Stony River (79 page)

What she was doing here, he could not even think. He turned back to the lodge to inquire if anyone had seen her.

CHAPTER 55

Joel stayed in his father’s room that night, but he didn’t sleep well. The white-haired matron of the lodge had told him that yes, a Miss Selwyn had a room there, but no, she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t make it a habit to pry into her guests’ affairs, and hoped he wouldn’t either.

His knock at Sevana’s door went unanswered into the late hours of the night, when he finally gave up.

In the morning he made a pretense of breakfast with his father, although he possessed no appetite, and saw him comfortable for the day. Then he said he needed to start looking for a place to live, which was misleading because it was not what he was intending to do just then. Stopping by the house of the woman he had hired to look after his father for the summer, he told her he would be gone for a while, and headed straight up the river to Fenn’s.

The red truck wasn’t parked there and no one appeared to be home. He even searched up at his cabin and in the pasture. Why was he looking for her there?—she had probably returned to Calgary and he was an addled fool. Dejected, he started back for town.

Sevana was so happy she was practically singing as she climbed the rocky trail—and might have attempted it if she’d had any breath to spare. She had been handed a lucky break. While walking by the lake, she’d been spotted by Milt and Emery, who stopped to see if she wanted a ride out to the homestead. She took them up on the offer at once. She couldn’t wait to tell Fenn about her new house and let him know she wouldn’t be so far away.

Fenn had been impressed at her news. Said it was the smartest thing she’d ever done, getting out of the city. He was back on the job running the loader, but would drive her to Cragmont after the shift tomorrow and help her get settled in.

“There’s one thing I want to do before I get tied into a job, before I do
anything
else,” she said boldly, casting a desirous look at the reaches above her.

“Name it.”

“I want to go to the high country. I want to see Stormy Pass in the springtime. Oh Fenn, is there any way?”

“No—I’m sorry, but there isn’t. It’s too dangerous for you to go alone, and the crew needs my help. We have a sale with a deadline we might not meet, even with all of us working.”

“So I can’t take Trapper?”

“No, I won’t be responsible for your broken neck.”

“Then I’ll walk,” she said calmly.

“Walk! No, you won’t.”

“I’m sorry, Fenn… I don’t want to cause you any worry, but I’m going. I can walk ten miles in a day. I walked all over Lethbridge and out into the countryside. I’m going tomorrow morning and I’ll be gone overnight. I’ll build a fire and sit by it all night to keep the wildlife away. I’ll be scared stiff, but I’m going.”

Fenn shook his head at such obstinacy. “In that case you’re taking a gun, and you’re going to practice shooting it tonight.”

And now she was on the trail with the cumbersome revolver strapped to her side, and in six hours or so—if all went well—she would be in that alpestrine world that was like no other.

On the way back to Cragmont, Joel stopped at the loggers’ camp. Finding Cleaver Dan peeling apples in the mess hall, he asked if he knew where the crew was logging, and Cleaver Dan did. There had been too many gloomy speculations of them missing the shut-off date not to know exactly where they were.

Joel drove to the unit and spotted Fenn operating the loader on the landing just below the road. Fenn idled the engine when he saw Joel, but it was still so noisy it made communication a challenge. “Do you know where Sevana is?” Joel yelled.

“Hiking to Stormy Pass,” Fenn shouted back from the cab. “Left this morning. Couldn’t talk her out of it.”

“What?” bellowed Joel. “Alone?”

“You’ve got that right.”

“I’m going to find her.” Joel turned on his heel, suddenly in a hurry.

“Good idea,” Fenn called. “Maybe you can talk some sense into her.” He hollered after him: “Don’t take her by surprise. She has a gun.”

Joel lifted a hand to show he heard, and took off in his truck. She’d had a good head start. She could be halfway by now if Fenn had driven her to the trailhead. He parked at the pack-bridge and began up the trail at the fastest steady pace he could maintain. Already since the Yukon, with good food and rest, he could feel his endurance beginning to return.

When he thought he might be getting close, he started shouting her name before rounding a blind bend. He climbed this way for another half hour before he saw her. Hiking fast, jabbing a walking stick briskly into the dirt as if her life depended on getting to the top, she wore an impromptu outfit of Fenn’s flannel shirt tied around her waist and his fishing cap jammed down on her head, her hair in a braid below it. “Sevana!” he shouted.

She whirled in amazement. “Joel!” Her face lit in greatest delight, then clouded with suspicion. “Fenn sent you after me, didn’t he?”

“No, he just told me where you were.”

“And said to talk me out of it?”

“As a matter of fact.” Joel grinned. “But I’m not going to.”

“No?”

“No, I’m going with you.”

She tipped back her head with a lilting laugh that made the cap fall off. She scooped it up and crushed it back in place with, “Then let’s go! I can’t wait to see the wildflowers again, and hear the wind singing on the ridgetops!” And she took off with renewed, into-the-ground vigor.

He followed at a pace a little slower than he’d been keeping. “Sevana,” he posed the question he’d been wondering all night, “why are you here instead of at your new job in Calgary?”

She whirled to face him. “I’m moving to Cragmont, Joel.” Her eyes glowed a deep violet shade in their happy intensity. “I rented a house. From now on this is my studio—” and she twirled around with her arms stretched in the air. Then she took off again so fast that even Joel had to scramble to catch up.

“I read you there,” he said, when he’d resumed his place behind her. There was so much more he wanted to ask, but it was difficult to hold a prolonged conversation with someone burning up a trail. “I’ve got news, too,” he mentioned after an appreciable distance, when the crags came into sight ahead and she paused to admire them. They were both winded from the climb. “I got hold of Randall by phone. Asked what the deal was, why he’s not living here. He said his detail is opening up into a permanent position. He’s taking a transfer over to Tweedsmuir country.”

“You’re joking.” Sevana reacted with complete surprise. “I never thought he’d leave. Why, he’s been here twenty-two years and practically runs the whole forest!”

“I know. Maybe he couldn’t resist the offer of an even bigger territory. He’ll be in charge of an additional quarter-million acres over there. And it has more lakes, probably fishing violations everywhere.”

“Then he must be in heaven. He’ll have more responsibility than ever.”

“He does seem to like to take on superhuman tasks,” Joel agreed. “But he’d like out of the deal we settled on—he needs the money for his new house. He didn’t get any arguments from me. That place—when I agreed to let it go—it felt like I had let go not only my home, but my past and my future—my whole heritage.”

“Your destiny,” Sevana said quietly.

“Yes, exactly. It was intolerable—the feeling that I had opened up my hand and it had flown away, like a bird returning to the wilds I would never see again.”

Sevana was overjoyed at this news, but she spent no more time talking. She would wait until the top to broach the one subject that truly mattered. She speculated on his situation as they climbed. Once back in the spell of the girl he had never been able to resist, had he maintained his determination to break their engagement—or returned with the wedding date intact? The more she thought about it, the more she was sure Chantal had managed to talk him into it. She would almost prefer not to ask, than hear it was so.

But when they were standing at the pass, her fears were temporarily superseded by the sight of the meadows ornamented with shiny-faced buttercups, pastel phlox, and squat mats of evergreen heather garnished by tight crimson buds amid patches of melting snow. Icy drifts glittered on the ledges of the bare cliffs, darkening the rocks where melting ice trickled down, and alpine firs stabbed the azure sky with their needle-sharp spires.

Sevana stood still and listened to the wind rasping across the ridgetops and the snowmelt streams babbling over the ground, smelled the sweet resins swelling in the trees and heather. Any energy she had expended to get there was worth it. No matter what else she lost or possessed, this place would always be hers.

They walked up toward open sky. A red-tailed hawk soared in a playful arc above them, a pika pronounced his decided satisfaction from a scree slope. The mountain heights rose mysterious—rock-solid and mythical all in one.

“What are you thinking, Sevana?” Joel asked.

She realized she was smiling. “I was thinking I’ve come full circle to find myself back here.”

They wandered like two contented children, letting the untainted air blow from their minds everything that had collected while they were away. Up there life looked so different: so very few things had importance. The tangle and clutter of life was laughable, irrelevant, and wholly dispensable.

Later, the meadows traversed, the plunging chasms and stony uplifts admired, they gathered wood for a campfire. Sevana said they would have candy bars for dinner, the only compact and readily portable food she had gleaned from Fenn’s cupboards. But Joel said the young lady would eat her vegetables, and brought back a handful of spring-beauty bulbs he’d cleaned at the brook. They also dined on miners’ lettuce—a much too glamorous name for the leathery rock-lichens—and neither cared they were still hungry. The sunset and each other’s company as they sat before the smoky, spark-spitting fire were enough. “I’m too early for the daisies and asters and white heather,” she made note.

“Yes, they don’t bloom until July.”

“I’ll just have to come back,” she said contentedly, because she could.

“Did you really get a house in Cragmont, Sevana?” Joel asked.

“Yes.” She sat bareheaded now, the shorter strands of hair escaping her braid to play in the sunset wind. “Just yesterday. Up the hill at the top of town.”

“You gave up your job and your art training and that—painter—to come here alone?”

“Yes,” she said again, serenely. “I was boarding the bus to Calgary, and I couldn’t make myself get on it. I just
couldn’t
, Joel. So I came here to live, because this is the one place on earth that has ever seemed like—home.”

Joel was doing his best to assimilate this astonishing information. “What does Willy think of all this?”

“He—wasn’t thrilled, of course. But I rather think he saw it coming.”

“Sevana—are you and Willy—?”

“Friends only,” she said, thinking she was doomed forever to repeat that phrase.

Your turn, she told herself, steeling herself for the dreaded interview. Her heart began to pound so uncontrollably that she got up and stepped to the fire so he couldn’t detect her agitation. “How was your trip to Vancouver?” she got out from that safer distance.

Joel had been in a deep turn of thought ever since her last reply, but bestirred himself to answer. “It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” He came to stand at fireside with her, his eyes on the flames as he spoke. “Chantal didn’t exactly welcome my news. But on the other hand, the Mountie has been coming around almost every week asking her to reconcile, and it’s been tearing her up. I really believe if I was out of the picture for good, she could be happy with him.”

“So the wedding is off?”

“Yes. Turns out she did send out the invitations with the idea that once it was official, I wouldn’t get second thoughts and back out. But I did.”

“What reason did you give her?” As impolite as it was to ask, she had to know.

There was a lengthy pause. “I told her—” he turned to face her with a queer, inscrutable look in the salmon afterlight of the darkening sky, “I told her I couldn’t marry her because I had fallen in love with someone in the Yukon.”

Sevana felt her blood run cold. Her life ran out ahead of her, empty without him. So that was how it was going to be, then—living alone in her cottage, the lake and mountains her only companions…

His eyes on hers, so certain to detect the slightest reaction, were her enemy. She didn’t want him to know how badly she was wounded by his words. She longed to tear herself away from his gaze, but she couldn’t break out of the spell it held her in. “Did you, Joel?” Her voice had a hoarse, unnatural sound.

“Yes, it was the truth. I once thought myself in love with her—but that was only because I hadn’t yet found the person who meant everything to me. And when I did meet her, I saw what a far gulf it was between loving someone you find attractive and desirable, and someone who is your perfect match—the other half of your soul.”

She was willing everything in her not to cry. She promised herself she could cry all she wanted later, if she could just be strong right now when she had to be. She freed herself from the power of his compelling stare and looked back to the fire as she recounted dutifully, “So, you are marrying this other girl—your perfect match—instead?”