Bruno imagines himself an insect as he swings through the door at Mountain Hut, an insect that can hunt and gather and consume, though he’s not sure if he should be a honeybee or a red ant today. 

He used this tactic of being a bug when he climbed his very first big wall the summer before — ‘positive imaging’ his freshman partner Roger called it as they started up the easy trade route. They worked out the systems together, Bruno (a wolf spider that day) throwing his small frame off the wall to jerk the haulbag after him, slings floating up to his ears at times as if he were under sea and not in high air. On the second day, aiding 700 feet off the ground, a piece blew out and dropped him to the next solid one.  He wasn't hurt, but then, clipping into his lower piece, he suddenly felt expansive — light — and what he did not know was that deep in his body he had triggered a series of raw, chemical explosions. Endorphins and oxytocin and norephinephrine ripped through his bloodstream and then the center of his brain like ion chains, retrenching like cloud strike, to burn pathways that would not come undone. 

Until that day he had a real job to return to, a credit card that wasn't maxed out, a family in Chicago whom he loved and a girlfriend who said she loved him. But by the time he finished the route everything east of the Sierra Nevada had begun to fade. 

Present partner in crime, Mr. Magoo, enters Mountain Hut a few minutes after Bruno and heads towards the climbing gear section. Mr. Magoo is the cleanest Bruno has ever seen him, both of them having snuck into the worker showers in Yosemite Valley that morning to get spruced up for their thieving. Mr. Magoo hides his tight muscles beneath a pair of nice, new, very loose climbing pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. Magoo has been thieving for a while, and claims he will only ‘harvest’ from the big national stores. He looks today almost like a corporate weekender, which, he stressed over and over, is exactly how you want to look. Blend in  —  appear so common that they won't notice you. That's why he drove his white Dodge Caravan sixty-six on the way to San Francisco and didn’t speed in town. These acts of restraint will take their toll on Mr. Magoo, though, and he’ll need to howl in the grocery store later, or bare his teeth at someone’s kid, or expose himself to a postal worker again. 

Bruno is dressed pretty much like Mr. Magoo, which means that he, too, is wearing biking tights beneath his pants and a tight polypro shirt beneath a looser flannel shirt. From inside these layers he pushes out his belly, giving himself a gut so he can later fill its thin hollow with the Gore-Tex jacket he has come to harvest. But they need hardware, today, too.  A new wall hammer and baby angles, a bunch of sawed-offs, a full set of HBs, replacement copperheads, and some TCUs, which when stuffed inside the tighter clothes will hug so well that they can barely be seen. They plan to visit several stores this day, harvesting a few items from each one, though Bruno will only try for the jacket on this stop. 

Bruno starts to head towards the clothing section, but then finds himself stuck before the shiny camping stove display, stunned by the simple thought that the route they want to do and its danger makes this stealing nothing — inconsequential — and suddenly he makes his decision: today he will be a dragonfly larva, gram for gram the most vicious predator in the animal kingdom. 

And then he is unstuck and moving through the well-lit store. Its wide aisles are thief-friendly and the hardware and much of the clothing are for some bizarre reason on the backside of the indoor climbing wall and thus can’t be seen from the cash registers. 

They have already agreed that when they are done harvesting they will leave separately and meet at the van, which is parked far away from the store. For protection they mostly count on their fast and wiry legs, cabled by long scree approaches and disc-crushing loads, but Mr. Magoo carries a nasty pepper spray to boot, like a stinkbug, Bruno thinks. Bruno carries nothing but his strong hands, loose and scabbed at his sides.  He has broad, flat knuckles … but then he's sure he won't get caught.  

On his fifth big wall, which was only his first with Mr. Magoo, Bruno finally made friends with what he thought of as a denser part of himself — a part that let him blow through his first two partners and all their pretty gear. "Adreno-freak," one had called him, but it wasn't really risky if you could just see the line between the risk and you. Then it was simply geometry, simply light. And in that light he could also see the shape of pain around him and knew exactly how many times each day he could swear out 'motherfuckingpieceofshit' with knuckles mashed the color of late twilight, knuckles the color of when he'd let himself stop for the day and regroup all the tattered lines and mixed-up gear about him. 

What he'd also come to know after five big walls was that by the beginning of the last day he regretted everything — and that at the moment of topping out he regretted nothing. Not leaving his woman, not not-telling his worried family where he was, and not not-finding a job that would steal climbing time away from him. 

He'd never even considered stealing until he found himself broke and hungry and lost in the Valley the day after he'd come off The Shield. His partner, Rainer from Berlin, had flailed badly and said he would never do a wall again, and Bruno, with swollen hands and bruised hips, wandered alone past the Curry Village restaurants in a daze, unable to find anything he wanted to eat. 

But then in the grocery store, still hungry and incapable of decision, Bruno caught Mr. Magoo stealing a few thousand calories worth of ice cream bars. They locked eyes, neither of them saying anything, but a few minutes later, outside, Mr. Magoo handed him a bar. They sat together for a moment, Bruno's ravaged body drunk on cold sugar and fats and when Mr. Magoo nodded and asked if Bruno was looking to do a wall, Bruno nodded back.  

The combination of Bruno's focus and Mr. Magoo's brute strength romped them up a few Valley classics, and then the itchy, 2,600 foot big wall Sargasso Sea, where on the third day the tattered chaise lounges they used in place of portaledges got caught hauling.  One was torn up so badly that they had to send it spinning out over the valley floor, the two of them whooping together as it wheeled and tumbled on updrafts and shrunk towards the ground.