It had been two full moons since the night Seng Nu made Zaw forget.

If someone asked him about Jin Bu, he would recall her as a childhood friend who had been close to him for a while, but he no longer knew of their relationship, and he seemed disinterested to talk about her.

The rains had finally stopped and the forest sparkled as the soft earth gave way to new luscious shoots of green.

“You can fry these, but you need to soak them in water overnight” said Seng Nu, pointing out a bunch of chubby catkins dangling from the low branches of a goldwillow tree.

“What would I ever do without you Seng Nu?” beamed Zaw and then folded his lips together to suppress a grin, as he picked off the catkins.

Seng Nu caught the expression “Hey don’t make fun of me!” she reached up a hand and made to punch him but pulled her hand back before she touched him. She was still unused to being friends with people, and was unsure what was appropriate when it came to physical contact. Of course she had touched Zaw before, when she had bandaged his leg and tended him by his bedside for three nights. But now, as they walked together through the forest, she wasn’t sure what a touch would mean and whether it would mean the same thing for both of them.

“I’m only joking!” said Zaw, giving Seng Nu a pat on her shoulder. “I really do enjoy your company on these trips. Of course I already know about the goldwillow catkins, my mother used to make them for us when I was a child. But there’s so much you’ve shown me here in the forest that I don’t know about. Like the barrel gourds we roasted on the fire last week or the three pointed edible flowers we picked already today.”

He reached into his basket and picked one of the flowers out. At the centre of the flower was a circle of small golden anthers which sat on one large petal, triangular in shape, purple in colour. Zaw held it up to the sunlight. “It’s funny isn’t it, this flower? We don’t normally see three of something. Two legs, four legs, six legs, eight legs, two petals, four petals, five petals even. But never three. Except this flower.”

He put it in his mouth and let the flavour roll around his tongue. “Have you ever seen another flower with three petals Seng Nu?”

But Seng Nu was barely even listening. She was still thinking about the touch of his hand on her shoulder.

Later they walked even deeper into the forest, to an area so thick with life that even in the day the dense roof of trees blocking out the sun made it seem like evening. There were no paths either, just places where the trees parted.

Zaw stopped to collect a bunch of white starflowers that were growing from the moss under an Oakenbore tree.

Seng Nu frowned as she waited. “What are you getting them for? They taste of nothing.”

“They make a plate look nice though” said Zaw, wincing as he stood back up.

His damaged leg had never fully healed and it was unlikely he would ever become an oozie now. But the men at the camp enjoyed having him around, and after the camp cook went back to his village to marry, the men asked Zaw to take over the camp kitchens. It was a rough trade for a life as an oozie, but Zaw had tried to make the best of it.

“I added these to the feast dishes for the Gate of Winter” he said, offering Seng Nu one of the tiny white flowers.

“What’s the Gate of Winter?” said Seng Nu while taking the flower.

Zaw’s mouth went ever so slightly ajar. “You don’t know the Gate of Winter? How could you not know the biggest celebration of the year. No wonder you weren’t around a few days ago, you didn’t know.”

Seng Nu shrugged and said nothing. In fact she did know what the Gate of Winter was. Naw and her had celebrated it each year when the rains stopped. Naw had even given Seng Nu her own set of bells to call for the gate to be opened. It had always been a small celebration for her so when she had seen the camp preparing for their own larger Gate of Winter feast, she did not want to be a part of it. It did not feel like it was a Gate for her. So she had scampered back to her own home while the men rang their bells and ate.

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“I’m sorry Seng Nu, of course you wouldn’t know about the Gate, you were brought up in the forest weren’t you? Next year, you’ll have to come, I’ll get you a bell and cook you something delicious”

“I’d like that,”.

As cook, Zaw was not only concerned with giving the men of the camp sustenance, but wanted to know whether they liked it too. He had started by adding a few more cloves of garlic to soups, which of course got Kon on his good side. Then he had a competition with himself to chop the chillies as fine as he could, so that their zest would find every spoon that dipped into every bowl. The old cook had always just chucked whatever vegetable was around into the pot and cooked them all together, but Zaw began to experiment with amounts and measurements and to give lists of specific ingredients to the supply porters. Instead of one big pot, he would make two smaller dishes, and did not care that it meant more work, after all what other use did he have for his time? He found that carrots and ginger worked well together and so did sweet apples and rockroot. Squash vines went well with orange toms but not green ones. Of course all experiments were a risk and even Zaw knew he had gone too far when he served a green banana and chilli curry that most of the men had refused to eat and those that did politely declared the taste “interesting”.

When he wasn’t cooking, he spent time with Seng Nu in the forest, searching out wild ingredients. Though he could no longer run and he walked with a noticeable limp, he was still able to go deep into the forest with her, as long as they left plenty of time to get back.

“Look at this” he said, leaving the path again and poking a stick at the leaves of a small ground plant. It had no fruit or flowers, but on each stem there were rows of thin leaves and as he touched them with the stick, the leaves curled and folded so they reduced in width, hiding the plant from any predator who fancied a bite of a thick juicy leaf.

“Fingercurl” said Seng Nu. “I used to spend hours playing with them, waiting for the leaves to reopen.”

“How long does it take?” asked Zaw. “I’ve never stuck around to watch.”

“Too long.” Seng Nu walked on and had stopped by a hedge of bright red berries and was strimming them into her basket.

Zaw caught up with her and took one of the berries in his hand and looked at it carefully. “What are you doing?”

Seng Nu smiled back at him “don’t pretend you don’t know! This will go very well with apples and mushrooms,”

“This is not banberry. Look, see around the stem, there are thin green marks, like tiny blades of grass. Banberry does not have that. This is olmaberry. If you put that in your mouth...” He stuck out his tongue and crossed his eyes.

Seng Nu dropped the basket and the berries, poisonous and edible, spilled to the forest floor.

“Oh Oh! I’m sorry...I didn’t know!” she folded in on herself and buried her head in her knees. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”

Zaw placed a friendly hand on her shoulder. “It’s alright. We haven’t eaten them have we?”

“But I didn’t know...I could have killed you all.” Seng Nu sniffed.

“No you couldn’t. My legs might be weaker these days, but my eyesight is fine enough. I’m just surprised you didn’t know yourself. I thought you knew all the plants in the forest.”

Seng Nu said nothing. She picked up the Olmaberry and looked at it hard. The little green lines near the stem now seemed so obvious and alien.

“I don’t know everything.”.

Seng Nu looked down at the scattered berries. She picked up a handful and began to separate them out.

Zaw crouched down beside her. “There’s about a hundred berries to sort through. You’ll be an expert by the end of today.”

Later they walked back to the camp. Zaw asked her to join them for the evening meal. Seng Nu always seemed to disappear as they got back to camp, sometimes she would even grab a bowl of curry before slinking of into the jungle to presumably eat alone. He felt sorry for her.

“And don’t say ‘no’ this time Seng Nu” he said as she began to purse her lips in protest. “I would hate for you to die because you ate the wrong berry.” said Zaw.

Seng Nu screwed her face up in annoyance.

“Not that you don’t have a great knowledge of jungle food” Zaw said quickly, getting to the point he was trying to make “But a group will always know more than one person. Every poison berry we know in this forest represents a person who died. It’s some of the most precious knowledge we have. And the only reason we have it is because we eat together.

He put his arm around her and gave her a friendly shake. “Which is why you shouldn’t eat alone anymore, you’re joining us for dinner tonight.”

Seng Nu’s shoulders tensed. The feeling of Zaw’s hand on her was so overwhelming that she nodded with an affirmative mumble, just to get him to let go. He did.

“Great! I’ll make sure to cook something extra special for you tonight!”

They walked back to the camp and as they did the path seemed to be narrower than it was when they came in, as though the forest itself was trying to make them walk closer together.