We bolted into the camp like three goggle-eyed, grinning idiots. A single small tent, a small campfire, a skillet meant for meals-for-one.

A lone camper. With a pickup! Thank God, a pickup!

“Hello? Hello!”

“Hallooo!”

“Anybody here?” That was Hayden. “We’re lost, we need you to get us back to civilization, please!”

“Who the hell are you?” came a voice behind us. A man with a small bucket, he’d been off getting water from the stream we’d been walking beside, I guess. He was older than us but not much, in his thirties, he had a scruffy-looking beard (not a real beard, just hadn’t shaved in about a week) and a thick mat of chest hair over muscles a bodybuilder would have envied, thick, broad ovals spaced over the breadth of his chest, and forming a six-pack on his stomach with his navel a lost indentation among them. The sleeveless shirt (hell, it was practically a vest) over his worn blue jeans and construction boots. Why he was here, he wasn’t here for fun and games, that was my take on it. Probably a worker for a forestry company, out here marking timber to be cut or some such. We had probably wandered onto some privately-held land in the national forest, such tracts were dotted around a lot of these lands. His dark-brown eyes were anything but welcoming, his eyebrows and mouth were drawn into a scowl rather than a smile.

We made a cacophony of prattling noises as we informed him of our situation. “And if you’d be kind enough to get us back into town, we’d really appreciate it.” I concluded hopefully.

We three waited for his agreement.

“Can’t do it.” was his answer and he came on into the camp, like we weren’t standing there, gawking at him, dumbfounded.

“You can’t?” Hayden said. “But...we’re lost!”

“Not my problem.”

“It wouldn’t take too long to get us into town.” Gilbert argued.

“What’s in it for me?” he wanted to know.

“We got money.” I said after a short silence.

“How much?”

Our wallets had been in our bags, which had been in the pickup. “We don’t have it with us.” I said. “But get us back into town and our families will wire us the money, however much you want.”

“Huh! I get you into town and you vanish. No, thanks!” the guy said.

“Guys, you’d better turn out your pockets.” I said. “We’ve got us the mountain version of Ebeneezer Scrooge here.”

We produced a fancy gold-leaf covered keychain, a pocket knife, and a handful of small change, less than a dollar. We showed it to the guy. “We got this.” I said to him.

“That’ll earn you a couple of biscuits each for your supper.” was his appraisal.

“Hey!” I gasped out.

“Nothing’s free.” the man said.

“Well...all right.” I said. Three days without food, you’ll give up a keychain and twelve cents in change for a couple of biscuits to eat.

They were the kind of biscuits that come in a can of ten, he had baked them in a Dutch oven. Two each were doled out to us. I wish I could say we threw them back in his face in disgust, in fact, we ate them and craved more.

“Come on, man!” Gilbert pleaded. “You got to help us out. We’re lost and don’t even know which way to go.”

“You got nothing I want.” the man said. “Nothing you’d want to give me.”

“So what do you want?” Hayden blurted out. “Maybe we do.”

The man looked us over. “You heard the old rule about rides? ‘Ass, gas or grass, no free rides.’” he said. “What you got for that?”

“We don’t have any money.” I said. “You know that.”

“Yep.”

“We don’t have any drugs, either.” Gilbert added. “You’d have seen it if we’d had any, we would have offered it to you.”

“Yep.” the guy went on.

And that left...

Hayden finally broke the general silence. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!” he groaned. “Guys, he wants to fuck us. He wants to fuck us.”

“Got it right away, did you?” the guy said sarcastically.

“We can’t do that!” I said, scandalized.

“Then you got nothing I want.”

“Oh, God, oh, God!” Hayden moaned. “He’s going to just leave us here in the wilderness.”