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You told me that you couldn’t find the map, and I looked breathlessly on.  I forced the worry, the doubt, the fear into every pore of my face and looked you in the eyes.  Stop kidding around, I said.  It’s not funny, I said.  But it’s really gone, you said.  I don’t have any idea where we are, you said.

We spent the next week wandering around, over and under rocks, in circles around the trunks of ancient trees that whispered truths into the wind.  We lost ourselves in the creases that mountains make and learned that water from the stream doesn’t kill, but tastes like ice and freshness.  We found that those big red berries hold some close relation to ipecac, and that the blue ones taste like dry lemons but stay down.  We only figured out how to make a fire one night, but we danced around it and shook our dirty faces in defiance of the clean and open sky.

You found that wounded rabbit and we cooked it the night we discovered fire.  You were the first to drink from the stream and shake the specks of water from your hair like a dog.  You told me that I was beginning to look like the bride of Bigfoot.  You insisted me that there were secrets in the warm hearts of pinecones and that we were going to be fine.  You looked me in the eyes and held my hand.

I analyzed my dreams for signs of north.  I broke open pinecones to find their secrets, and I cursed like a sailor that night when you used a few scraps of shirt to bind my bleeding fingers.  I jumped on the smoky, jail-bar shadows that trees cast in hopes of dispelling them like wind.  I let you know that you looked rather like Bigfoot himself.  I was the first one to try those berries and the first one to throw them up all over the mattress of dead leaves that stretched in all directions.  I made up those constellations, and you believed me.

And I was the one who tossed our map into the river and watched it sail on into eternity and the mouths of trout.  I smiled as I did it.  You were looking somewhere else, perhaps into the expanse of the sky.  We continued on into a world of ancient trees and the possibilities of earth.