11. Rowan
ROWAN
BANANAS: A CRIME AGAINST GUARDIANS
Waiting is a skill humans have largely abandoned in favor of devices that beep when their food is warm.
I, on the other hand, have honed that particular skill over the centuries.
With my back against the rough bark of a cedar, I watch the light change from the bruised purple of pre-dawn to a thin, watery gold.
The air is heavy with the scent of damp pine and the ozone of the passing storm.
I don’t need a watch to know she’s late.
The forest tells me. The squirrels are already deep into their morning arguments, and the dew is beginning to lift from the ferns in a slow, ghost-like vapor.
Wren arrives with the grace of a stumbling pack mule.
I hear her long before I see her. The rhythmic crunch of gravel under those oversized boots, the erratic clicking of trekking poles she clearly doesn’t know how to use, and the steady stream of low-voiced muttering is enough to disturb even the most ancient trees out of their slumber.
She looks exactly like I expect: exhausted, slightly damp, and vibrating with a frantic energy that makes the birds go quiet in protest.
“You’re five minutes late,” I say, stepping out from the shadow of the cedar.
She jumps high enough to rattle the various metal clips hanging off her backpack, clutching a trekking pole to her chest like a spear.
“Good morning to you too, Smokey. Jesus. Do you have a bell? Or maybe just try not to materialize out of the wood grain like a jump-scare in a bad indie horror movie?” She exhales a shaky breath and adjusts her glasses, which have fogged up from the early morning air.
“And I’m not late. I’m on Cassidy time. It’s a localized temporal anomaly where the person holding the keys decides when the day starts. ”
“The sun disagrees.” I look at the sheer volume of gear strapped to her. She has enough nylon and high-tech Gore-Tex to outfit a small expedition to the interior of the moon. “We’re walking three miles to the North Ridge cameras, not establishing a colony. Why are you carrying a satellite phone?”
“Because the last time I went out here alone, I almost died of a heart attack because of a suspicious-looking rope,” she snaps, though her eyes soften slightly when they land on my shirt.
I was wearing the HIDE the sound of her struggle will provide a constant sonar ping of her location.
“Call it what you want,” she pants, her boots clumping behind me.
“But the hotline is blowing up. I spent three hours last night deleting voicemails from people who think you’re an alien or a government experiment gone wrong.
If we don’t give them a curated version of the truth, they’ll keep inventing their own.
My plan is simple: I post blurry, inconclusive footage that ‘confirms’ a sighting in a completely different sector of the park.
You stay in the North Ridge. They go to the South Ridge. Everyone wins.”
“Except the people at the South Ridge will be disappointed,” I say, stepping over a protruding root without looking down. Humans don’t handle disappointment well. They turn it into litigation or vandalism.”
“Better a disappointed tourist than a documentary crew with thermal goggles in your living room, Rowan.” She stops to catch her breath, leaning heavily on her poles.
“Honesty didn’t work. Remember? You told me the truth and I laughed in your face.
We have to lie to keep the secret. It’s the art history approach to reality—it’s all about the frame, not just the painting. ”
I stop and look back at her. Her face is flushed, a stray strand of hair plastered to her forehead.
She looks fragile against the backdrop of the ancient timber, a small, stubborn spark of human industry trying to negotiate with a mountain.
I feel a strange, unwelcome twitch of something that isn’t quite irritation.
It’s the same feeling I get when I see a particularly determined bee trying to fly against a gale.
“I will allow the cameras to remain,” I say, my voice flat. “But I choose what they see. I will turn them when I move. I will move them when I hunt. If you try to curate a moment that involves me without my consent, I will eat your satellite phone.”
“Fair. A bit dramatic on the hardware consumption, but fair.” Her pace slows as the incline sharpens, her breathing a little louder now. “We have a deal. I provide the digital smoke screen, you provide the... whatever it is you do. Being tall. Looking ruggedly suspicious. Guarding things.”
We reach a section of the trail where a massive Douglas fir surrendered to the wind months ago.
The trunk is nearly four feet in diameter, slick with moss and rotting bark, and barricading the path.
I can get over it with one step and the press of a hand, but for Wren, in those boots and with that pack, it’s an insurmountable wall.
Jaw set, she looks for a way around it, but here, the brush is a wall of devil’s club and blackberry brambles.
I can see her mental gears grinding, calculating the friction of her soles against the moss, the weight of her pack.
She’s probably thinking of the possibility of a humiliating slide into the dirt.
“I’m going to need a minute to engineer a solution,” she mutters, reaching for a pole to probe the moss. “Maybe if I can find a fulcrum... or a very sturdy vine.”
I sigh. I don’t have a minute. The light is moving, and I have to check the hives before the heat hits the valley floor.
She doesn’t have time to protest before I hook my hands under her arms and lift her.
She’s surprisingly light, mostly nylon and indignation.
I hoist her up and over the trunk, setting her down on the dry needles on the other side as easily as moving a basket of apples.
Wren gapes at me, her trekking poles still clutched in her hands like frozen lightning bolts. Her face goes from a pale, sweaty pink to a vibrant, startled crimson. She adjusts the straps of her backpack with a violent, jerky motion.
“I had a fulcrum in mind, Rowan. I was going to use leverage. You can’t just... toss me around like a sack of artisanal flour. We are partners. Partnerships involve consultation before physical relocation.”
“You were thinking,” I say, stepping over the log with ease. “I was moving.”
“I was strategizing!” she shouts at my back as I continue up the ridge. “There is a dignity in the struggle, you know. You’re ruining my character arc!”
“You’re too slow,” I say, not looking back.
It’s a statement of fact, unadorned and undeniable.
She lets out a huff, but then she resumes her heavy trudging.
She doesn’t stop arguing, of course. No, she debates the ethics of non-consensual lifting for the next ten minutes, her voice a constant, rhythmic hum that eventually blends into the sound of the wind in the trees.
I find the first “offering” near the bend in the trail where the old SAR shack used to sit.
The cloying, artificial sweetness assaults my nose right before I see the cluster of yellow objects neatly arranged on a flat stump.
Bananas. Six of them, looking like a neon sign against the deep greens of the forest floor.
I stop so abruptly that Wren nearly walks into my back. A cold, ancient prickle of offense rises up my spine. The choice of offering is an insult.
“What is it?” Wren asks, peering around my arm. “Oh. Someone left you a snack. That’s almost... sweet? In a very weird, stalker-adjacent way.”
“It is a crime.” I pick up one of the bananas. It was soft and bruised. “Do I look like I belong in a tropical jungle? Do I look like I have the digestive tract of a fruit bat? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of my habitat and my dignity.”
“I mean, according to the internet, you’re an apex primate,” she says, her voice taking on that amused register she uses when she’s about to make a joke at my expense. “And primates like bananas. It’s science, Rowan. Cartoons wouldn’t lie to us.”
“Cartoons are a human invention designed to mask the cruelty of the world with bright colors,” I mutter, dropping the banana as if it’s toxic.
“Over the last three centuries, I have been offered many things. In 1842, a man left me a very salt-heavy ham that I spent two days burying so the bears wouldn’t go mad.
In the sixties, a group of children left me a collection of small, plastic soldiers and a half-eaten bag of marshmallows.
About a month ago, someone left a pair of rubber shoes.
Green. I believe they are called Crocs.”
“The Crocs!” Wren laughs, a genuine, bright sound that made a squirrel chatter in alarm. “The hotline caller! He wasn’t lying. You really took them.” She narrows her eyes. “But you do know offerings aren’t typically left on porch cabins, right?”
I shrug. “He left them outside. I took them. I don’t like litter, and those shoes were litter.
They smelled like a chemical fire.” I look at the bananas again.
“Humans think they can bribe the unknown with things they find in their own cupboards. It’s lazy.
If you’re going to worship a myth, at least bring something the myth can use. Like cedar oil. Or high-quality twine.”