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“It was updated last year.”

He glanced back at me. “The beavers weren’t.”

I stopped walking for half a second, then had to quicken my pace to catch up again. “You have beavers?”

“Yes.”

“Normal beavers?”

Barrett’s mouth twitched. “Depends what you call normal.”

I looked past him into the trees, suddenly far more interested in every patch of moving undergrowth than I had been thirty seconds ago. “I’m beginning to suspect that word has a very different definition here.”

“Now you’re learning.”

I quickened my pace.

For the next hour, we argued almost continuously, although I began to realize that neither of us was particularly annoyed by it.

Barrett objected whenever I stepped off the trail without warning. I objected to being ordered back onto it without explanation. He told me a patch of pale groundcover would release soporific spores if disturbed, and I informed him it was clearly a clubmoss rather than a moss.

“It matters,” I said.

“Not if you’re asleep face-first in it.”

“It still matters.” His mouth twitched, but he kept walking.

At the ridge, I found a tiny white fungus growing beneath the bark of a storm-damaged maple and stopped so abruptly that Barrett nearly walked into me.

“Don’t touch that,” he said automatically.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You say that a lot.”

“So do you.”

I crouched beside the tree. The fungus formed delicate fans along the split bark, almost translucent, except for a faint pink line around each edge. Beneath it, the wood had darkened, but not in the pattern I would’ve expected from decay.

His shoulder was close enough to brush mine, and I became briefly, inconveniently aware of just how much of him there was.

“Heart rot?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. Look at the margin.”

“The pink?”

I glanced at him. “You can see that?”

The look he gave me made me immediately regret the question.

“Sorry. Stupid question.” I pointed without touching the fungus. “The fruiting body is emerging from healthy tissue, not from the damaged section. There’s no visible rot around the wound either.”

Barrett ran his fingertips over the bark several inches higher, his brow furrowing. Instead of answering, he rose and walked around the tree, pressing one broad palm to the trunk before crouching on the other side and scraping away a layer of wet leaves.

A cluster of fine roots lay exposed beneath them. Half were black.

“Water,” he said.