The wilds of the mountains were not a kind place, but I tried to become a part of them anyways. Enjoy the way the mist laid like a second skin across my face in the morning. Be grateful when the birds thought me quiet enough to sing overhead. As the years went by I found parts of myself bloom and die back with the seasons, and I welcomed it.

Campkeepers, however, didn’t work alone. Instead we were required to work in pairs, finding each other through random job postings or the occasional seedy recommendation. Hired by merchant guilds, we’d traverse hundreds of miles a year to care for the campgrounds on their trade routes. These stops varied in style, some just a plank floor and a slatted roof, others cabins with stoves and hearths. Campkeepers would conduct repairs, refill the hidden caches of medicinals or food reserves, and so on year round. When my previous partner retired, I found Tal through one of the less… optimal pairing methods.

Right away, I found that while I aligned myself with the woods, Tal saw it like a puzzle to solve. I’d build campfires like spring nests. His were feats of engineering. He preferred acts of precision, I valued subtlety. At first I found it grating, like he was purposefully making things harder for sport. But the truth was—the truth about Tal’s very core—was that if there was a perfect method out there, he wanted to know it.

In the spring he said, “I like the way you did that.”

We had just picked honeygranates, a fruit with a hard husk to protect golden crescents of meat inside. They weighed heavy with vitamins and were one of the few native fruits that thrived at high altitudes. An essential part of any mountaineer’s diet, therefore mine.

“What?” I popped one of the perfect cloves into my mouth, the thin membrane vanishing on my tongue.

“That.” He pointed at the next piece I had poised to my lips. I paused and he gestured to his own. It was mangled and dripping in his palm, juice running down his sleeve.

“It’s the way I’ve always done it,” I said, “You just follow the skin.”

“Show me.” Tal had already snapped his utility knife shut and grabbed another. When I didn’t react he nodded at my hands and said it again, adding a simple “please.” I shifted to face him properly and pointed to the crown.

“Peel that back to the bulb,” I directed.

He took this simple direction seriously, watching carefully for my reaction to his every move. Still chewing, I told him to move to the other side and hashmark it with his thumbnail.

“Okay, now…” I said, stretching my hands over his, “push.” Together we pressed the foam rind out the bottom like a dart.

“Gods, that’s satisfying,” he murmured. “Don’t you love that? The feeling?”

“Of what?”

“Getting it right.”

I did. And after that I noticed when Tal did too. I came to appreciate when his brows furrowed and learned to pause when he did that ever so gentle cock of his hip. When he complimented my work I stopped underplaying myself. There, on the ragged mountain range of Elus, our partnership began in earnest.

Our stays “home” as civilians became shorter. The wilds were unkind, yes, but architecture and politics were underhanded. Fences of bricks and flesh to hide the true nature of the landscape and its inhabitants. The longer I did this, the more I embraced every jagged tooth that the mountains offered me. The more I relied on Tal, too. Even when he’d fill my shoes with acorns or throw me, fully clothed, into a pond. The idea of doing these hauls without him became unfathomable.