Billings was a long ways away. The small city where Denise had grown up lay below many miles of deep canyon trail, over a twisted state road, across the rolling expanses of wheat and range land that descended to the Yellowstone River. Here in the Beartooth range of southern Montana Denise and Alan were all alone.

By mid-afternoon they had made their way almost five miles toward civilization with perhaps another five to go to the trailhead and Denise was tired. The boneache fatigue of jamming downhill was completely unlike the triumphant strain that accompanied their gasping excursion to the regions above timberline. She thought a dozen times of stopping him, suggesting that they stay over another night. But she didn't want to be a wimp, and she knew that Alan really needed to get back to work.

Alan was leading, as always, and he stopped so suddenly that Denise nearly bumped into him. Denise brushed a damp strand of brown hair away from her face, ran her tongue across her lips.

"Moose," Alan said softly. She leaned forward, certain that he must be mistaken, but this time he was not. The trail had rejoined the main run of Rocky Creek and the big animal was standing shoulder deep among the aquatic plants and willows that grew where the rushing waters of the glacial stream trickled out into a wide dark swamp.

"So beautiful," Denise breathed. She reached back and pulled the zipper on the side pocket of her pack, pressed the camera silently against her cheek. Through the viewfinder the wallowing moose seemed smaller. She pressed the little button to move the zoom lens into place.

The beast was a female, a cow, unburdened by the heavy handspread of horns that a bull would bear. She angled her massive head meditatively sideways, fixing their position with a single round brown eye.

Alan turned toward her, smug with pride in his discovery. "Better than your porcupine?" he asked rhetorically. "Hey, get me in there too." After four days, Alan's flushed cheeks still showed only a trace of blond beard. His face was blotchy from the effort of carrying the heavy pack, the band of his Cleveland Indians baseball cap darkened with sweat.

Denise pushed the button again and the scene widened to include Alan. The automatic flash popped as she took the photo and the moose raised her head, considering them seriously. Alan hitched the pads of his pack into a new position on his shoulders and turned to walk on.

"Wait, Alan. Can't we take a little break?"

"Sure." Alan shaped his thumbs and fingers into a frame, centered Denise and the moose within it. "Here, let me snap one of you and your friend." Denise handed him the black Minolta.

Alan slung his pack over into the brush and held the camera up to his eye, twisting it to take her in, pressing the close-up button back in to focus in on her. For a moment Denise sensed how he saw her, beautiful and desirable. He bent down to take the picture of her smiling face from a lower angle.

"I'm going to get that one blown up for my desk," he said. "I knew the first time that I met you that you were the perfect match for me, Denise," he said. "I'm so happy that we're going to spend our lives together it makes me crazy."

"It's the way you always do the right thing at the right time, even without analyzing it, like I do. I really admire that it you, you know, your faith. We make a good team, you know."

"Aw, stop," Denise said bashfully, "I feel the same way about you."

"Yeah, well, I just wanted to tell you that." Alan rose and handed her the camera. "Let's get going again. Pretty far to go to the trailhead." He threw the pack up behind him and tightened the waistband. "You ready?"

Denise sighed and took one more picture of the moose. Then she followed mutely behind Alan as he pushed their way into the bushes.

The swampy uplands that swelled along Rocky Creek marked a sudden change from the granite plateau and scattered stands of lodgepole pine they had been traveling through the previous days. Knee-high profusions of bladed grass leaned over the rutted and muddy trail. A fresh growth of willow branches laced the air above.

Denise knew as well as Alan that the level path across the flats at the top of the canyon would soon give way to trickier parts as the icy mountain creek regained purpose and tumbled down over a jumble of granite to the wide Yellowstone valley. Tiredness narrowed her focus to the shifting placement of Alan's feet as he manuevered through the thick vegetation with raised arms. He wore dirty yellow wool socks. Dark mud splattered the backs of his legs.

"I don't know if I told you much about the plans we've got going at work. The reorg." Alan huffed close ahead. "It's clearly the best choice for the company--and quite frankly it's going to be good for you and me too. I think in a couple of years we're going to be in a position to do things like backpack a lot more often."

That will be nice, Denise thought. It was hard to be appreciative when you were so tired. She had become so used to discomfort that she failed to recognise the pain as Alan fended away a thin willow branch and the released tip whipped across her cheek and went away. Instead it was a sudden disorienting asymmetry that first showed her something was wrong. Half her world was replaced with a warm blue-green blur. Before she could raise her circled fingers slick wetness was spreading from her eye.

"Ow," she said."

She heard Alan stop ahead, sigh and start back. "Denny, darling, we have to keep going, dear. Can't you--wait, what's wrong?"

"Screw," Denise moaned. She was swiveling her head from side to side, trying to slide away from beneath the blurriness. "My eye. The branch."

"Let me look." His huge pink face leaped too close, his hands pulling at her, trying to hold her in place.

"Get away from me," Denise wailed. She threw crossed arms between them. "Leave me alone. Oh man. Ohh, man!" Now the pain had become real. She rocked away from Alan with her palm pressed hard into her cheek. The darkness and pressure soothed, but it was filled with swirling purple circles, sharp popping pinpoints of orange fire.

"Don't do that." he captured her wrist and wrestled it away from her face. "Sit down. Please, Denise. Don't move."

"I told you we should stop," Denise moaned. She heard Alan start to respond "you didn't", then hold back. He swung his pack off and let it drop behind. "I said please get your hand away from it. Let me see."

I don't care any more, Denise realized. Why was he hurting her this way? He was hurting her arm, stretching her injured eye wide open to the air, stabbing at it with blunt fingers. Dimly behind everything she could sense Alan's concern, but she could no longer see him.

"I have a clean T-shirt," Alan said. "Hang on a minute." Denise jumped as his hands left her face, as a rush of warm water splashed over her cheek, felt relief as the hands returned behind a wet mask of cotton.

"Denise, I'm so sorry," Alan said when he had finished. "It's all right," she said dully. "No, it's not," he said. Then suddenly his voice thickened. "I can't figure out what the best thing to do is, Denise. We need to get you to a doctor as soon as we can."

Alan seemed small and remote, his face indistinct. She wasn't beaten yet, though. She could still see a little bit. If he couldn't be strong for her she would just have to do it herself. The tough get going. Denise shook herself away from her boyfriend and tried to pull the pack up on her back, but her arms were trembling, too weak. She let it drop, sat back again awkwardly beside the bulky frame.

He was clenching his fists to his cheeks, now, frozen in place. Denise waited numbly until Alan finally gained control and began to paw through her backpack. "We'll have to leave this behind. Can't carry it now. We'll set it back in the trees and I'll come back for it in a few days."

She was too weary to be supportive any more. How was he going to do that when they were scheduled to fly back to Cleveland on Monday. "Take the camera," she said. Alan crammed it under the flap of his own overstuffed pack, tied her windbreaker and her sleeping bag to the outside.

"Okay. Okay. The first thing we have to do is get you out of here. Not too much further to go. We'll be fine." He pulled the added weight up by the straps. "After we come down the trellis it's just a flat straight stroll to the parking lot. Let me know if you get tired, Den."

It had to mean that the whipping branch had hurt her eye bad. Now Denise fumbled her way along before him, the trail strangely flat and distant beyond the thick slant of T-shirt he had knotted around her head. Denise's face hardened around her growing understanding that there could be no return to the time before. She set her feet carefully one in front of another.

If it turned out she had lost the eye Denise didn't know what she would do. So much of what she did seemed to depend on her sight, being able to make sense out of the small numbers on the invoices and spreadsheets. Plus she knew it would make her look like shit. Who was going to trust their accounting to a woman with a glass eye?

"One time in scouts I was trying to whittle on a green stick and nicked the tendon on the back of my hand?" He reached his left arm forward across her shoulder. "It's still stiff. Doctors in Minneapolis had to sew the cord back together again. There's a little lump of scar tissue under there. I was a pretty good baseball player before that, Babe Ruth League level, but after that I had to realize I couldn't hit or field. But see, I learned from that. It's just like with your eye."

"Your hand got better," Denise said stonily, pushing past his arm. It wasn't the same at all.

"Whatever happens we'll deal with it, Denise. There are always things you can do. Think about people who are totally blind. They get by. A lot of them compensate in some really great ways."

"Alan, please," she said. Alan thought he was reading her thoughts, but he was reading them wrong. "I love you. But just shut up for a while."

As long as she could remember Denise had been able to go to God for help. It was in prayer that she was able to fully focus her direction, understand her own feelings. Now she wished it could be like it was when she was a little girl again, a firm voice to give her guidance, but those days of direct guidance were no more. It was not that the spirit had ever left her. Just that she realized after she grew older that the Lord was not a person.

"Alan," she said suddenly, stopping and turning back to him. "How can things like this happen? How could God allow this to happen?

"I'll have to ask Him," Alan said. She could feel his worry. "Den, it was just an accident. Look, Denise, God still loves you, I'm sure he does." But Alan didn't understand God.

Could the man who put out your eye ever be your friend again? Denise let pain carry her past the boundaries of her faith, bewildered at her willingness to take the journey.

It was already four-thirty. An hour later, they stopped at the lookout over a wide expanse of dark forest. The trellis was a network of narrow paths that would take them deep into Rocky canyon. "Our best choice is to keep moving," Alan said. Denise squinted up at him. The strain was evident on his face, a pink and white flush from maintaining the pace and the overweight load. "I'm too tired," she said. He nodded. "We'll go down tomorrow."

There would be no water on this rocky overlook. A stiff wind blew through sparse trees that lined the trail. Alan shambled around until he found a place to put up the tent. She sat putting together the jointed poles while he circled her cracking sticks for the fire. In a surprisingly short time, as the canyon walls darkened and sparks began to pop within the fire ring things seemed to sink into horrible normalcy. "Most of the food was in the other pack," Alan apologized. He pressed Denise's hands around a cup of warm, salty soup.

Later Alan came to sit beside Denise, a flat plastic bottle in his hands. "Here's some more tylenol," he said, pressing the tablets into her hand. She swallowed the tablets mechanically, reaching for the water to chase them down, staring hard with her unbandaged eye at the unchanging coals that lay beneath the leaping flames of the fire.

Even with the tylenol her eyesocket was a swollen fire-hot hole. Alan began to chatter again. "We'll get up as soon as the sun cracks tomorrow," he said. "Worst case, we should be out of here by noon. There'll be some doctor or clinic in Redlodge."

"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked, breathing hard. Far more than forgiveness was required now. Of course she forgave him. He was right. It was just a lousy accident. But she felt herself flinch as soon as he touched her to undo the bandage around her head. "Sorry," he said. She forced herself to allow his touch. When would trust return?

"Do you see anything?" She squeezed her injured eye shut as he aimed a bright flashlight at her. "I can see that," Denise said, unwilling to accept the fractured yellow stimulus as vision. "It hurts.

"That's okay. Keep it closed while I clean your face a little." Darkness returned as Alan set the light aside and dabbed away the crust of tears. "It looks better than I thought," he said. "It might be okay. Our best move is just to rest it some more. I'm going to put on a clean bandage."

Alan would never be able to give Denise the comfort she needed, she knew. She sat bent over after he had finished, thinking hard.

"Mom's going to be so worried," she said a few minutes later. Alan shook his head, a bushy silhouette beside her.

"I was hoping to get back to Billings tonight so we could give her the news," he said.

"What news," Denise asked sharply. There was an issue here. "I don't think I want you to tell my mother about, us, yet. I don't know when I will." She felt the depth of the feeling with dismay.

Why had he forced her to say this? Denise knew that she would regret the words, but she couldn't stop from saying them. For a long time Alan didn't reply.

"I really respected the way you kept on going this afternoon," he finally said. "After you got hurt."

"Yeah," Denise said bitterly, "I was a real G.I. Jane, wasn't I?"

"It just made sense. The faster we get out of here the sooner we can get your eye looked at."

"I told you we should stop. If we'd stopped it never would have happened."

"Well, in the first place, you never said any such thing. But anyway that's not the point. We're in this situation now. We just have to deal with it."

It didn't seem to Denise like that was what life should be about, acceptance of the bad. "My father used to say ‘Only fools and engineers believe there's a right answer for every problem'," Denise told Alan. "It just doesn't feel like this is what life should be about, choosing the least worst choice."

Alan looked at her without comprehension, or maybe she had lost the ability to read his response any more. "Well there you go. I'm not an engineer," he said, "But there's always a better solution. When you add things up one alternative always comes out on top. If it doesn't, well, then I guess your father was right--you toss a coin or something."

He picked up a short pine branch and began to push the glowing coals of the fire randomly. "Tell me more about your dad."

"He was a great guy," Denise said. "Very much an in-control kind of guy. Like you are, really. You've been great today, Alan. No one could have stood by me better. Alan, I remember another thing he said."

"Yeah, what was that?"

"He said: I'm going to die and there's nothing you can do about it." They had him in the hospital almost all the time then. I prayed and prayed. Of course in the end he was right again." The tears stung.

"Listen, Denise," he said, his voice low, "I think we need to admit to ourselves that the wedding is off. Just for a while. I feel incredibly guilty for doing this to you. I know you're blaming me. There's too much going on now. Things will be different after your eye heals."

"I know," Denise said miserably. But she didn't believe it any more. "We should talk about it more tomorrow," Alan said. He pushed the larger sticks out of the center of the fire and helped her to her feet.

Alan kissed Denise softly. "Please," she heard him whisper. And then to her, "We'd better try to get some rest.

She felt cold and she had to pee. Denise lay in her tight mummy bag with her back to Alan, the side of the tent inches from her trembling lips. He was thick and heavy behind her, thinking whatever thoughts he was thinking, dreaming his own dreams. She dozed, woke up to the same world, fell asleep once again. Finally, when she couldn't stand it anymore she unzipped the triangular opening and crawled outdoors.

The sky lifted up into the blue-black depths of space. Denise rose again, dazzled by the lack of bounds. Mountain air swept past her bare legs. Heaven stood above her, the milky way a spackled bridge of light that spanned the canyon walls.

She turned carefully, then counted the distance as her father had taught her. There was the small cluster, isolated from the rest of the stars by endless night. The Pleidaes, seven, maybe more pinpricks in a tiny dipper shape. Denise fumbled in the hair behind her head to where the T-shirt bandage was knotted tight, slipped it forward.

The oval of sight of her right eye swam into shape, still blurry but restoring the sharpness of perspective. Denise felt the prayer building in her chest, let free a gasp of thanks and sweet sadness, and took her reply.

Until she shivered suddenly and ducked back into the shadowed tent. It was a time she would remember all her married life.