Oscar followed and looked over Gwen’s shoulder. It was an owl’s head, perfectly severed, as pristine as if the bird were still alive. Its feathers were white with a ring of orange rust; they looked downy and waved in the breeze. Its narrow beak was shiny and its eyes were wide open, staring up at them. It was hard to believe the rest of the body was gone. There was no blood—the head had been removed with surgical precision.

“Wow,” Oscar said, echoing Tracy. “That is fucking weird.”

“Must have been an eagle or a hawk,” Todd said. “It probably dropped him.”

“It still looks alive, doesn’t it?” Oscar said.

“Yeah, it’s amazing,” Tracy said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It does look alive,” Todd said. “Must have just happened.”

“It’s creepy,” Gwen said. “I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

She seemed genuinely freaked out and Oscar didn’t blame her. Sure, the head was beautiful in a macabre kind of way, but it was hard not to take it as an omen. He became even more certain that it signaled bad luck when, within a few minutes of resuming their hike, they heard the sound of water—not the gentle trickling of the river in the meadow but a louder sound, active, insistent. Oscar’s stomach tightened. This was real water—how big and fast would it be? And how the hell would they get across it?

Todd must have been thinking the same thing because now he remarked, “You hear that? Doesn’t sound like a creek.”

“What’ll we do if it’s too big to cross?” Gwen asked.

“It won’t be,” Tracy assured them.

They were all quiet for the next few minutes, watching their footing, and with their voices still, the river grew louder. They hiked down through one last steep section and then suddenly there it was: a solid mass of moving, churning water, twenty feet wide, big and full and serious.

They stood four abreast at the edge of the woods, about ten feet up from the bank.

“Well,” Todd said after a few moments of quiet, “that’s a heck of a river.”

It was like a living thing, the river, steady and strong, arguing with itself and with them. The water flowed past them quickly without flourish or drama; it stepped down several terraces, rounded a corner, and disappeared from view. But the sheer mass of it—the steady inevitable progression—made Oscar wonder about the strength of the current. It looked powerful and indifferent. And cold.

“How deep do you think it is?” Gwen asked.

“No way to tell, really,” Tracy said. “Not until we start to cross it.”

“You actually want to try and cross this thing?” Oscar blurted out. “No way, Tracy. This is serious. This is too fucking much for me.”

Tracy stared out at the river for so long that Oscar wasn’t sure she’d heard him. Then she said thoughtfully, “There’s got to be a way. Let me just go upriver for a bit to see if there’s an easier spot.”

“I’ll go down,” Todd said, and Oscar looked at him, surprised.

“Really?”

Todd shrugged. “It’s worth checking out. It would suck if there was an easier place just around the corner and we didn’t even bother to look.”

Were these people crazy? Were they out of their fucking minds? Oscar thought of the tourists who died every year in Yosemite, the ones who stepped over railings and past clear warning signs. But while he hated to admit it, Todd’s calmness eased his own nerves just a little. And he discovered to his own surprise that he trusted this guy’s judgment more than he trusted Tracy’s.

“Well, I’ll wait here,” Gwen said, bending to unshoulder her pack.

“Me too,” Oscar said, unfastening his waist straps and letting his own pack fall.

Todd made his way downstream to the left, feet crunching on fallen branches, and Tracy walked off to the right. Soon Todd was around a bend and out of sight; Tracy’s figure grew smaller but stayed visible as she walked along the riverbank. Oscar sat down and rooted around in the top of his pack and pulled out a Snickers bar. A lizard ran out on the boulder beside them, feinted in their direction, and then scooted away. In the silence the sound of the river was louder—patient and steady, speaking to the trees and the ridges above them, a conversation as old as time.

“Want some?” he asked, holding the candy bar out to Gwen.

“No thanks. That poor owl made me lose my appetite.”

“Yeah, this is more than we bargained for, huh? Not exactly a leisurely stroll.”

“Oh, I’ve been having a great time,” Gwen said quickly, glancing at him. “But this,” she said, gesturing toward the river. “I don’t know, it just makes me nervous.”

“Do you get the sense,” Oscar said carefully, “that we’re in a bit over our heads?”

“Maybe.” Gwen sounded noncommittal, and Oscar realized that whatever doubts she might have, they were still about herself and her own abilities—not about the wisdom of taking this unused route, not about the judgment of Tracy.

Todd returned in a few minutes, looking discouraged. “No luck,” he said. “It actually gets worse down there—after that bend, there’s some rapids.”

Tracy came walking up jauntily and after she heard his news, she said, “Well, there’s a spot up there that might work. A little wider, the water’s slower, no big rocks below—and a fallen log across the whole river.”

“Is it big enough to walk across?” Todd asked.

“No. It’s too skinny. But we could probably hold on to it and wade.”

This didn’t sound promising to Oscar, but Todd, replied, “Well, okay! Let’s go check it out!”

They all reshouldered their packs and made their way a quarter-mile upriver. When they got to the spot that Tracy had found, Oscar’s heart sank again. Sure it was wider here—maybe twenty-five feet—but the “log” was more like a sapling. The rocks beneath the water looked slippery and dangerous. This was no place to take a fall.

“That’s not much of a log,” Todd remarked, echoing his thoughts.

“I know,” Tracy said. “But it’s all we’ve got.”

The fallen tree lay about two feet off the surface of the water, a few jagged points sticking out where branches had broken off. Oscar’s eyes followed the length of it to the stump on the other side, where the trunk was still attached by some strands of wood. The color of the exposed flesh there was shocking in its lightness; the tree might have fallen just that month, that very week.

“I’m not sure it’ll hold,” Todd said now. “It’s not attached by very much.”

“It’ll hold,” Tracy said.

“Well, maybe one of us should test it first.”

“I’ll go,” Tracy volunteered. She set her pack down and loaded her phone and bear spray into the lid. She collapsed her poles and shoved them into her pack handles-first, the points sticking out of the top. Then she sat on a rock and removed her shoes. “It’s too dangerous to wear your flip-flops,” she said. “You could really fuck up your feet. So take your socks off and put your shoes back on. Unclip the clips of your sternum and hip belt. If you lose your footing and start to get pulled backward, let the pack go or it’ll drag you down with it.”

Oscar listened to these instructions with a detached wonder. Were they really learning how not to drown? Yes, they were. Before he knew it, Tracy had put her shoes and pack back on and had scrambled down the bank.

“Uh, what if we do lose our footing?” Gwen asked.

“Try to keep your head upstream and your feet downstream so they can brace you against any hard obstacles,” Tracy said. “And pray like hell.”

She took hold of the tree and stepped sideways into the water, which quickly came up to her calves and then her knees. Her poles swayed behind her like antennas. About a third of the way across, the water reached her thighs, and she slowed down and gripped the log more tightly. Oscar could see the force of the current pulling her back, extending her arms until he thought she’d lose her grip. But she didn’t. Even as the water reached almost to her waist, even as her knuckles grew white from the effort of holding on, she stayed on her feet, she kept moving. Oscar looked at her face and saw that she was grinning.