Jacqueline Brennan

I ultimately took Pete’s tip on the therapist/astrologer once I was out on the Peninsula. She went by Tully, and though I had initially contacted her through a personal email, I did look her up through official channels where she was listed as Maeve Tully. From that, I found out she was indeed licensed to practice psychiatric medicine in the state of Washington.

I got back to the government area and had just made it into my room when I heard two sets of feet beelining for my door, their turnover so fast it sounded like a single organism scuttling across the floor with an uneven gait. Bridger and Ian, two of my fellow seasonals, were outside my door before I could finish commenting that they were like dogs. “We were taking bets about…

Bridger and I were the novices, so our respective first four-day assessment trips out to the second-growth area were accompanied by Ian, who was tasked with showing each of us the ropes. Those ropes, from what I gathered about an hour into the drive to our trailhead on my first hitch, consisted mostly of the sacred art of shooting the proverbial shit. That notion felt unspoken until there was enough daylight…

Ian and I had returned on a Friday from four uneventful days in the backcountry. I defined uneventful minimally: We hadn’t been impaled by any trees or limbs during a day of high winds, Glorified G still seemed to like me enough not to bite or spit on me when I approached his enclosure, the cabin hadn’t caught fire, I hadn’t murdered Ian out of frustration or vice versa, and Ian…

It struck me even in my earliest memories of visits to Ayla and Pete on the Peninsula that, compared to my home area, there were substantially less large predators near the coasts. There was never any shortage of fucking deer though. It made total sense—almost no predators, tons of verdant growth. There could never be any risk of overgrazing. Or, so it still seemed. I knew all bets were off these…

Aside from Glorified G’s disappearance, the remaining days of my first solo assessment had been uninteresting. I got back in early enough on the last Friday of June and considered using that weekend to explore a different part of the Peninsula. But I knew that on Monday I would be going straight back to the second-growth treatment area for the second of three consecutive weeks. It would’ve ordinarily been Bridger’s week…

“Let’s hear it for the woods!” Ian yelled after another round of handclaps, this time from Bridger and not me. “What?” Bridger asked, sliding awkwardly over a wet rock compacted into the trail. “He thinks you’re giving it up for the woods. Like an ovation,” I said. “Yeah, man. That’s your guys’ shtick, right? I know you Sagittarians love communing with the earth and shit,” Ian said. Ian was deliberately trying…

“Callahan, you’re quiet today,” Ian said from somewhere behind me. He wasn’t wrong. I’d gotten back to sleep eventually during the night, but woke at such frequent intervals that it hadn’t felt like I slept. I’d been looking down through our entire walk back to the trailhead. We were probably half-way along. I explained that I’d slept like shit and felt nasty. “Yo, you slept like shit, too?” Bridger asked, audibly…

If not for the nerve-numbing effects of a long run immediately after I’d returned with Ian and Bridger to the government area, I wouldn’t have lasted an hour alongside my buzzed neighbors without having some kind of a breakdown. Our coworker Ben’s partner Cassie had just outlined the painful process that led her to conclude that I was “actually the fucking GOAT,” right after Bridger had finished giving me shit about…

I saw that Glorified G’s enclosure was still empty once I could see the cabin. It had been as foggy as any morning in the dense interiors of the Olympics until the sun started breaking through the hazy water vapor. Because so much of my outside time that summer was in the trees, I so rarely needed sunglasses that I had stopped keeping them on me. I regretted it a little…