“Which way?”

I shrugged. How was I supposed to know? I’d never been on this trail before and the paths that diverged from the fork were unmarked.

“Well, we have to pick one,” he said, stating the obvious.

Trying to peer further down each path was no help. The woods were thick with undergrowth and the spindly saplings made it difficult to get a bearing. Looking up was no use either. The canopy was thick enough to obscure all but the weakest sunlight that filtered down, not enough to even warrant heavy sun protection.

The map, now soggy from the morning mist, looked more and more like a child’s scrawling interpretation of trails up and down the mountain. I missed the days of precise, large, ordinance maps. When people seemed to care about the usefulness of their work.

“Well, we can’t stay here,” he said, fists on his hips, glaring at the fork in the road as if it was put there personally to offend him.

“I know,” I replied staring at our shoes.

“Which way from here?” His huff reminded me of our cat.

“I don’t know,” I said still looking at our shoes, funny they should strike me as so incongruous on the trail. I almost laughed.

“Fine. We’ll go that way.” And he started up the left fork of the trail.

“We could always turn around,” I called after his back, but I don’t think he heard me.