The fire crackled low, its embers glowing against the dark stretch of wilderness beyond camp. Most folks had turned in for the night, their soft murmurs and shifting bedrolls the only sounds beneath the endless sprawl of stars.

Arthur sat on a log nearby, one boot planted firmly on the ground, the other leg stretched out as he leaned back on his elbows. His cigarette burned lazily between his fingers, the glow of it briefly illuminating his face before he exhaled, sending a thin stream of smoke curling into the cool night air.

He didn’t know you were watching him.

There was something about the way he carried himself, even when he wasn’t trying. Steady. Strong. He wasn’t just a man—he was something more than that. Like a buck standing proud in the woods, backlit by morning light, noble in a way that no hardship could break. There was kindness in him, too—real, honest kindness. The kind that wasn’t loud, the kind that didn’t demand attention. It was in the way he helped, the way he listened, the way he believed, even when there wasn’t much left to believe in.

You, though? You had never been something so grand. If Arthur was a buck, you were a coyote—scrappy, quick, meant to slink through the edges of things rather than stand tall in the middle of them. A dog not worth saving. You’d always known that. You’d spent your life weaving through shadows, knowing your place on the outskirts, scrounging for what you could get. That’s just how things were.

But Arthur? Arthur wasn’t built for shadows. He was made for the sun, for open fields and clear skies. And yet, here he was, sitting by a dying fire in a world that had taken so much from him, and still—still—he found reasons to keep going.

Maybe that was why you admired him so much. Maybe that was why you could never quite understand how someone like him could exist in a world like this.