But others sided with Agnes. Carl said, “We’ve got a burgeoning tracker on our hands.”

At camp, they sent a party to follow the stream for a day and report what they found. The stream began farther up the mountain in an ice-blue pool. Snowfed. Perhaps spring-fed too. A horseshoe cliff face surrounded it. No clear way through. The party returned with news of the dead end.

Agnes smiled shyly as people patted her shoulders. Val rubbed her scalp where new hair was sprouting in stumpy patches.

“Our fearless leader,” Val said.

Agnes knew they felt bad for her. Motherless in the way she’d been made motherless. But Agnes had always paid attention to the small things here. The creatures. Agnes had noticed that a mother would only be a mother for so long before she wanted to be something else. No mother she’d ever watched here remained a mother forever. Agnes had been ready for this without knowing it. She hadn’t cried once and that had to mean she was ready for it. She was not a bear cub any longer, but a juvenile on the lookout for her own place in the world. And so when Val called her a fearless leader, Agnes believed her. Val saw her for what she was now. An equal.

That night by the fire, Agnes scooted closer to adults as they discussed camp breakdown and the plan for the morning. The children yawned and squeezed juniper berries between their toes. Laughed and looked at Agnes to see if she was watching their antics. But she kept her gaze very steady on the grown-ups and tuned her ears to the conversation they were having so she would know exactly what was expected of her in the morning. She was their fearless leader after all. She’d found the trail into the mountains. And she had to make sure it would lead them to the other side.

*

By following the ruts, they avoided the white peaks that rose high above. Each time they arrived at a new threshold where the route seemed impossibly steep or rugged, the ruts led them through a gentler scene, bypassing the up-up-ups. Following rivers and streams. Sidestepping sheer rock face. There were some scrambles. There always would be. But they wondered if the Rangers knew of the ruts. If they’d wanted the Community to follow them on purpose. Or if they had simply lucked out by finding them. They wove in and around giant trees they couldn’t even see the tops of. The bark changed color and texture. Smooth white with knotty eyes, orange and scaly, then dark, almost black, like the charcoal from a dead fire. Occasionally they moved through hardened snow, their moccasined feet breaking through the iced-over sheet, cleanly making a hole through to shallow powder. They walked days through a melting snowfield made eerie by a long-ago fire. What remained were black trunks naked of branches and sharp as blades, reaching out of the snow toward the colorless sky. Beyond the snowfields, the ruts directed them to a pass where they descended into forests of lean ponderosas with feet blackened by a ground fire that had never made gains. They moved on through this clean forest over the course of a mountain summer. Then the forest thickened, and soon it was shrouded, dark and dank. So dark and dank the tips of the coarse hairs of their hides collected dewdrops. The walking here was slow. The ground was knobby with thick roots hidden under carpets of mosses. Everything chilled. Gloom settled on the group.

Then at some point it seemed like it was all downhill. The ruts came and went from view or were covered under mosses, rock slides. But the path forward was obvious. The rushing sound of rivers multiplied until it seemed they were surrounded by falling water. The air changed from sharp to cool to wet, and their clothes never felt dry. Small spores of mold colonized their clothing.

As they walked, the hum of water became a howl, then the roar of what must have been a large, epic river just out of view. They called it the Invisible River because it sounded as though it ran right under their feet, but they could see no glimmer of it. The forest was now so thick and lush with waterlogged greenery, they lost sight of the ruts. They were disoriented and some vocally regretful, convinced the ruts had long ago veered another direction, and they were never meant to travel through this jungle of mottled light.

But Agnes scampered along, certain of the feel of ruts below her feet. She saw them like an owl might see a mouse under a covering of leaves or a sheet of snow. But even if they weren’t ruts, she knew this was a good way to go because, for all its imposing darkness, she had seen the glint from animal eyes. She felt their ease. This corridor was safe for them. Their bright eyes didn’t dart. They watched not from fear but from languorousness. The ears swiveled mechanically, following sound the way a clock works, a clock without an alarm. Agnes felt safe. And she tried through the ease of her shoulders and her chipper whistle to make the others feel that way too.

Then, one day, as suddenly as the darkness had surrounded them, they broke out of it, at a cliff’s edge, so suddenly Agnes might have tumbled over it if Carl hadn’t grabbed the back of her tunic.

The forest had given way to nothing. The soft land crumbled down to water that stretched far, far, far across to another cliff face, which glistened green with colonies of wet ferns clinging to it. They’d never seen so much water in their lives. The Invisible River was a monster.

Above the fern-decked cliff rose endless fir tips sloping up and up and up into new white mountaintops. And a tall, steel, seemingly electrified fence in front of it all. A border. They looked at their map. What was the land? The Woodlots? Where were the factories and the smoke then? The river seemed a mile wide. But it was not on their map. Had they gone the wrong way?

There was no crossing this river. The fence looked as though it might be electrifying the water. Agnes thought she could hear the buzz of motors, but she was no longer sure what that sounded like, and how it differed from the roar of water. Or a horde of insects. It was all noise. She touched her fingers to her ears and found they were vibrating.

Agnes scuffed her feet at the soft ground, feeling for the ruts. She felt nothing but root and rock. She looked over her toes to the river below. The cliff face angled down, and jagged-trunked trees stuck up from the mud-and-rock mound. She scrunched her toes through her moccasins into the loose soil. The cliff hadn’t always begun here.

To the left, Agnes saw that the trees retreated and a headland rose up. There, Agnes saw the ruts pock the ground and curve their way skyward. She tugged on Carl’s hand and pointed.

“This way,” Carl said to the others.

Agnes smiled. He’d done what she’d wanted and she hadn’t even needed to speak. She felt like an animal of few words but imperative work. She felt like the alpha. With a nod or a snort, the herd followed. How long before they followed simply because she moved?

They wove through a last thicket of dark trees and broke out onto green high grasses that bent in the wind, which jostled them now that they weren’t buffeted by the trees. Their skin tightened and pinched as the moisture they’d collected in the forest was stolen by the sun-dried air. They felt thirsty and tired immediately. At the highest point of the headland they could see the ruts head down, down, down to where the river released itself into what looked to be a tidal plain miles ahead. The cliffs softened themselves into rolling bluffs and spits that got swallowed up or exposed with the invisible tide. And far, far, far out they could see whitecaps at the river mouth and wondered if it could possibly be the sea. Consulting the map, they saw only a border marked by Xs. No other symbol. They’d always assumed it would be more of the same. Desert. Grassland. Mountain. They inhaled. Brine. Their mouths watered. It had to be the sea. There must be some mistake.

The newly visible river widened as they walked along, and the imposing fence across it veered away from them until it seemed quite small. Was the river theirs?

The ruts dropped them to the shore, and they continued next to the enormous river. It was more water than they’d seen in their lives. Moving so swiftly it looked to be hardly moving at all.

Now closer, they could see the riverbanks crowded with submerged debris. Old wood, planed but warped. Engines from large machines. Tires bigger around than six people circled finger to finger. Old rusted blades from big trunk saws. And furniture. Couches that at one time were plaid, or plastic. Old recliners with waterlogged woodland-scene upholstery. A whole intact side of a small log cabin.