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as fast as he could. “When did they drop it?”
    “Two days ago.”
    “Is there a signal, a GPS?”
    “No. Yes, but weak. A mile max. I know the flight line and the hour it went missing. This is a private experimental aircraft and they don’t want to lose that piece or leave it out there. It’s bigger, much bigger than the stuff I showed you.” He unfolded the USGS map. There was a red oval that covered the entire diagonal. “We may not find it, any trace, and that’s worth five grand, but you’ve got to look. We need this.” Yarnell opened his face in the sincere way that great liars can and Mack knew that face.
    “I don’t know where it is,” he said. “I need you. It’s a long shot, but you know the country.”
    “Some,” Mack said. After a minute he added, “I’m taking Vonnie.”
    “I thought . . .”
    “You thought what about Vonnie, Mr. Yarnell? She’s a friend of mine. Is it at all dangerous or just a walk in the big woods?”
    “A walk,” Yarnell said. He opened the glove box and pulled out a packet of hundreds. Mack saw his own hand go out and take the money. Twenty bills. “A start. Good luck. Go bowling and have a sandwich. You know how the BlackBerry works. It should be a walk in the woods.”
    With the money in his pocket, Mack had no position from which to speak. He pushed open the door with some effort and slid to the ground. In the last year every time somebody had handed Mack a sheaf of money, it had been freighted with shame and this was no different. He could taste it. Mack heard the vehicle back and drive out through the gravel. He walked up under the humming sign and entered the carpeted auditorium which smelled of beer and echoed with muffled crashing.

    Now the wind came up as if charged by the great shadows, and with the sun gone, the cold gathered. Vonnie always fished until he called it; she wouldn’t quit first. His bobber was bright in the lake, something as out of place as it could be. “They’re in here,” he said, “but let’s leave them tonight. It’s chilly.” The far hill had collapsed into darkness and the birds were gone.
    “One more,” she said, drawing an elegant arc with her flyline and tipping the fly in the lee of the rocky bank forty feet farther. She reeled in and turned to him. There was a smile on her face, and he saw it. Fishing worked. It was something that still worked.
    In their campsite Mack fed up the fire and banked it with a little log windward in case they got up in the middle of the night and needed to refire for tea or cocoa, and he sat in the tent and pulled on his sweatpants. He felt like a man washed up on the beach after trying to drown himself. His shoulders hurt. How could he have made such mistakes? Ten years and here he was in a tent alone. He groaned, a habit he disliked in himself, but it was better than the swearing that had taken him months to stop. Somewhere getting in his car and he’d say, Fuck me, and look around and have to silently take it back. He drew a deep breath. He could feel the altitude headache like a tight hat. He heard noises but they were nothing; the first night way up like this and it always seemed the woods were full of traffic. He climbed out of the tent again and erected his clothesline in the dark and clipped the blue and green towel to it with a wooden clothespin. He always had clothespins. Vonnie had bedded against the windward rock in the pine needles. “You want in the tent?”
    “I’m good,” she said, crawling in her bag. “This goes to twenty below.”
    “That’s plenty,” he said. “You won’t need a hot stone.” She gave him a look. He’d burned his sleeping bag with a rock plucked from the campfire on their third trip. “You want a story?”
    “Oh Mack, not tonight.”
    “Those were fine eagles,” he said. “I wonder if we’ll see our owl.”
    “It’s not ours,” she said.
    “It’s ours,” he said.

Day Three
     
    At dawn the bowl of mountain sky grew from gray to