Stony River (17 page)

Sometime later she jerked upright, blinking her eyes. Fenn was coming in the door, the night pure black behind him. She staggered up from her chair. “Oh Fenn, you’re home!”

“Hell, you still up?” he demanded irately. He kicked the door shut and strode past her to set a box of groceries on the counter. “You’d think at this hour I could have the place to myself.” He shoved a block of ice into the icebox none too gently.

“I didn’t know where you were,” she said honestly, searching his face with her clear gaze. “You’ve never been so late before.”

“Waiting up for me, are you?” He turned on her wrathfully, his presence too near and overbearing as he stood only a step or two from her. “I thought I told you to let me live my own life. Gad!” he implored. “Am I never to have any peace?”

To Sevana’s tired vision, his red flannel shirt glowed like a flame in the dull lanternshine. His eyes, too, were a fire, glittering with a diabolical light. “You’ve been drinking!” she cried, taking a step back from him.

“Remarkable observation!” he sneered. “I’m drunk, as a matter of fact. And I’ll thank you to take yourself out of my sight before I give you a good reason to look so frightened.”

She
was
frightened, but his insolent speech spurred her to stand her ground. “Don’t talk to me that way—it’s not right!” she said sturdily. “What were you thinking, driving that treacherous road in such a state? I would think you had better sense!”

“Treacherous road!” he scoffed. “You’ve never seen a treacherous road. There’s roads I drive on, there’s not room for all four tires at the same time. Came down one this afternoon and gave that blamed Brangan a ride for his money.” He gave a laugh, then seemed to realize she was still there. “Away with you!” he exclaimed with a swing of his arm. “I won’t be accountable to you or anyone else.”

“That’s what you’d like to think,” she retorted. “You’re living in an unreal world if you expect other people not to have feelings, just because you don’t have any. I couldn’t help but worry, Fenn. Anything could have happened to you, and I—”

He lunged forward, seizing her shoulders with two powerful hands. “I’m telling you to get out of my sight,” he ground out, “and if you don’t, so help me—”

She turned from him coolly and went upstairs. She knew he was too intoxicated to be answerable for his actions, and therefore was willing to forgive him. She did have a thought about the many guns in the house, and wished again for a bolt on her door—but since there was none, she moved the trunk against it as noiselessly as she could. Then, tiredly, she threw herself down on the bed in the total darkness, questioning her sanity for sticking it out there. Maybe she should write her father and tell him how things really stood.

But strangely, as she was drifting away, it was not images of Fenn’s ire that filtered through her sleep-dazed mind. Instead the darkness was pushed away by a bright vision, and a light dazzled before her eyes. It was the sun, shining down on a sea of purple-blue flowers. And in the midst of them—looking over it all as if he had designed it so himself—stood a solitary man of the mountains, with the wind in his hair and the gladness of the day in his eyes.

CHAPTER 11

In the morning Fenn was untalkative and his face shadowed, but his surliness was gone. He even helped with the breakfast dishes, perhaps to make amends for the previous night. Maybe he was remembering she had almost left once already. In any case, in some indirect way he seemed to be apologizing for his behavior. He said he hadn’t gotten any mousetraps because the mercantile was out.

“I met the game warden yesterday,” Sevana said, handing him a plate to rinse. “He wants us to let him know if we see anyone around, any strange cars parked, that kind of thing.”

“I think he’s chasing ghosts,” said Fenn. “Nobody’s going to waste their time trapping this time of year. But he says he’s seen a lot of oddball things in his line of work and hasn’t ruled it out.”

“I thought I saw a light moving somewhere down by the river after he left.”

“Probably Randall taking a look around.”

“Maybe…but he was on his way upriver when I saw him. Maybe he stopped on the way back.”

There was still a box of groceries on the counter, a sack of potatoes on the floor. After Fenn took the potatoes to the root cellar, he collected his fishing gear. Sevana stood outside while he saddled Trapper in the morning sun—which for the first time in many days was shining unhindered. The river range rose in full view over the valley, its washed, blue-green hues seeming almost too pure and bright after all the monochrome days. “Where are you going?” she asked.

He cinched the belly-strap. “Cache Creek.”

“Could I go with you?” she asked hopefully.

“Sorry, Sevana, I only have one horse,” he said, but his indifference belied his words. He rode out of the yard at a gallop.

Sevana went back in the house and finished putting away the town goods. There were two loaves of bread—evidently Fenn would still take store bread over hers when he could get it. She held her breath as she lifted out the last few items, but no packet of flower seeds lay at the bottom. He had forgotten—or never had any intention of buying them to start with. Probably it was unreasonable to expect him to care about having flowers around the cabin. She was not even sure why she did; it wasn’t her house.

With the promise of good weather, Sevana wasted no further time in packing her paints and heading up the trail. But when she reached the high pasture, she saw her hope was not to be: indefinite sweeps of fog still varied on the upslopes, obscuring the very visages she wanted to paint. Her only consolation was a thrill at how high and ethereal those peaks appeared in the clinging, wraithlike mists.

“I wish I could paint fast enough to capture the way the mountains look right now,” she confided to Joel, whom she had found reading under the big pine. But Joel laughed at that, and said if she wanted to capture the mountains in all their moods, she would need a thousand canvases.

He invited her to sit under the pine where the ground was fairly dry. But no sooner had she taken a place beside him than a disturbance erupted in the flock—bossy Briar butting Alpine out of her feeding ground. Joel went down to settle the disagreement.

Sevana glanced over at the book he’d set in the grass. It was a King James Bible, and from the look of its worn leather cover, it had seen many mornings in the pasture before that one. She picked up some pieces of pine bark that had fallen off the corrugated tree trunk, and amused herself by trying to make them fit together like a puzzle.

Joel saw her playing with the bark when he returned. “Since you can’t work on your picture today, how would you like to weave a basket like the Indians up north?” he asked, scooping up a handful of damp pineneedles from the ground before he sat down.

“If you’ll show me how.”

Intrigued by his example, she was soon twisting and threading the pliant needles on her own, the mat growing in a tight circle under her fingers. She wouldn’t have thought pineneedles could be used in that way. “What else did you learn from the Indians?” she asked curiously.

“Well, I’m part Tlingit myself, a quarter or so,” he replied. “But I had friends who were full-bloods who still lived the old ways. I learned their methods to survive in the woods, fish and hunt, dry berries and meat…and maybe a superstition or two.”

She was not surprised to hear he had Indian blood. His skin was not much darker than hers, but she could see it in his lean-boned face and black hair, his riveting dark eyes. “What kind of superstitions?”

“Well, take that red-tailed hawk.” Joel pointed to a bird soaring above the valley, its wings outstretched on the lift of the wind. “Listen, you can hear its cry. It’s defending its nesting territory.”

Sevana focused on the bird effortlessly riding the air currents with its taut reddish-brown wings, heard its distant, high scream.

“In the legend of the tribe, the shadow of the hawk is a symbol of danger, but of course it isn’t so. Otherwise we would be in constant peril, for they are always flying overhead. And the owl is a symbol of death, but I have one or two that circle my cabin almost every night at sunset—and near as I can tell, I’m still here.”

Sevana smiled but had to ask, “Why do they circle your cabin?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s a little ritual with them, and I always look forward to their visits. I like to think they’re flying in to say hello.”

The hawk flapped its wings to circle higher, then stretched them wide and plunged in a smooth parallel glide down the slope toward the unseen river. And Sevana wished she could span the valley as easily, and reach the mountains the other side.

While they were eating lunch another bird landed nearby, a smaller gray-and-white jay who viewed them with specific, bright-eyed interest. Joel tossed the opportunist a piece of bread, upon which it immediately pounced. “Scavenger,” he remarked as it flew away with its prize. “Just like all whiskyjacks. Indian legend has it, if you leave your sandwich unattended, a whiskyjack will steal it.”

Sevana laughed, but was interested to see a whiskyjack for herself. “Mr. Radnor took time out of his busy day to tell me what a whiskyjack was. I thought it was just the bar in town.”

“Yes, one of them.” Joel seemed surprised she knew of the saloon. “Have you been to it?”

“No—but one of the loggers used it for his phone number.” And she had to explain a bit foolishly about the list of names.

Joel listened to her tale with entertainment, but also a trace of exasperation. “I could say I’m surprised, but I’m not,” was his comment. “There was a girl on firetower a few years back the loggers just would not leave alone. They tried everything to go out with her—drove her crazy. Of course she was quite a beauty—as are you,” he added, amusing her by his afterthought of a compliment. Her looks were evidently not a subject that had occupied his attention overly since meeting her. But he was asking, perhaps teasing a little, “Are you going to call the one who left the number?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She was the essence of dignity. “I don’t have a phone.”

Joel spared her by dropping the subject. “So you’ve been talking to Randall? Any leads on the poaching case?”

“Not that he mentioned.”

Something had caught Joel’s attention, and he went to uproot a flower some distance away. Bringing back the purple spike of lupine to show her, he said it was poisonous to sheep. He asked that if she saw any on her trips through the meadow, to let him know.

Sevana agreed. The sun was full on the hillside now, baking the moisture out of the rain-dampened trees and ground, and the air was infused with a delicious aroma like cookies baking. “It smells like dessert,” she said, a bit perplexed, sniffing the sun-warmed tree trunk at her back.

“You’re very observant,” he complimented her. “Ponderosa bark smells almost as sweet as sugar pine. And if your lunch is like mine, that’s the only dessert we’ll be having today, too,” he added sadly.

“No, it isn’t,” she was pleased to contradict him, and dug a bag of cocoa brownies out of her pack.

Joel was suitably impressed. “You can come up here anytime,” he said, accepting the liberally bestowed bars with relish.

After lunch he showed her how to secure the rim of her weaving, and she took home a very attractive basket—not big enough to hold anything but coins or a robin’s egg, but something she was to treasure disproportionately to its size and usefulness.

The next time Sevana went up the trail, the mountains stood in all their gleaming clarity above the green meadow, patches of snow still clinging to their sides. They were becoming familiar to her: the massive, blocky form of Graystone, the nearly symmetrical uplift of Old Stormy, the dark daggerpoint of Bearclaw. They were so changeless, and yet, paradoxically, changing with every variation of light and shadow.

So wild, so lofty! As she studied them, her face clouded. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to capture the essence of their beauty, the indefinable strength their presence portrayed. Aloof and imperturbable, they seemed to resist acquaintance—even while their beauty demanded it.

She stopped mixing paint to think about that. If you truly wanted to understand the mountains, you had to become a scientist of sorts. For their beauty was not merely a picture to behold: it was rocks and trees and all the stuff of science. And yet—her mind went on in that train of thought—was that really true, that all their substance was what could be touched and studied? Or were the rocks and trees the outer form of an invisible essence no analyst would ever find with his pick-hammer or tree-borer, though it was as real as the other? Suddenly she was not sure.

When Joel came back from searching the pasture for lupine accompanied by Thistle and Gyrfalcon, he found her staring toward the mountains, paintbrush idle. “Why the troubled look?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I can paint them as they are,” she answered faintly. “There’s more to them than just their form—their loftiness, the silence…” Her words trailed off.

“You must try,” he encouraged her. “Perhaps as you paint the way they appear, you will capture what they are, as well.”

She looked at him wonderingly, for she saw he understood just what she’d been pondering. “I hope so,” she said fervently. “There’s never been a scene I’ve loved so much. I don’t know if I can do it justice, but I must try before I go.”