“Teresa!” Daphne sang out.

Of course they hadn’t heard her, but now she made noise. “Don’t call me Teresa. Please. Not Tracy or Terry, either. I implore.” She limped into the clearing and began to dress.

“What’s the story? And why are you limping?”

“I think I did something to my ankle. I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything, but I was paying more attention to the hunters than to me. It gave me some trouble in the last quarter mile or so. I’m sure I just need to rest it.

“It was a good plan for us to move. Those guys could be dangerous. They were talking about partying with us. Remember the tall one, with the red shirt and the two guns? They called him Buck. Just as I got there, he was advising his buddies that with four of them to three of us, and with their weapons, sex was a sure thing tonight. It looked to me like he’d have no trouble convincing them to come after us. Especially after they’d had a few drinks.”

“I thought I heard gunshots.” Daphne stood and added wood to the fire.

“You did. Idiot Buck thinks he saw a snake in the rocks and fired his handgun. He shot twice and didn’t hit any snake, but the bullets ricocheted around in the rocks for awhile.”

They savored their escape as the campfire burned down. They agreed to hike far away from the hunters tomorrow.

Now Reese stands to look down on the dying fire. “Ouch,” she expels as she tries to walk. “I’m sorry to say this ankle may be a problem.”

Gail and Daphne speak at the same time. “Oh shit,” Daphne blurts through Gail’s “Sit down, Reese. Let me see.”

They remove her boot. The ankle is swelling. They figure Reese couldn’t have broken it; though in her a break wouldn’t have announced itself with a snap, it also wouldn’t have allowed her to walk. But it starts to look like a disabling injury. They can’t ice it, and the nearby creek is too steep and rocky for a night soaking.

Gail sits by Reese while Daphne unpacks their first aid kit. The only aid it offers is aspirin and an ace bandage. Daphne looks at her friends, blonde heads close together, and laments, “If this had to happen, I wish it had happened to me.”

She isn’t speaking some sort of charity. Daphne has the sturdiest ankles of the group. She also has the sturdiest ego.

She’s always had a strong sense of herself. She can recall clearly back to the age of two. She says she can remember discovering language. No matter what her experiences have been, she has remained unshakably her; even at five and a half years of age, when parents, doctors and hospital staff grossly mishandled her stay for a tonsillectomy, she knew they were incorrect in behavior, and that their errors were not her responsibility.

She can’t act. That would involve being someone else. She can’t lie. She’s incapable of having an identity crisis. She’s dense, in that she’s a concentrated personality. If she had sprained her ankle, she would have turned her focus inward, marshaled her powers of integration, and bullied the injury enough to hike out of there.

Gail speaks. “Daphne, do you suppose…do you think we could work together on this? Maybe it’s possible for me to translate healing from you to Reese.”

Daphne understands where Gail’s going before Gail finishes speaking. She grins as she pulls her bushy dark hair away from her face. “It can’t hurt to try,” she says to Gail. She feeds the fire to burn another half hour.