“You’re dead,” he says.

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. They got you. Lie down.”

There is no arguing with him, since he can see the enemy and I can’t. I have to lie down on the swampy ground, propped against a stump to avoid getting too wet, until it’s time for me to be alive again. Sometimes, instead of war, we hunt through the forest, turning over logs and rocks to see what’s underneath. There are ants, grubs and beetles, frogs and toads, garter snakes, even salamanders if we’re lucky. We don’t do anything with the things we find. We know they will die if we put them into bottles and leave them by accident in the sun in the back window of the car, as we have done before. So we merely look at them, watching the ants hiding their pill-shaped eggs in panic, the snakes pouring themselves into darkness. Then we put the logs back where they were, unless we need some of these things for fishing.

Once in a while we fight. I don’t win these fights: Stephen is bigger and more ruthless than I am, and I want to play with him more than he wants to play with me. We fight in whispers or well out of the way, because if we’re caught we will both be punished. For this reason we don’t tell on each other. We know from experience that the satisfactions of betrayal are scarcely worth it. Because they’re secret, these fights have an extra attraction. It’s the attraction of dirty words we aren’t supposed to say, words like bum; the attraction of conspiracy, of collusion. We step on each other’s feet, pinch each other’s arms, careful not to give away the pain, loyal even in outrage. How long did we live this way, like nomads on the far edges of the war?

Today we’ve driven a long time, we’re late setting up our tent. We’re near the road, beside a raggedy anonymous lake.