The Second Tent

The CampfireThe openingFree

My cousin told me this one. He swears it happened to a friend of his, which is what everybody says. But he's never been a liar, and he doesn't go camping anymore.

Four of them went into the backcountry in October. Two couples. College kids. They hiked nine miles in to a lake in a basin with granite all around it and nothing but trees for twenty miles in every direction. They didn't see another person all day. That was the point.

They pitched one big tent on a flat spot by the water. Four sleeping bags, side by side. They built a fire. They cooked. They told stories, like we're doing now. They went to sleep around eleven.

In the morning, there was a second tent.

It was about forty feet away, at the edge of the trees. A small one. A one-person tent, the old-fashioned kind, a triangle of faded orange canvas held up with a pole at each end. It looked like something out of a photograph from 1970.

Nobody had heard anyone arrive. Nobody had heard anyone set up a tent in the dark forty feet away. You hear everything in the backcountry. A pinecone falling. A fish jumping. You'd hear tent stakes going into the ground.

The flap was zipped shut.

Mark, who was the outgoing one, walked over and said, "Morning!" in a friendly voice. Nobody answered. He said it again. He said, "Hey, we didn't hear you come in, sorry if we were loud last night."

Nothing.

They decided whoever it was must be asleep. A late hiker. Exhausted. They made breakfast, quietly, and went down to the lake to fish, and when they came back at noon the orange tent was still zipped up, and nobody had come out.