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do
you
think?” Gwen said, though not unkindly. I’d noticed that for all her worldliness and bravado, she never acted mean or superior. “I got to pee so bad my teeth ache.”
    “Me, too,” I said, realizing for the first time that that was another reason I hadn’t been able to drift off. We’d carried canteens with us on the hike up to the campsite and had stopped frequently to swill the warm, metallic-tasting water. We’d had lemonade with dinner and hot cocoa with dessert. One of the counselors had lefta plastic bucket by the tent’s entry flap for us to relieve ourselves in during the night, but, for me at least, the very idea of piddling away in front of everybody was mortifying. I’d rather die first.
    “Come on,” Gwen said, sitting up in her sleeping bag. “I’m going outside.”
    “But—” We’d been instructed to stay in the tent, I was going to remind her. We were out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization and emergency medical care. But before I had a chance to put any of these worries into words, Gwen had already slipped out into the night. My bursting bladder won out over my better judgment, and I followed her.
    The cooking fire had burned down to embers, and the campground was awash in a ghostly sheen. The sliver of moon that hung like a stage prop above the tree line was outshone by the main attraction of the evening—a brilliant, dancing panoply of stars. Gwen and I stopped and stared up into the night sky for a minute or two as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. The woods were alive with sound. Insects hummed like an old refrigerator. And there was something else—a low, rough, raggedy roar—that sent a shiver through me.
    “Did you hear
that
?” I whispered urgently to Gwen.
    “That,” she said, grabbing a handful of napkins from the picnic table that was stacked with our supplies, “is the sound of somebody snoring.”
    We followed the hiking trail back down the mountain about fifteen yards before squatting a few feet apart in the underbrush. Brambles pulled at my nightgown and weeds tickled my backside, but I was finally able to pee.
    “You okay?” Gwen asked as I rejoined her with my nightgown bunched up around my waist.
    “I’m not a very good aim.”
    “Let’s find some paper towels,” Gwen said, heading back up the path again. It was only when we started to rummage around on the supply table that we noticed someone had been there before us. Boxes of cereal had been torn apart and Cheerios scattered on the ground like confetti. Bags of corn chips had been slashed open and pulverized. Our super-saver plastic tub of trail mix was gone.
    “What—?” Gwen said, looking up from the mess and around the campsite. Neither one of us had seen the bear earlier because he was so big and black and quietly preoccupied. He was sitting on the ground not far from our tent, the tub of trail mix between his legs, shoveling the stuff into his mouth with both paws. A low, rough—and now I realized—contented growl escaped from his maw between bites.
    “Oh, God!” I cried. “Oh, my God!”
    The bear looked up from his little picnic.
    “Shhhhh!” Gwen hissed, holding my arm as I tried to bolt. “Don’t move a muscle. Don’t say another word.”
    “What’s going on?” one of the counselors called out.
    “Stay where you are!” Gwen called. “There’s a bear out here. He’s feeding. If we leave him alone, he’ll go away when he’s done.”
    Like the rest of us, the counselors seemed to hold Gwen in special regard. They quickly came to realize that she knew as much, if not more, than they did about the wild. Just that afternoon, one of them had asked her if a group of mushrooms we’d passed was edible, and Gwen had responded after quick examination: “Only if you want to kill yourself.” So now, though we could hear a certain amount of stirring from inside the tents, no one emerged. And Gwen and I stood stock-still, watching the bear devour the