Stony River (33 page)

Sevana, aware of the difficult feelings he was dealing with, left as soon as she helped with the breakfast dishes. At home she sat on the front steps and looked through her new book. It was keyed for that region, and she recognized some of the flowers in the photographs. It would provide a great deal of interesting study. She would have preferred to keep her real-life nature guide—but this one would have to fill the gap.

Knowing she should make bread, she put the book aside and went for water. Even though she was used to hauling water now, she still couldn’t manage a full pail. But despite the strenuous exercise, going to the spring was always a highlight in her day. All that water pouring out of the ground in such abundance, perpetually there for the taking, more than she could ever use—it was like a gift. Each time, she felt fortunate walking back to the house with the treasure in her bucket—that so cold, diamond-clear, pure-tasting water.

She was kneading dough when Fenn returned, in the bad mood he always brought back from a trip away. When she asked about the sale, he scoffed. “Waste of time. Steep, rocky—you’ve never seen such a joke. And the incredible thing was, Hawk was still considering it after he saw it. It took some doing to convince him it wouldn’t be worth the time it’d take—like he didn’t have eyes in his head.”

“So you’re not going to bid on it?”

“No, we’ll leave it for someone even more addlepated than Hawk—hard as I know that is to believe.”

“I like Mr. Sutter,” she said, even though she knew it would only increase his ill-humor. “I don’t think you give him enough credit.”

“Rationality prevents me,” he said summarily. He got his pole and headed for the river.

As Sevana rounded the dough into a ball, she was thinking about good-natured Mr. Sutter and his equally nice crew. And all they had ever gotten from her or Fenn was a cold shoulder. She thought she would like to make it up to them. Maybe she could invite them to dinner. But right away she knew it was a bad idea. Fenn didn’t have enough plates for one thing, the table was too small, and she couldn’t picture him agreeing to it anyway.

Cookies
. It came as an inspiration. She could make a big batch of cookies to thank them for their neighborliness. Once the bread was set to rise, she made a list of ingredients she would need next time Fenn was at a store.

Joel came the following afternoon as planned, bringing the welcome report that Goldthread was bounding around as if he’d never been sick. Ecstatic at the news, Sevana said she was ready to go and quickly wrote a note for Fenn. But as they were walking to Joel’s truck, Fenn himself came driving into the yard.

Sevana went over to meet him as he got out of his truck. “Dinner’s on the stove, Fenn. Joel and I are on our way to Landmark Peak.”

He gave a nod as he shouldered his chainsaw and started across the grass.

“Anything we can pick up for you in town, Fenn?” Joel asked after him.

“Sure.” He swiveled to face Sevana as if she’d been the one to speak. “Get me a couple bottles of Old Crow and a roll of Copenhagen. And whatever you need to cook with,” he added, setting down the saw to hand her some bills out of his wallet.

Joel gave him a cursory nod. “We’ll see you after a while.”

“Not if I can help it.” Sevana just caught the muttered words as Fenn hoisted the saw back onto his shoulder and turned on his heel for the house.

After they were on their way down the hill, Joel asked Sevana tersely, “How’d things go the other night, after I got Brook?”

She wondered what to say. That Fenn had been out in the dark for over an hour for no apparent reason? That he, ridiculously, had all but accused Joel of being a thief? “He went upstairs and I didn’t see him again,” she settled on—which, while not strictly accurate, seemed close enough for general conversation.

“He drink like that every night?”

“No—but more often than he used to. Maybe I’ve driven him to it,” she tried to joke.

Joel didn’t share her humor. “You—haven’t had any more trouble with him since he was sick, have you?”

“No. Mostly he’s just been awfully quiet. But with him, it’s hard to tell if something’s truly wrong, or if it’s just his usual bad mood.”

Joel blew out a long breath. “I bet Lethbridge is looking pretty good to you right now.”

Then it was Sevana who was quiet. The fact was, she was increasingly dreading the time when she wouldn’t see Joel anymore. But of course it wasn’t proper to say so, when he would be engaged to someone else right now if he could be, so she let it brood as an unspoken misery.

Upon entering Cragmont, Joel drove through its hillside streets to let her see the unpretentious houses with their mature fir trees and striking vistas of the lake. It was quite a situation for a town, Sevana concluded, there on the lakeshore and surrounded by so many elevated peaks. And anyone could live there if they chose; it was not like Fenn and Joel’s exclusive mountain. A glimmer of desire suggested itself to her—the thought of moving there to become the town’s resident artist…someday, when she was good enough! The idea appealed to her more than a little.

Back on level ground, Joel stopped at the mercantile. “Go ahead and get what you need,” he told her. “I’m going to pick up a few more things for my trip.”

The log seat out front reminded Sevana of the old backwoodsman she’d met that first day—which seemed a very long time ago now. She wanted to tell Joel about that bizarre conversation, but he was already getting out of the truck.

The shopkeeper greeted them with his bashful grin and garbled speech, but Sevana was surprised to hear Joel answering him easily, calling him Clarence. They carried on a conversation without difficulty, and Sevana thought the slight man looked positively beaming, as if Joel was a special friend of his. It was strange to hear them talk, for she could only understand one side. But Joel knew this, and deflected things her way. “You’re having a pretty good time out here, wouldn’t you say?” he asked, to let her know Clarence was inquiring. “Oh yes, a very good time,” she answered, including the shopkeeper in her smile. The thin man grinned and dipped his head. He was much shyer with her than he was with Joel.

After more talk, Joel selected two boxes from a pile of cardboard and set them on the counter. Then Sevana wandered through the crowded aisles after him, following his lead by taking items back to fill her box. She got the things she needed for the loggers’ cookies, and some supplies for the larder—even some fishing flies for Fenn’s birthday in August, although she had to solicit Joel’s help in picking out the right kind. She easily found the chew Fenn wanted: there was a whole shelf stocked with it. The only hitch occurred when she asked for Fenn’s whisky, and Clarence took one look at her and shook his head regretfully. Joel, coming over, translated for him that even though any friend of Joel’s was a friend of his, he still couldn’t sell Old Crow to anyone underage. Then Sevana looked so distressed at the thought of Fenn’s displeasure that Joel got it for her, although the muscles in his lean jaw rippled tautly as he put the square bottles in her box.

When they were back in the truck, Sevana asked how he could understand Clarence, and he said there was no trick to it, it was just a matter of being around him enough to get used to it. As he started the engine, Sevana cast one more look down the street, if by chance to see the oldtimer with the ghostly-eyed dog at his heels. When she related that peculiar encounter to Joel as they drove out of town, he acted neither surprised nor mystified. “That fellow’s been around here longer than anybody,” he said. “He’s an eccentric, and it’s rumored he writes volumes of material no one has ever seen, but he’s not a bad sort. He just meant the mountains are a hard place to leave, that’s all.” He grew reflective. “A hard place to leave,” he repeated soberly.

Then he was steering up a precipitous mountainside just outside Cragmont, and Sevana turned her eyes to see the new territory he was taking her into.

The road to Landmark Peak was the worst Sevana had been on yet. One switchback was so sharp Joel had to back up to finish the turn. Another curve had washed out completely, and some previous adventurer had rolled a rotten log into the gully for the tires to ride over. The truck dropped into the hole, and rocked and bounced alarmingly before grinding out of it again. Sevana was wide-eyed, but Joel didn’t seem to recognize the road was practically impassable. “They should have used a bigger log,” was all he said.

At another tight switchback, he pulled in an Indian paintbrush from the straight-up cutbank outside his window. “Paintbrush for the artist,” he said, presenting the scarlet flower as he drove on around the corner. “What about it, Sevana? Will I one day hear your name mentioned with the other great artists of our time?”

“I hope so.” Intensity darkened her eyes, so that Joel, looking over, thought they resembled a smoky blue sky. “I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.”

“You’ve got talent and determination, so I can’t see anything standing in your way,” he said seriously. “And to think, I knew you before everybody else.”

Sevana smiled at him, clinging to the faith he expressed even as she clutched the flower he’d given her. It was encouraging to be believed in.

The truck continued its rigorous toil up the stony grade. Little by little they were gaining that steep mountain, if the force fighting against them didn’t win to drag them back into the valley. They had just rounded a horseshoe-shaped switchback with a sloped edge that shot nakedly into open space, when the truck jarred over a large rock, sputtered in protest, and died. Joel didn’t even try to restart it. He just set the brake, remarking that at least he wouldn’t have to block the tires, and got out.

Even opening the door was a strain against the steep angle, and Sevana could feel the pull of gravity resisting her as she climbed the tilted road with Joel. Wind was rasping through the stiff-needled alpine firs and rough clumps of juniper and heather: it was sharp-scented, fresh and tangy. There were a few patches of unmelted snow. On the crest ahead loomed empty sky, and it seemed they were approaching the top of the world.

A snowdrift lay across the road, slanting over the edge. “Watch your step, the snow’s icy—” Joel was saying, and in the same instant snatched her arm as she started to slide. “Dig your feet in as you go.” He kept hold of her until they were on bare ground again.

Suddenly a weathered gray-white firetower loomed above them on the skyline. “Welcome to Landmark Peak,” Joel intoned in his best tour-guide voice. “Elevation 6980 feet. That’s a clear gain of five-thousand vertical feet from the valley floor.”

After scrambling over one last snowdrift, they reached the ridgetop where the land dropped away at their feet. All around them, mountains and valleys rose and fell like waves of the sea to the far horizons, where more peaks stood in a mighty, unbroken circle around the rim of the world. The sky, which Sevana had grown used to being just a small slice above the rising mountainsides, was wide as the earth. The sun, which she had thought already set, was still shining above the horizon to the west. “Oh, Joel,
look
at all those mountains!” she said in wonder.

With the gladness of the view reflected in his eyes, Joel pointed out their own Old Stormy, Graystone, and Bearclaw amid the crests of that range. He named other ranges of the mountain chain, big for their distance. But he wasn’t satisfied to remain on the ground, and urged her to climb the tower with him. Sevana thought the old building looked precarious—built on wooden stilts at the edge of a precipice as it was—but she followed him anyway, holding tightly to the splintery railing for the four very steep flights of shuddering steps. The windows and door of the building were boarded up, but around it ran a catwalk from which they could look out in every direction unhindered.

Sevana studied the view from all four sides, but spent the most time facing their own river canyon. She could see the Stony winding in a thin silvery line far below, see the evergreen forests uniformly clothing the flanks of the deep valley, see the fissured iron-gray rocks rising barren above them, and gain a bird’s-eye perspective of how everything fit together. For the first time she understood the true magnitude of the land she had come to shelter in, and was so overcome by it that she stood silent in awe.

Joel was looking at her. “Sometimes I can see you painting pictures with your eyes.”

“Is it that obvious? Why, Joel, you could spend your whole life here and never run out of subjects!”

They sat on the platform and ate the bread and cheese and apples Joel had bought in town for the occasion. “Why isn’t anyone stationed here now?” Sevana asked as she unwillingly crunched into her winesap, which in her opinion was too perfectly shaped and colored to eat.

“The building’s over fifty years old, and the Ministry of Forests decided not to put money into renovating it. Chantal was the last lookout here.”

Sevana had a hard time picturing the sophisticated girl she’d met, living in that primitive tower—and Joel guessed her thoughts. “She was all wrong for the job,” he acknowledged. “Straight from Vancouver, no experience in how to rough it, scared to be alone, scared of the wildlife, scared of the spiders and ants that live in these old towers. If I hadn’t come along, she probably wouldn’t have lasted the summer without quitting or getting fired. But it was the best thing she could have done for her career. The photos she captured that summer were priceless.”

But he hadn’t come here to reminisce—had deliberately purposed he wouldn’t; and was operating on a level distanced from his feelings, for he wanted to show Sevana his wilderness. “See Old Stormy?” He rose for a view unblocked by the railing. “At its base is the pass where I take the sheep. It’s an open meadow, and in July it’s filled with wildflowers.”