Orel took a deep breath and let it out quietly. The familiar earthy scent of the nature reservation filled his head, the same trees as before, weathered, rings added with time, limbs missing or beginning to branch off. The smell of new shoots of grass coming up, and the decay under the leaves. The sun was low in the sky. He took out his water bottle and took a quick sip. Had he and his father crouched behind these same bushes? He couldn't remember a whole lot from that day aside from the long hours of the night.
"Alright, son, steady now."
Arthur nodded, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He willed his hands not to shake too badly, that would mess him up...
"There he is," Orel said, his voice low so he wouldn't scare away the fuzzy bunny that hopped into the clearing. Its nose twitched, but it didn't realize they were there. "Line up the shot..."
Arthur's tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth. He aimed at the bunny, getting him in clear view, waiting for focus, and then-
Click.
At the sound of the camera, two long ears popped up in slight alarm. Orel and Arthur held their breath. The bunny relaxed, nibbling the tops of some blades of grass before meandering into the bushes.
Arthur excitedly pressed a few buttons on his shiny new camera. He had worked all summer earning money to pay for it. As a surprise, his dad had bought him a tripod to set it on, and homemade 'coupons' for getting photos printed out at the store. The tripod was arriving through the mail and hadn't been here soon enough to bring on their trip. So Arthur was trying to steady his hands, even though his excitement made him fidget.
"This one turned out really good!" he turned the camera to show his dad.
"Yeah, it did!" Orel grinned.
As they continued down the trail, he felt his stomach twist. Here he was, in his own father's place. On a camping trip with his son.
And for all the excuses he had made for Clay when he was younger, he couldn't imagine- here and now- doing what he had done.
"Are you okay, Dad?" Arthur slowed down, glancing at Orel's leg. It never returned quite to normal, even after all these years, and Arthur thought maybe it was giving him trouble.
Orel pushed away the memory of lying in the dirt, the smell of rotting flesh. He looked down at his son. He had Christina's eyes. "Yeah, I'm fine."
They fell back into companionable silence. Like a distracted frog, Arthur hopped and skipped ahead, examining all sorts of things he found alongside the trail. He snapped a picture of what he declared to be 'the fattest bullfrog he'd ever seen'. Then he ran ahead, turned back around, and snapped a picture of his dad.
That was one of the ones he decided to develop, and it was stuck in a scrapbook later, with the bullfrog picture, the bunny, and the colors of the sunset reflecting off the river. His dad, leaning more to one side than the other, his good leg taking more weight. A smile on his face that sort of reached his eyes, an expression Arthur wouldn't understand until he was older.