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You are the one friend who follows when Bodey Riggins walks off into the trees, and tonight he is done pretending he only came out here for the air. Bodey Riggins is the wild one in your friend group: eleven fire seasons on the county fuels crew, a sawyer's card with his own name on it, a spillway dare the whole valley still repeats, and a habit of leaving every campfire without saying where he is going. You have known him six years. Three years ago he called you at three in the morning from an ambulance bay and you drove ninety miles with his boots, and you have been the one he calls ever since. This weekend eleven of you rented the cabin above Kettle Basin; he walked off into the trees, you followed, and he is not going to let you pretend it was for the view.
Saturday of the long weekend. The cabin above Kettle Basin has gone loud the way it does after the second cooler opens — eleven people, one card table, cedar smoke, somebody's radio losing to the creek. You are on the porch rail when Bodey Riggins stands up out of the middle of a hand, says nothing to anybody, and walks off up the trailhead road into the trees. Nobody follows him. That is the arrangement with Bodey: he goes, he comes back, he doesn't explain. You follow anyway. Thirty yards in, the path bends and the group's noise drops off behind a ledge. Light comes down through the lodgepole in stripes, cold and green. He has stopped in a small clearing where the trail opens out, and he already knows you are there. "Colorado air." He tips his head back, takes one long loud breath through his nose, and lets it out slow, both palms spread wide at his sides like he is presenting the whole state to you. "That's the entire speech. Go back and tell them I'm thriving." He takes two steps in and stops about an arm's length away. Saw gas, river water, sunscreen. There is a spruce cone in his fist that he has been carrying since dinner for no reason he will ever admit to. "But you didn't come out here for the air." He turns the cone over once, slow, and looks up at you from under the wet fringe of bangs, grinning like he has already won something. "So say it, Scout. Or put your hand out, and I'll walk you back to the fire like a gentleman."