dead-end road. Stop in front of a locked gate, draw your trembling legs from the cab, and unlock the gate. Don’t think about the irony. Drive through and lock it behind you. Keep driving until a bend in the hillside hides you, until it’s just you and the warm truck and a carpet of knapweed across the roadbed and wind brushing through alder above you. Until, again, you’re alone.

As is protocol, pull out your satellite phone and listen to the signal ping through the atmosphere to whatever vessels sweep, invisible and latched to sunlight, overhead. Call the Forest law enforcement officer first, then your supervisor, to relay what happened. You can come back early, use sick leave, stay home and write up the incident report from your back porch and spend the evening watching a movie about eight women who plan a jewelry heist and get away with it.

First, though, you can falter. Bend towards the dry ground and heave all the stuttering from your lips. Do not blame yourself. Do not think about all the shut gates with ramshackle pickups parked in front of them. There’s no need to feel guilty for hiding behind gates only you have the keys to. Keep some things for yourself.

Think of the quiet bodies of the grouse. Remember they can only fly as high as branches, never to the sky. Grouse can’t soar. Their plumage is just a puffed-out buffer against falling. Remember that their only defense is to rush what frightens them.

2.

Don’t call yourself lucky. Luck is for pinochle and traffic lights and good roommates on Craigslist and the knot of bad weather that breaks the minute you step onto the trail. When you read story after story of sexual harassment in the Forest Service and Park Service and interagency fire crews, don’t say it surprises you. It doesn’t, even though it hasn’t happened to you. Do not call this shelter of trauma luck. Luck pardons those who would harm you. Luck turns your hands either passive or at fault.

When you attend a training about standing up to workplace harassment, bury your anger again. You are told of the long, bureaucratic process it takes for a complaint to bounce around HR up to Washington and back to the local office, where the details of punishment are confidential. The person in question may simply be moved out of a leadership role, put in a different duty location. Sure, they will be punished. But you, or anyone else, probably won’t know how. This is to protect the harasser. Do not question this logic.

Do not think too much about the extra weight of protocol. Field evac forms for splintered bones and hypothermia, certifications for the chainsaw and crosscut. Practice the release of bear spray in an empty field prickled in tumbleweed. Add the thought of leap-frogging line officers to make a complaint, rating the severity of the harassment, parsing which HR call center is applicable, launching shock into nondisclosure agreements. Do not think too much about this added layer of awareness, an inversion of smoke atop haze. Keep your eyes open for mountain lions, handguns strapped to hips, hazard trees, meth labs, bears, militia logos on tailgates, game cameras, bull moose, darkening skies. Add an unfamiliar trail or fire crew. Add a shared bunkhouse. Add an office.

Tell yourself this meeting is still progress. Remember there are middle-aged men in the group. They have daughters. Their fury is valid and it will carry more weight than yours. Do not question this, not right now. Slip your thumbnail under the clip of your pen and concentrate on the slim nudge of force it would take to snap it across the conference room. Study the white creases in the plastic, beading there like graupel. Think about the millimeters your thumb has to go before the clip breaks. Do not break it. Not yet.

Luck is for huckleberry hunting and which radio repeaters will catch above the cliff bands. For days off falling when Brandi Carlile comes to town and trees toppling just shy of the tread. For raffle tickets and online dating and winning three hundred bucks at the slot machines. For the doe skirting into the ditch at the last moment. The rest you build with intention. The rest is shaped and tacked and plastered by blistered palms into a ladder still for the taking. Some days the ladder lifts your confidence. Some days it reveals only your vulnerability.

Let your forearms ache with the weight of an ax. Remember how you feel when you carry your tools from your rig into the shop, heavy across your shoulders. Inside, splash a whetstone with cool water, trace it in soft circles over the blade. Shave the metal down to its finest ridge. This is where the power waits, millimeters from nothing. Run your thumb over top, protected by the callus you’ve worn there, tender to the finest lip that will gut deadwood roots.

3.

When the clerk at the running store tells you this canister of pepper spray is best for close range, nod your head. You’ve started running alone miles and miles back into Pattee Canyon, where you hear of black bears loping alongside joggers and mountain lions stalking kids at the bus stop. Tell the man you’re not too worried, that a small canister should be fine. Only mention the lions and bears. But mostly, remember the story you heard of a woman running the riverside path at dusk. Remember why you need close-range pepper spray.

If it’s dark, carry this canister almost everywhere with you. When you walk home from campus, past the frat houses with their thumping basses and drawn blinds, cross to the opposite sidewalk and coax the canister into your palm. Nudge it in your shoulder bag when you go out, even though it’s a pain to rifle around to reach your wallet. Do not let it settle to the bottom of the bag among crinkled receipts and grocery lists on post-it notes and loose change dragging on your shoulder like an anchor.

When you move across the country for grad school, bring the small canister with you. Leave it in your school backpack for walking home after evening classes, and when your friend tells you she saw a man jerking off into the bushes blocks from your apartment one night, transfer it back to your pocket.

For a year your room will face the fire escape, and a skinny man with his hood drawn will sit on the stairs late into the night outside your window. Switch the alarm on the windowpane, draw your blinds, pin a blanket across the whole windowsill. Hook the pepper spray—the bear spray for close encounters—on your lamp, right by your head. Call the property management company. Tell them the motion-sensor cameras on the fire escape aren’t working. Check the lock to the door that opens to the landing. When you see the skinny man tucked into the corner against the door one night, pour half a refill bottle of liquid soap on the step in the morning. Bang on the door before you go to bed, watch for his shadow to steal away. Check the deadbolt every night.

Count the days until you return home, where you can tell yourself the pepper spray is for curious bears and lions perched in ponderosa limbs. Lying in your bed, learn to count your heartbeats, until they patter beyond number and roar like a spring flood in your mouth.

4.

The bear’s prints are twice as wide as your palm. In the grainy spring snow, press your fingertips into the depressions pushed in by the toes. Claws made for grubbing curve into the drift. Think about what it would mean to greet this bear’s warm paws.

Follow the stride down into a gully, back up a cutbank. Do not stray too far; this is your first work patrol of the season, slogging atop five-foot drifts, and there is no trail. You haven’t been up this way in two years.

Remember the curve of Lake Creek below, rushing past meadows clouded by bear grass come August. Remember the slope of the land, snowpack or not. You have been here before. You have coaxed trailside huckleberries into these same palms, pitched fallen snags downslope. You know where you’re headed.

Remember the hunger of the bear, the lunch chilled in your pack. Remember this presence, solitude, humility. You are not afraid. Remember this feeling. Like the treetops will buoy you into sky, like the land is the language you know best. Like danger holds no ill intent, only a sky that will drop squalls across your shoulders, only a bear as curious and wild as you.

5.

When headlights swallow moonlight from the dome of your tent, cut your sleep-heavy conversation to silence. You and your friend, lying here in your sleeping bags, can talk about your love lives later. Listen to the rumble of an old engine in the pullout where you are car camping, growl of exhaust over dry-packed dust. Listen to the vehicle roll back and forth as if it’s turning around but doesn’t. Look at your friend through the grainy orange light. The engine chokes to silence.

Slowly unzip one of the mesh windows of the tent, then the fly. Watch a man slide from the ramshackle SUV, walk around the vehicle. He doesn’t seem to notice your car is also parked in the pullout. He doesn’t seem to notice your tent is pitched a couple dozen yards away, but you never know. The high beams did catch your shadow.

Watch the man unload objects from the bed, drop them lightly on the hard dusty ground. Some make a quiet thump, buffered with air, but none catch the faint light from the man’s cab. Wonder what he’s doing. Give him the benefit of the doubt, until you feel your friend stiffen beside you, her breaths quiet but loaded with fear.

Listen to the creek just down the field whisper its words through the night. Do not move, but watch, still as a whitetail before she bolts. The man’s hands knot together and scratch a flame into the darkness, which he drops on the pile at his feet.

Oh, no he’s not, you hiss. For a moment, let yourself think of fire restrictions and tinder-dry grass in this meadow and the jackstraws of fallen lodgepole sprawling these mountains. Do not trip into guilt for taking yourself, briefly, away from your own danger. Let your mind babble upstream, thread into the landscape, break the brittle twigs of kinnikinnick. Here, it is dry. Here, the land will buck with flames.

Your friend whispers your name. Pull your mind back from the brittle tongues of cheatgrass. Watch the man. Watch how the firelight, worming through stacks of floppy paper, dims and catches his sharp cheekbones. He circles back around his vehicle. The cab light switches dark.

Nope, we’re going now, your friend says. You hesitate only briefly. Then you do go. In the quick sprint from the tent to your car, take only what your hands can hold—phone, keys, and the canister of bear spray. Sprigs of hollow grass stab bare feet. Moon-cool air rushes against your faces, and then you are there, heartbeats thundering into eardrums. Click the car doors locked.

But your hands hesitate with the keys. Look to your friend, the moonlight like milk on her face, behind you where the man hangs in the shadow of his SUV, back to the silhouette of your tent in the field. We need to go, she says again. Forget the fire, the restrictions. Remember where you are. Remember who you are.

Your friend repeats your name, a spark of recognition where your mind swarms for excuses. This is your life, she says.

And you look again at the black dome of your tent. I know, you murmur, but you are thinking of everything left there in the grass—tent and sleeping bag and your grandfather’s Leatherman and rain jacket and maps and field journal where you’ve scribbled your soul wild. I know, you say. But really you mean all these things are your life; what you bear in the backcountry presses heavy against your spine, keeping you warm and dry and fed and comfortable and comforted and hydrated and free, as if with every ounce of gear gained your body sheds what the world deems it—vulnerable, fragile, passive. Here are the objects you carry to make yourself feel less like one. Here are the buffers that unwind a narrative your hands won’t let go—out here, moonstruck under nylon, as if all you should fear are bears.

Turn to your friend. Learn to accept when it is time to go. Jam the keys in the ignition. Shift briefly into reverse, spray the dogwoods trimming the creek with blood-red light, then spin around the pullout. Press your bare foot onto the gas pedal, down the dirt road, following the moon. You and your friend shutter out breaths; let your strong hand find hers. Leave everything else behind.