Chapter 25

The Jeep was red, a glorious fire engine red.

Quinn stood in the driveway and looked at it in disbelief.

The Colonel walked up to him and tossed him the keys.

He had no words.

The Colonel must have recognized that not having words was its own statement of profound gratitude. He smiled a rare smile.

"You earned it. Smith took some of your brass to a jeweler in Reno and had that coin made as a memento of your month at the ranch."

The key fob was attached to a heavy brass coin with a "Mil-Dot" reticle engraved on both sides.

"Thank you," Quinn said. The words seemed so inadequate that he had to repeat them. "Thank you."

Sullivan stood behind him, a slight smile on his face. "You did good, Quinn. Real good." Rare words of praise from him.

The kitchen door opened.

Maria came out of the house. "You men get out of the way." She looked at Quinn with her bright, welcoming smile. "My boy here is taking me for a ride in his new Jeep."

He drove her to an ice cream place on Clement Street. It was Tuesday afternoon and February cold. They were the only two people in the place.

She got two scoops of something chocolate and complicated. He got one scoop of vanilla, which she looked at with theatrical concern.

"Vanilla," she said. "You are such an old man."

"I like vanilla," he said.

"You like vanilla because it doesn't ask anything of you," she said, settling into the booth with comfortable authority.

He thought about this for a moment. "That might be true," he said.

She laughed the full laugh. Afterward, they drove home through the winter streets. Maria filled him in on the latest doings of her sister and her kids.

She never asked about Neveda and Quinn didn't talk about it. He instinctively knew to keep it to himself, besides the experience was his to understand in his own time.

Instead, he told Maria about passing the driver's license test. She was appropriately impressed with his accomplishment.

When they got back, Sullivan showed him the hidden gun safe in the library and made him memorize the combination, an acknowledgment of his new status. He also informed him of the regular range practice that he needed to add to his schedule.

The girls recruited him the minute they saw his new Jeep.

"You go right past my house," Katherine said.

"Okay," he said.

"And Sheila's is basically on the way," Katherine said.

"Basically," Sheila said in her own voice, having evidently decided this conversation didn't require a character.

He looked at Keiko.

"My driver," she said, with the delicacy of someone navigating between two systems simultaneously, "is a formal arrangement. I don't think..."

"I'll talk to your father," Quinn said.

She looked at him, her expression asking whether he understood what talk to your father involved.

"He's particular," she said. "About arrangements."

"I know," Quinn said. "I'll be respectful."

She smiled. "Very well."

The conversation with Mr. Yamamoto was the following weekend. It was a brief meeting, formal but warm. Quinn was direct about the driving arrangement, the route, the school schedule, and a bit about the scope of his driving training in Nevada. He answered the questions put to him without elaboration and without deflection and at the end, the Consul agreed.

Now that he had wheels, he could date. He did not consider dating the three girls. Anytime they were together, it was always the four of them.

Instead, he asked the girls in his classes. He took Emily Winters to a play at the Rep downtown, which he'd read about and thought she'd like.

She liked it. He was proud of himself that she'd enjoyed it.

When Sheila heard about that, she wasn't happy. He hurriedly asked if they all would like to see the play at the Rep.

"Why yes, we would," Sheila said. "How thoughtful of you to ask."

He chose the girls he dated by some internal algorithm he didn't really understand. He liked them all. He was genuinely interested in them. They had fun. But any deeper closeness was not something he was able to give.

He was direct when directness was kind and oblique when obliqueness was kind. He did not use them and he did not let them use him.

He took Katherine, Sheila, and Keiko to the winter homecoming dance.

This had been Sheila's suggestion, delivered with the flat certainty of a forgone conclusion: "You're taking us to homcoming. It's been decided."

Okay then.

Sullivan drove him in the Bentley, with Maria in the front seat to take pictures. He stopped at each house. Katherine, first dressed in an elegant dark green. They stood patiently for pictures. Then it was off to Sheila's house, who was dressed all in black satin, looking utterly beautiful; again, the pictures. Then to Keiko's, who wore a dress that managed to be both distinctly Japanese in its aesthetic and entirely appropriate for a California high school dance. More pictures there.

He wore his dark blue suit that the tailor had fitted with a tie that Ms. O'Toole had selected.

The dance was fun. He danced with all three of them and with other girls. He watched Keiko navigate her first American high school dance with the collected attention she brought to all new experiences. He watched Sheila be herself at full volume. Katherine was in her element. She was, after all, one of the beautiful people in the school's social hierarchy.

Afterward, Sullivan brought them to the Colonel's house. They transferred to the Jeep and went out for burgers and cokes. The four of them laughed and talked, running on post-event energy.

He dropped each of them at their door and kissed each one goodnight.

It had been, he thought, a perfect date.

It was almost like he was a regular kid.

Chapter 26

Three weeks later, they weren't speaking to him.

The whole thing had started when Paula Reeves came up to him in the library after his tutoring session. They had dated a couple of times and had fun.

She sat down across from him, looking simultaneously terrified and determined.

He was just finishing his math homework when she sat down. This was unusual; Paula was smart; surely, she didn't need his help. Her grade point average was the same as his.

He noticed her nervousness and the determined set of her shoulders.

"What's up, buttercup?" He kept his tone light, trying to help her relax a bit. He liked Paula. She had gone out of her way to be nice to him on his first day at school.

"Quinn, I want to ask you something. And I want you to understand that I've thought about it seriously."

"Okay," he said. "Shoot."

She held his gaze with the air of someone who has rehearsed a thing and is now finding the asking harder than she imagined.

"I've decided I want my first time to be with someone I trust," she blurted. "Who won't make it weird in a way that I don't want. And who'll be..." She stopped, then found the word. "Nice."

He looked at her.

Quinn could see right away what it had cost her to approach him.

He took a deep breath.

Careful here.

"Okaaaay, I'm listening. Go on. And hey, relax; it's just me here. The dorky guy who practically tripped and fell on his face when we first met."

"I'm asking you, not as a relationship thing. I'm not looking for that. Just this one thing, because I've thought about it and you're who I'd choose." She paused another deep breath. "I don't want to head off to Cal and still be a virgin."

She stopped and looked at him, nervously playing with her hair.

Quinn sat with this and thought about her--the actual person he'd been sitting next to in Ferretti's history class for two years.

He thought about what she was asking and what it required and what it would mean to get it wrong. Quinn was a sophisticated young man, but he was also a romantic when his life experience said he shouldn't be. His childhood had been dire; by the time he gained access to the sex culture of the Internet, he was too busy to engage with it. His sexual encounters were real, with real girls, not the fantasies that most teenage boys held in their imaginations. Plus, his experiences had given him a profound hatred for predators of all kinds.

The need here was attention. Real attention to an actual person. Everything else followed from that or didn't follow at all.

He had been thinking about this long enough that she had started shifting in her chair, her courage draining away the longer he was quiet.

"Paula," he said. "Can I ask you something first?"

"Yes?"

"Have you thought about why you want this to be separate from a relationship? Why would you want to divide them?"

"Because the relationship thing is complicated. I'm going to be a doctor. I don't have the time for a boyfriend," she said. "I want this to be a simple life experience."

He nodded slowly. "Okay," he said. "I understand that." He paused. "Can I tell you what I think you want and you tell me if I'm reading it right?"

"Okay," she said.

"You want the experience to be what it is," he said carefully. "Without all the expectation and obligation that a relationship would build around it."

She looked at him. Something in her expression shifted--the relief of being understood.

"Yes," she said. "That's exactly it."

"And you picked me because you think I can do that," he said.

"Because I think you can be with me and not make it about yourself." She paused. "You do that with everyone. I've watched you for two years."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I'm going to tell you something," he said. "And I want you to receive it as information rather than as rejection because my answer is yes. Okay?"

Her shoulders came down slightly at the yes. "Okay," she said.

"Careful has a definition for me that's more demanding than you might think. It means you leave me in better shape than you arrived. Not just unharmed. Actually better. More yourself." He looked at her directly. "That's what I'm agreeing to. Not just the act. The whole thing."

She held his gaze. "That's a lot more than I asked for."

"I know," he said. "But that's what careful means to me."

She was quiet.

"You're pretty scared," he said.

"Very, that's partly why I'm asking you. I think I'll be less scared with you than with anyone else I can think of."

"That makes sense. Being scared is fine. You telling me means you're being honest." He paused. "That's one thing I need from you, and it's the hardest thing."

"What do you mean?"

"Honesty," he said. "The whole time. No telling me you're fine when you're not fine. I can't deal with you lying to make yourself look good."

She looked at him for a long time.

"I can do that," she said. "I think that's actually easier with you than it would be with someone I was trying to impress."

"You're not trying to impress me?" he grinned with mock dismay.

"No," she said. "I already know what you think of me."

"What do I think of you?"

"You like me. You've liked me ever since we met, but not 'liked liked', I could tell when we dated last month."

He looked at her. "Yes."

"So, Saturday?" she asked.

Quinn ran through logistics.

"Saturday works," he said. "I'll handle the details."

She nodded once, the nod of someone checking off a to-do list.

He smiled. This whole idea was so Paula.

She looked at him and smiled. "Thank you for not making it weird."

"It's not weird," he said. "It's just two people treating each other like people."

She almost smiled. "I don't think most people can manage that."

"We can. That's why I agreed."

She stood, picked up her bag, and looked at him for a final moment.

She left.

Quinn sat for ten minutes, thinking: This could go wrong in so many ways.

For some reason, his mind went to Jean Auel's Ayla and Jondalar--the tenderness in those sex scenes. Maybe that was the way it could be.

He took a deep breath, thought: Okay, I can do that.

Paula got in the Jeep on Saturday afternoon. She looked worried, scared, and awkward. She wouldn't meet his eyes.

This won't do.

He put the Jeep in gear and drove; as he drove, he put on some low classical music: Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2. The Colonel's latest assignment. He'd been listening to it ever since he came back from Nevada. It was calming.

"There's this woman," he said, breaking the silence, his eyes on the road with his now practiced driving awareness. "Named Ayla. She's Cro-Magnon, living among Neanderthals who found her on the steppe, all by herself when she was little. They raised her. She's different from them in ways she can't fully understand because she has no reference point of her own kind."

Paula's head came up.

"She's capable of things they can't do," he said. "She thinks differently, learns differently, sees the world differently. It isolates her. She loves the people who raised her, but she doesn't belong with them. That confuses her, and she keeps trying harder. But that doesn't work either, and they end up banishing her."

He drove. Paula listened, nervousness forgotten.

"In those times, banishment was almost certain death. She was a young woman alone on the steppes of prehistoric Crimea, armed with nothing but a sling and boundless determination. Her story is riveting. The thing about Ayla is that she is a true innocent. She's never lived among people like her, the Cro-Magnons, modern humans. She is not even aware they exist. She lives by herself until she rescues a young human man named Jondalar."

"What's he like?" she asked. She was fully engaged in the story.

Quinn was quiet for a moment. "Tall," he said. "Genuinely good at most things. The kind of man who takes his responsibilities seriously. She thinks she is ugly; he thinks her beautiful. After a while, they fall in love. And eventually make love."

He paused. "Auel's word for their lovemaking is that they share pleasures, which is what I think sex should be."

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "You and me, we're going to be sharing pleasures."

Paula looked out the passenger window at the city going past.

She was quiet for a moment, then smiled. "Holy crap, you're way more romantic than you look."

"Don't tell anyone. It'll ruin my reputation as a dork."

She laughed, a real laugh. Quinn heard it and knew the afternoon was going to be what it was supposed to be because she was herself now, the nervousness still present but not weighing on her.

He pulled up to the hotel he had chosen.

She laughed again. "Seriously? The St. Regis?"

"Well, I thought of finding a no-tell motel and renting a room for an hour. But then I thought, what the hell, splurge a little."

She laughed again. "You are such a strange weirdo." She linked her arm in his, and they went inside.

He was careful in all the ways that careful meant. He was patient. He was honest, and he paid attention to her and not to himself. When it was over, she lay beside him in the quiet of the hotel room and looked at the ceiling, and he could read from the quality of her silence that she was okay--genuinely okay--which was what mattered.

"Pleasures," she said after a while.

"You okay?" he said.

"Absolutely."

"Me too," he said. "Thank you for picking me."

She giggled. "You are so welcome."

He drove her home in the Jeep at midnight. He walked her to her door and kissed her softly. She looked up at him with glimmering eyes and said, "Friends?"

"Friends," he said.

She nodded once. "Thank you."

What he had not anticipated was that she would talk to her friends. He'd been, he thought later, more than a little naive about the social networking instincts of girls.

The three girls knew the details by lunch on Monday. They made their displeasure known by sitting at another table at lunch.

Quinn gave them the space and went about his day. He had nothing to feel sorry or guilty about. They would come around when they decided to or not.

He sat at the table, ate Maria's lunch, and talked to Peter, James, and Will about the latest strategy game they were making.

It took four days.

On Friday, Sheila sat down beside him. She looked at him with bright, direct eyes.

"Paula Reyes," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"For God's sake, sharing pleasures at the fucking St. Regis?"

"I have no comment on that."

Sheila looked at him for a long moment with the assessing attention that reminded him of her at nine years old.

"This was her idea?"

"I have no comment on that."

"Honest to Christ. You are such an asshole."

"Thank you. Thank you for your support," Quinn said, as if he were a senator talking to a constituent thanking her for her vote.

She slapped his arm.

Katherine arrived. She sat down, opened her lunch, and looked at Quinn.

"For God's sake. Pleasures? At the St. Regis?"

That got one of Sheila's full-throated laughs.

"She told Emma Burns," Katherine said, "that it was the absolute best experience she could have imagined."

"I have no comment about that. I already told your minion that," he said.

She ignored him. "I'm still deciding how I feel about it."

Keiko arrived last. She sat down and looked over at Quinn.

"Pleasures?" she said.

That got another giggle from Sheila.

"Hi, Keiko, glad to see you," Quinn said.

"Kono yaro." (You asshole.)

Quinn laughed.

"Katherine is right," Sheila said. "You are genuinely the weirdest person I know."

Peter looked up from his book across the table. "Are you guys done?"

"Yes," Katherine said. "We're done."

"Good," Peter said. "Because I have an idea about Clausewitz for our game and I need Quinn to tell me if I'm wrong."

Quinn looked at him. "What's the idea?"

Peter began explaining the thing, and the conversation moved on. The lunch period ran its course, and it was back to classes.

The phrase raced through school quickly, completely finding every available space and establishing itself.

"Sharing pleasures?" The question came from Anna, a girl in his English class. She asked with bright-eyed eagerness, like someone delivering a test and watching for the response.

Quinn had looked at her and said, "'Valley of the Horses' by Jean Auel. You should read it," and returned to his essay.

She read it. He knew she read it because she'd reported back to him three weeks later, breathlessly, that it was the best book she'd read in two years, which he agreed with, and they'd had a fifteen-minute conversation about "Clan of the Cave Bear" and what Auel had understood about the relationship between vulnerability and strength that most people spent their whole lives avoiding.

The three girls had their own reaction to the situation, which he understood but could do nothing about.

Sheila had summarized it.

"It's not that we want to have sex with you." She'd stopped, considered, and started again. "It's just that the bar is higher than we knew." She'd looked at him with bright eyes. "Don't make this weird."

"I wasn't going to say anything," Quinn said.

"You were thinking something."

"I think things constantly," he said. "I almost never say them."

Keiko looked at him with mischief and said, "You are very weird, Quinn-san."

"People keep telling me that," he said.

"Perhaps you should consider it then," she said, and returned to her book.

He thought Katherine, Sheila, and Keiko had made the same calculation from their own angles and arrived at the same position. Their friendship was the thing worth protecting.

The rest of the school year was surprisingly drama-free.

His grades held at the level they'd been, which required a maintenance level of effort that left the remainder of his attention for the Colonel's assignments.

He continued to practice his shooting with Sullivan critiquing his form at the range.

The tutoring continued. The income steady. The books kept arriving on his desk--Gibbon finished, replaced by Machiavelli's Discourses alongside a biography of Hamilton that the Colonel had left with a note: Two men who understood power and its limits. Compare their conclusions.

He wrote a twelve-page response over two evenings that the Colonel annotated with nine questions, all of which surprised new insights out of him.

The basketball season ended in March. He'd averaged eleven points and seven assists, which Coach Henderson reviewed: "Your ball handling is the best on the team. You sometimes wait too long to take a shot. Next year, we'll build some plays around you."

Yaakov continued to show up. The sessions had evolved from the foundational instruction of the first year into something more like sparring, less systematic. His responses continually tested against sparring that felt close to real.

He and Sullivan had developed something over the months that he didn't have a word for. Not friendship exactly. Not mentorship either. Respect, maybe.

Now, they talked about practical things mostly. The Jeep's maintenance, which Sullivan oversaw with the seriousness he applied to all vehicles in his care. The driving, which Sullivan occasionally critiqued from the passenger seat in the terse, accurate manner of someone who has his own relationship to the skill.

Once, in April, while driving back from a basketball game, Sullivan looked out of the passenger window and said, "You're going to be alright, kid."

Quinn looked at the road. "Thank you, sir."

It was a very good year.

Chapter 27

Summer arrived, the light changing before the temperature did.

Quinn had been thinking about the summer. He knew the Colonel would send him somewhere. He was hoping for Montana again. Cody and Rafe had sent a letter in February that was two paragraphs long and ended with, "We overhauled the old jeep so we can do some off-roading up in the breaks."

He talked to the three girls about the ranch at lunch one day. They were all talking about their summer plans.

Keiko was going to Tokyo for the summer visiting her grandparents, Japanese family obligation pulling her back.

Katherine was going to spend a month in upstate New York with her aunt, which she was genuinely excited about.

Sheila was going to spend the summer working at a theater camp in Marin County.

"Montana," Katherine said casually. "Will there be barn dances again?"

"Probably," he said.

"Are you going to dance?"

"I'm going to dance."

"And is there a girl you're going to dance with at these barn dances?" Sheila asked.

"Several, probably," he said.

Keiko smiled into her lunch. "This is very diplomatic."

"He's good at avoiding the real question," Sheila growled.

Keiko laughed her tinkling laugh.

Quinn looked at the three of them fondly. He felt the crack in his armor that was increasingly there these days.

He was going to miss them. He was going to go to Montana and work the fence line and read the Colonel's books. But when he came back in September, they were going to be here, at this table, doing the same arguing and the same laughing.

He was going to miss them a lot.

He had somehow let things matter. He had let the lunch table and the jeep and Maria's kitchen and the Colonel's margin notes and Sheila's unchanged laugh all matter.

Sometimes he found himself having to breathe through the anxiety that welled up.

Look where you live, he told himself. I hope it continues...

Chapter 28

There were visitors sitting at the kitchen table when he came home from the last day at school.

Smith and Jones he recognized immediately. The third man was new. He was in his fifties, face weathered and wrinkled. Like Smith and Jones, he carried the quiet competence and confidence of someone who had spent time in serious places and been changed by it.

"Meet Mr. Taylor," Smith said.

The stranger was watching him with the same comprehensive inventory that all these men seemed to run.

He nodded.

Quinn nodded back.

Sullivan was at the table companionably drinking coffee the way he had the last time Smith and Jones were there. He looked at Quinn and communicated in the private language they'd built -- this is real and I know what it is and you'll be alright.

Quinn set his bag down. So, no Montana for him. He swallowed his disappointment.

"When?" he said.

Smith checked his watch. "Now," he said.

They stopped at the REI on Geary Street. Smith, Jones, and Taylor selected items with the efficiency of people who knew exactly what they needed and why.

Boots first. Taylor waved away the salesgirl and sat across from Quinn on the fitting bench, evaluating fit himself, directing Quinn to stand and walk and flex and squat. Then, gripping a boot by the sole, he tested its torsional rigidity. The boots were leather and heavy and would need breaking in.

"They'll do," he said. "Your feet are going to hurt for the first two weeks. That's just boots becoming yours."

The pack frame fitting was careful, sized to Quinn's torso with the same precision a tailor brought to his clothing. Taylor adjusted the straps with hands that understood this piece of equipment was not an accessory but a working tool.

Taylor noticed he hadn't asked any questions.

"You're not going to ask," Taylor said.

"I figure you guys will tell me what I need to know," Quinn said.

Taylor looked at him and grunted approval. He adjusted the last strap and stepped back.

They bought a sleeping bag rated to negative twenty, a poncho and a rain cover; a water filter; a compass; a map case; some quick-drying pants and shirts; a first aid kit whose contents Taylor reviewed item by item in the aisle, assigning a use and a method to each one with the completeness of someone who had needed these things in circumstances; a six-piece fishing rod and reel; and a belt knife.

They did not buy a gun but bought a lot of bear spray.

He noted this and filed it alongside the negative-twenty sleeping bag and Taylor's face and the compass and let the pattern develop.

The flight to Spokane was unremarkable. From Spokane, they drove north in a rented pickup, the landscape moving from city to farms, then to forest that got wilder as the miles accumulated.

Doukhobor Discovery was a small place on the Arrow Lakes. They met two more men there, Jim and Carl, guys he recognized from the Nevada ranch. Apparently, now it was okay to talk to them.

There were six of them and three canoes.

Quinn looked at the canoes on the lakeshore and thought about the ranch kids who'd been appalled at his inability to drive. Now, he was going to be the kid who knew nothing about canoeing.

He was right. He sucked at it. Paddling wasn't nearly as simple as it looked. Paddling in a loaded canoe moving against the current's resistance demanded continuous response. He made every available mistake in the first hour, some of them twice.

Jim paddled stern of the canoe and said almost nothing. He corrected Quinn's stroke once, with a brief demonstration that showed the gap between what Quinn was doing and what was required, then let the water finish the lesson.

The pace was unrelenting. By the end of the first day, his shoulders were sore and his hands blistered. By the third day, the paddle had begun to make sense--not comfortable, not unconscious, but making sense.

Portages were the other thing.

He'd read the word before and gotten a romantic picture of the French voyageurs cheerfully carrying their canoes between waterways. In practice, portaging was a huge pain in the ass. You balanced the canoe upside down across your shoulders, the yoke balanced on your shoulders and walked through mud and underbrush and around fallen trees. All the while, a billion black flies and mosquitoes drank your blood like mad vampires.

"You're fighting the weight," Taylor said, who Quinn noticed was not the one carrying the fucking canoe.

Quinn repositioned his hands.

"The weight is not your enemy," Taylor said. "Find the balance point. Fighting takes three times the energy that carrying does."

Quinn thought about this for the rest of that portage and several after, the distinction between fighting and carrying extending itself to things far removed from canoes. He wrote it in the notebook he kept at the top of the pack.

They fished for food, not for recreation. This was conducted with the same seriousness as everything else. Quinn paid attention to the others and finally caught fish. He cleaned them over the water the way Taylor showed him and ate them cooked over a fire he learned to lay. Building it with care, to burn small and hot, with wood that was sometimes wet.

Taylor gave him flint and steel and wouldn't let him use matches, which was way more difficult, especially with the others watching and commenting on how hungry they were and was he going to take forever.

He learned that he had a nickname from his time in Nevada: "Deadeye," a name they called him with friendly teasing. He didn't mind at all; they treated each other the same way. Except for Taylor. They were careful around him for some reason.

When there were no fish, he ate MREs, which he ate the same way he had eaten group home institutional food. It was fuel.

During moments of MRE meals, he thought about Maria's kitchen, not with longing, but more as a reminder of what his life was like.

He drank what Jones called cowboy coffee. Grounds dumped in a pot of boiling water. Not particularly good but welcome in the chill of the morning.

His skin turned brown. His hands hardened. The boots hurt for two weeks, as Taylor had warned him, then stopped.

Taylor lectured constantly, showing him how to read a compass and use a map. He talked about plants and mushrooms, showing him what was edible and what was not.

Quinn paid close attention. By now, he was pretty sure what they had in store for him. The others were on vacation. Some kind of ordeal was in store for him.

Taylor knew this country intimately. He knew the plants by their relationship to sun and soil, named them, but more importantly, discussed their utility or, in the case of some mushrooms, their danger.

Taylor tested him too.

"What's that?" he would say, pointing to a plant at the trail's edge, low and spreading.

Quinn looked at it. He'd been building a plant vocabulary for three weeks, alongside the compass work, water reading, and portage technique.

"Labrador tea," Quinn said.

"What tells you?"

"The leaf shape. The underside is woolly." He crouched and turned a leaf. "The smell." He crushed it slightly. It was correct.

Taylor nodded. "What do you do with it?"

"Brew it. Medicinal." He ran through the rest. "Headache, cold symptoms. Not too much--it carries a compound that's toxic in quantity."

"And if you're not sure of the quantity?"

"Use a bit once, wait, observe." Quinn stood. "If there's doubt, there's no doubt."

Taylor looked at him. "Where did you hear that?"

"Smith. About weapons."

Taylor was quiet. "The principle travels," he said. They started splitting up in the fourth week.

He'd watched it coming--the navigational instruction intensifying, the others deferring to Quinn's route assessments rather than providing them, the whole enterprise shifting from we are teaching you to you are demonstrating what you've learned.

After three weeks, Quinn realized that they had traveled in a big circle; they were back close to where they started. They stopped at a large cabin.

The others unpacked while Taylor laid out the map.

"Here's your first solo. Make your way to that point and come back. Should take you a day and a half."

Quinn read the map. He translated contour lines into terrain, identified the portages, and estimated the time.

"Okay," he said.

The solos lengthened. One day became two, two became four. The trips became hikes; the canoe was left behind.

The map work grew more complex, the terrain less forgiving, the rendezvous points more precisely specified. He began to understand that the solo time wasn't the test -- it was the point. What was being given to him was not only a skill set but a particular quality of relationship with himself that could only be built by trekking, for sustained periods, alone.

The no-time came to him in the sixth week.

He'd been moving through boreal forest in the morning, the light coming through spruce and birch at an angle that made northern country distinct -- lower, more angled than California. He'd been reading terrain, maintaining his bearing, monitoring the pack's load transfer, the entire operational layer running below conscious thought, which was where it lived now after six weeks of practice.

Then the layer went transparent.

He was present in a way he had no previous experience of -- not the focused present of the library or the range, not the absorbed present of sparring or running, but something more total. A presence not directed at anything because everything was equally its object. The forest with its sound of water ahead, the weight of the pack, and his own breathing were all in one piece.

He had read about this in a book on Buddhism the Colonel had left two months ago without comment. He had understood it intellectually.

But he had not understood it in his body, the way he understood it now, moving through boreal forest in the seventh week of what he came to call "no time."

An hour passed. He registered this afterward, checking the compass and recalculating his position, finding he'd covered more ground than he'd expected. His body had covered it while his mind was elsewhere -- not absent, not checked out, but present on a different level. Somewhere in the deep present.

He stood at the edge of a small lake in the northern light in the waning light of the day and methodically prepared his camp, while his mind took in the silence, which was not quiet the forest was full of sound, but was the mind quiet that was below language.

He breathed with it.

He was pure and fully alive.

For the first time, he got what Emerson's was talking about when he wrote about transcendentalism.

The next morning, he took the compass bearing and continued north.

The grizzly came out of the brush on a Tuesday morning in August.

He'd been following a riverbank maybe a mile from where he planned to camp. The small creek ran burbling on his left. Thick brush on the right. Because the wind was wrong, she hadn't smelled him. They encountered each other at thirty yards with the mutual surprise of two animals sharing space that neither had expected to share.

Holy shit, she was big.

That was the first thought -- not fear, just awed surprise of scale. She had a cub. Taylor had told him about bear behavior. He knew what the presence of the cub meant.

He stopped and was already reaching for the bear spray, which lived in the right hip pocket of the pack's hip belt for exactly this reason. Taylor had made him practice the draw until it was simply what his hand did under urgency, the muscle memory installed through repetition until it ran below thought.

She charged.

He had no idea whether it was a bluff or not. He took no chances and deployed the spray in the pattern Taylor had taught him, into the space between them, not at her directly, the cloud at the right height, the can held steady, his feet planted, everything in him that wanted to run held in place by the understanding that running would end things badly.

She hit the cloud at twenty feet.

She stopped and huffed in indignation. She turned and bleated to the cub, and they were gone, crashing through the brush. The sound of their passage decreased and disappeared. He stood there on the trail with the bear spray in hand and his heart beating out of his chest.

He stood there breathing for a long while. Then, with adrenaline-shaking hands, he fumbled to reattach the safety and return the bear spray to his belt.

Then he checked his compass and continued north.

Later, back at base camp, he told them about the bear. The others were impressed.

Taylor was practical. "You held your ground."

"I didn't have a better option," Quinn said.

"You had the option to run," Taylor said. "You made the right choice by not taking it."

Quinn looked at the fire. "The spray worked."

"Yes," Taylor said. "Usually does." He paused, then said slyly, "Usually."

Quinn looked at him, open-mouthed with shock.

That struck everyone as hilarious. They rolled around laughing, then Quinn too, for a full five minutes.

When they finally settled down, Smith came over to him and handed him a cup of cowboy coffee. "You did good, Deadeye," he murmured.

It was, that evening, the best coffee he had ever tasted.

A week later, a bad mushroom almost killed him.

He'd been careful -- if there's doubt, there's no doubt -- running continuously in his mind since Taylor had invoked it on the first portage. He'd been careful with the plants and the water and the fish, and then not careful enough.

He'd been out for a week. His food was running out. They had assigned him a mountain trail. He was far from the abundant fishing he had enjoyed earlier.

So he was grazing. He found some chanterelle mushrooms, and by mistake (he figured out later) he added one bit of Jack O'Lantern mushroom. He cut them up and added them to his beef stew. An hour later, he was as sick as he had ever been--violent vomiting and stomach cramps that were so bad that all he could do was wrap his sleeping bag around him and suffer. During the long night, to make matters worse, the mushrooms induced hallucinations; he was convinced that Miss Ella had come out of the dark to whip him again now that he was helpless.

He was sick for two days. He slept. He woke. He crawled to the little creek he was camped by and drank, then slept again.

On the second afternoon, Taylor appeared at the camp.

Quinn was outside the tent, sitting against a spruce trunk in the weak sun, the sleeping bag around his shoulders, looking worse than he felt, which was already considerable.

Taylor crouched beside him and ran a professional assessment. He checked the water supply, the food log, and the notebook.

He quickly reached in his bag, filled a cup with some sugar and salt, then filled it with canteen water.

"Drink it all, and I'll make some more."

While he made a fire and started some soup, he asked his questions and listened.

"You made the right decisions," he said.

"I missed the rendezvous," Quinn said.

"You were sick." Taylor's voice carried the same register for everything--not warm, not cold, honest. "Missing a rendezvous for a medical reason is not failure. Missing it because you pushed through and made it worse--that's failure."

"I didn't want to stay put," Quinn said. "Everything in me said keep moving."

"I know," Taylor said. "Staying put anyway--that's the hard thing. That's what takes longer to learn than the paddling or the compass or the plants. Knowing when the situation requires you to stop." He paused. "Most people learn it the hard way."

"This seems like the hard way," Quinn said.

Something shifted in Taylor's face that might have been a smile. "You'll know what I mean when you see the other hard way," he said.

He made Quinn eat the soup and drink more water. They stayed in camp that night. In the morning, they broke camp and slowly made their way back to base camp.

What Quinn called the "thousand miles" ended in August, at a lake whose name he couldn't remember. The light had changed from June; the far north was already preparing for fall and winter.

When he got back to the cabin, a floatplane waited.

Quinn stood on the dock, looked back at the water, and felt the end of it. He was tanned dark brown, thinned to muscle and bone. He was quieter than he'd been.

He was different in a way he couldn't fully articulate yet. He was still processing.

He had the no time in his head now.

He thought about the Colonel's margin note on the Tocqueville. What has changed since the first reading?

Taylor came to his shoulder.

"You did all right," he said. It carried the same weight as Dale Whitfield's you did all right at the end of the Montana summer.

"Thank you," Quinn said. "For teaching me."

Taylor looked at the water. "I showed you the country," he said. "The country taught you."

Quinn looked at the water.

"Get on the plane, Deadeye," he said, and walked up to the cabin.

That was the first time he used his nickname. It was like a diploma.

Quinn picked up the pack, much lighter now, supplies consumed, and climbed aboard.

He was going home.