“I knew this was going to be hard, but damn,” Hugh said.
“Be glad it’s not snowing,” Ansel replied.
“I am.”
It was well past noon on Monday and to Hugh it felt as if they’d been hiking for days, not a few hours. At least by staying along the bank of the stream it wasn’t as hard as it would have been had they been plowing through the snow a few feet to their left.
“You might not believe it, but we are making progress,” Ansel said, pausing to give him a hug. “More than I expected. See that tree?” He pointed to an oak at the edge of the forest.
It had a strangely bent branch; as if someone had purposely shaped it so that one part of the branch was parallel to the ground, pointing in the direction they were headed, and then made an elbow so the rest of it pointed skyward. “Yeah. And?”
“I
