former honeymooners

By day three the honeymoon had worn off.

Dawn woke an itchy mess.  Thankfully, her tick bite from the day before looked normal, no redness or swelling, just a slight bump.  However, her mosquito bites, which numbered around 75, looked the same, raised white skin in a sea of red.

My legs looked wrapped in the early stages of poison ivy.

To join her bites, came four bee stings later that morning hiking along a road.  Dawn had stopped to find a secluded spot to do her business, and was gone for less than a minute before emerging wide-eyed and desperate.   Running toward me she yelled, "Bees! What should I do?" "Just keep running!" I said, as I joined matching pace. We ran down the road for a while after the buzzing stopped, and found a soft spot to rest.

We treated the stings with jewel weed, checked for cell phone service, and waited for excess inflammation. We were on the road, and it was the best time. 

Later in the day, Dawn really started to struggle with the weight of her pack, we began to quibble about pace, and there was so much indecision on where to camp, my head ached.  Tired, hungry, thirsty, and a meal for mosquitoes, we snapped at each other for the first time in our twenty year friendship.

Left to hash it out in the privacy of the woods, we did well.  There was no where to go, and no outside opinions, we just had to talk through it until both of us felt better.  By the end of the day, a weight had been lifted and had comical discovered that with an 0 blood type, Dawn truly was a universal donor for all living things.

If that wasn't enough to bring us back together, the alien sounds of a snorting and pawing dear outside our tent that night was.  Sweet Bambi is a territorial freak.