Mr. Briggs checked the weather the way other men checked the weather to decide whether to cancel things.

He checked it to decide whether to go.

Snow coming Friday into Saturday meant he was on the phone by Thursday evening. Parents answered and said yes because that was what scouts was for. Learning to handle things. Snow was a thing. You handled it.

Pee Wee’s mother said yes.

Trout’s mother said yes in the tone she used when she had already decided the answer was yes and didn’t want to discuss the reasoning behind it.

Trout’s father said good.

There were eight of them.

They went in two cars with gear in the trunks and the snow already coming down by the time they reached the campsite, not hard yet, just steady, the kind of snow that meant business without announcing it. The trees held it on their branches for a while and then didn’t. The ground went white in the time it took to unload the cars.

Mr. Briggs stood in it with his hands on his hips looking satisfied.

“Good night for a fire,” he said.

Nobody disagreed out loud.

They were good at fires.

That was true. Whatever else Mr. Briggs had put them through in rain and cold and mud, they had learned fires. Trout found dry wood under a log the way he’d been shown and Pee Wee split kindling with two strokes each the way big kids split kindling, efficiently and without ceremony, and Danny Reese got the tinder going and the fire came up clean through the falling snow and held.

Mr. Briggs looked at it once and nodded.

The snow kept coming.

Beans and weenies were the first night rule.

Always. Every campout regardless of weather or season. It was inherited procedure, older than any of them, older probably than Mr. Briggs, just the thing you ate the first night because that was the first night thing.

Pee Wee had the can.

It was a large can. Industrial size, the kind that suggested beans were not a side dish but a project. He held it in both hands and looked at the fire and made his operational assessment and set it on the edge of the coals where the heat was steady.

Trout was already moving toward his tent.

“You open it?” he said.

“It’s fine,” Pee Wee said.

This was the full extent of the safety inspection.

The tents went up in the snow.

This took longer than it should have because Danny Reese had never fully understood his tent and approached it each time as a new problem to be solved from first principles. Trout got his up and helped Danny and by then the snow was coming harder and the fire was doing what fires did in snow which was argue with the weather and mostly win.

The can sat on the coals.

Nobody looked at it specifically.

Mr. Briggs was at the other end of camp checking the younger kids’ tents.

Trout got into his sleeping bag with his boots still on the way Mr. Briggs had shown them, in case you needed to move fast in the night, and listened to the snow on the tent and the fire doing its work and the general quiet of eight boys in sleeping bags in the woods in a snowstorm which was its own particular kind of quiet, full of small sounds and no human ones.

He was almost warm.

The can went off like something had made a decision.

Not a slow sound. Not a warning. Just a single enormous concussive thump that took the fire with it completely, coals and all, and sent the contents in every direction simultaneously including up and including outward and including directly onto every tent in the camp.

Silence.

Then snow falling into the place where the fire had been.

Then eight tent zippers at approximately the same moment.

Trout got his head out first.

The fire was gone. Not low. Not scattered. Gone. Where it had been there were coals sinking individually into the snow in a wide circle, each one going dark as it went under, and beyond them in every direction the snow held the evidence of the can’s opinion about the situation.

Beans on the tents.

Beans on the trees.

Beans in the snow in a pattern that radiated outward from the former location of the fire like a diagram of something.

Pee Wee’s head came out of his tent.

He looked at the coals.

He looked at the trees.

He looked at the place where the fire had been.

He shrugged.

Mr. Briggs came out of his tent on the far side of camp at a speed that suggested he had not been fully asleep. He stood in the snow in his boots and his long underwear and looked at the situation for a long moment.

He looked at the coals sinking in the snow.

He looked at the beans on the tents.

He looked at Pee Wee.

Pee Wee looked back at him.

“Did you open the can,” Mr. Briggs said.

Pee Wee considered the question in light of available evidence.

“Not enough,” he said.

Mr. Briggs stood in the snow for another moment.

Then he said several things that were not in any scout manual.

They got the fire going again.

This took longer without the coals but they had the wood and they had the skills and by the time it was up Mr. Briggs had stopped saying the things he’d been saying and was crouching beside it with his hands out.

They ate weenies without the beans.

The beans were in the snow and on the tents and in the trees and distributed across a significant portion of the surrounding forest and were not recoverable as a food source under the circumstances.

Danny Reese found one on his sleeping bag and ate it.

Nobody commented on this.

The snow came down all night.

In the morning everything was white and clean and the only evidence of the can was the dark circle where the fire had been rebuilt and the faint staining on the tent fabric that would not fully wash out and that Pee Wee’s mother would ask about twice before giving up.

Mr. Briggs made oatmeal on the camp stove and didn’t mention the can again.

He didn’t need to.

He would mention it for the next eleven years to every scout who came through and held a can near a fire without opening it first. He would say Pee Wee’s full name when he told it. First and last. The way you said the full name of something that had become instructional.

Pee Wee Morris.

Said the full name.

Held up the can opener.

Let that sit for a moment.

Then continued.

The fire held through the second night.

The snow stopped sometime before morning and the woods went the specific quiet that woods went after snow, complete and temporary, the kind that didn’t last but was total while it did.

Trout lay in his sleeping bag with his boots on and listened to it.

Somewhere on the other side of the tent wall Pee Wee was already asleep.

Outside the rebuilt fire pushed back against the cold the way fires did, steadily, without being asked, doing the one thing it knew how to do.

The beans were out there in the snow somewhere.

Frozen now.

Distributed evenly across the forest in every direction.

Even..

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