Stony River (18 page)

“Will you put the sheep in it?”

“No, I’m not good at animals.” She reached out to pet little Gyrfalcon, but he backed away. He was more skittish than the others, analyzing everything in a shrewd, intelligent way. He had remained watchful of her from the first; but even with Joel, he preferred just to be nearby him rather than coddled or held. “Every time I draw one, it looks like a caricature.”

Joel laughed aloud. “If you ever draw a caricature of my sheep, I’d like to see it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” With a smile she set to mixing a new batch of paint, as the first had already dried to a resistant putty on her palette.

Over the following days the mountain faces slowly took countenance on her canvas. It was painstaking work, often discouraging, for she had no technical knowledge of what she was doing—was only compelled by love for her subject. She still worried she had taken on a project beyond her means. But she kept painting and repainting, refusing to let her doubts prevent her from what she had set out to do.

And each morning brought fresh inspiration. In the sunny meadow, with Joel beside her and the sheep and the mountains before her, she would often exclaim over the splendor of the day, for the wonder was always new. She could never take in enough to grow used to it or tire of it in any way. “It’s all so lovely,” she exclaimed one day. “And it’s all calling me to come and see.”

“And paint it, too?” He looked up from where he sat a few feet downhill of her, sharpening a set of wood chisels on his knee. He had been the perfect companion on the hillside. Quiet by nature and not apt to interrupt her moments of concentration, he was yet friendly to a fault, never failing to emerge from his own contemplations in time to be courteous to her or include her in something he considered worth sharing.

“Yes!” she said, wondering how he knew. “But I haven’t even finished this picture yet.” And she bent over the canvas again in earnest.

But when at last the peaks were in, she was no longer so afraid of falling short of her goal. The elusive essence of their beauty, which she had feared unportrayable, had somehow been caught in the painting of their form. There then remained only the lesser task of completing the foreground—and since she was caught up in it now, she could hardly bear to stop for such minor inconveniences as cooking and eating and sleep.

It was during this episode of artistic afflatus that Fenn, spooning honey onto a square of cornbread at dinner, informed her he was taking a loader to Trail on the morrow, and would be gone two nights. He had seemingly resigned himself that despite his desire for complete independence, apprising her of his whereabouts was sometimes necessary, as she was the one cooking his meals and waiting up for him when he didn’t come home.

“Why so long?” She looked up, half-startled, from her plate of venison stew, which consisted mainly of the potatoes and carrots and canned tomatoes she had picked out of the kettle, leaving the gamey cubes of meat for Fenn.

“One day over, one day to maintenance it, one day back,” he elucidated. “You can walk faster than you can drive a loader. And unfortunately Hawk can’t trust the other jokers out of his sight, so the lot falls to me.”

“Don’t you want to go?”

“Are you kidding—two nights and a day in town? I’ll go crazy. Just last month I was holed up in Trail for almost a week while a machine shop adapted a transmission for the
Kootenay Queen
.”

“What’s that?” she asked blankly.

“Hawk’s antique jammer. He’s got a new line-skidder, but he feels an obligation to trouble to keep the
Queen
running, too,” he explained, as if she would know what he was talking about. “They stopped making parts for it about twenty years ago—but Hawk wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have that thing giving him hell all the time.” Scowling, he went out to work on his truck.

The warden pulled in about that time. From the dishpan, Sevana saw Fenn emerge from the engine to exchange some words with the uniformed man. Then he retreated under the hood again while the officer strode briskly to the house. Sevana met him at the door.

“Good evening, Sevana.” Mr. Radnor loomed above her—a spare, straight-backed woodsman who had spent so many years running up and down hills that he seemed to be standing braced against some unseen angle even when his knee-high boots were on level ground. “I was on my way back to Cragmont and thought I’d check in with you.” His eyes were darting about him as he spoke, observing details as an ingrained habit. “Have you seen any sign of our poacher?”

“No, I don’t think so. I did see a light down by the river that same night I talked to you.” She described what she had seen.

“Really.” His hypercritical mind was already working through a dozen possibilities. “About what time would you say that was?”

“It was an hour or two after you left. I thought maybe it was you on your way back.”

“No, I didn’t stop when I came through.” He frowned and wrote something on a notepad. “I’ve been looking for a camp. Checked out a few leads, but nothing yet. May I come in? I brought some forms.”

Inside, he opened his briefcase on the table and handed her some reports. He spoke in a direct, forthright manner, pronouncing all his words carefully to avoid any potential misunderstanding as he explained how she could fill out one for any parked vehicle she saw, including license number, make, time seen, and so forth. And Fenn could use them for anything he saw on the drive to and from work.

Sevana agreed they would do all they could. “Would you like some tea or coffee?” she offered, aware of the long drive ahead of him. “I could stoke up the stove.”

“No, thank you.” The very thought of taking that much time made the refusal automatic. On the other hand, the fact that he was actually thirsty made him reconsider. “Well, maybe a glass of water.”

Watching as she dipped water into a tin cup, he asked—as though his inquiring mind must be satisfied despite his dislike of personal questions, “How are you adjusting to this life out in the wilds?”

“It took me a little while to get used to, but now I don’t mind it much at all,” she answered honestly.

He nodded, cataloguing the fact, however trivial, away in his ever-busy brain. “Well, I have to hand it to you. I have a house in Cragmont with all the amenities, and even that seemed a little primitive to me when I came out here twenty-two years ago.” He thanked her for the water and paced the floor while he drank it. The gun in the other room attracted his attention. “Fenn’s one of the most avid hunters I know,” he stated, studying the polished muzzleloader mounted on its brackets. “And he runs a fine trapline. You don’t know where he keeps his traps, do you?” His sharp glance had taken in the lynx fur on the bench.

“I think they’re upstairs.” There was a tangle of rusty metal under the eaves she had a strong suspicion were traps, even though she tried her best to ignore the probability.

He was still prowling around as if looking for something. His metal badge flashed in the light. A thought struck her. Was it possible he suspected Fenn? For a minute she was outraged. Then she forced herself to look at it through his eyes. Fenn was a trapper, maybe the only one in the area. Even if Mr. Radnor didn’t suspect him, any good law officer would keep those facts in mind as part of the job.

He came back and set the cup on the table. He pulled out some photographs of disguised traps from other cases to show her, so she would recognize if she saw something similar. He talked matter-of-factly about his past successes in bringing poachers to justice. Then, realizing the time he was taking might be interpreted as slacking—or worse, socializing—when there were so many other things to do, he snapped his briefcase and took it tightly in hand, standing poised to leave. “I take it Fenn got home all right Saturday night?” he remembered to ask, as he briskly scanned his mind for any unaddressed business.

“Yes, he did.”

“What time did he get in?”

“It was after midnight.”

“I got back to Cragmont late myself, but I checked a couple of the bars for you. No one I questioned had seen him that evening. I found that somewhat surprising, since there’s not much else going on in town that time of night,” he added, watching for her reaction.

Was he hinting at anything? Once again she had the feeling Fenn was being included, however casually, in his investigation. “He bought groceries and stopped at the locker at camp,” she said a trace defensively, even though she really had no idea where Fenn had been or in what order he’d done his errands. “Maybe he spent some time with the crew.” She thought of telling him he’d come home drunk just to prove he’d been drinking
somewhere
, but as that didn’t seem the wisest thing to reveal to a lawman, she kept it back. She knew she should thank him for looking for Fenn in town, but in her half-formed resentment she couldn’t get the words out. Maybe he considered it a duty anyway, the ever-vigilant lawman, and not a special favor.

“Maybe so.” Without further formalities he took his leave.

Sevana stepped to the door to watch him drive off with the feeling of having narrowly escaped a calamity. She could just imagine what would have happened if Mr. Radnor
had
found Fenn at the Whiskyjack, and informed him and everyone within hearing distance that he should go home because his sister was worried about him. She shuddered to think of the lecture she would have gotten over
that
. She would have to stay on guard, and think out all the possibilities before mentioning any of Fenn’s activities, however innocently, to anyone again.

Fenn saw the forms when he came in. “That guy is like a bulldog when he thinks he’s onto something. Well—except he’s like a bulldog all the time.”

“He seems like a pretty sharp man,” she offered.

“Pretty sharp? He’s uncanny. The man sees all, knows all. You think God is everywhere, but He’s got nothing on Randall.”

“Well, he hasn’t found the poacher yet,” she reminded him.

“No, but if there is one, he will.” He stated it categorically.

“Are you going to help him?”

“He doesn’t need help,” said Fenn. “All you have to do is start thinking you might shoot a deer in the dead of winter because you’re low on meat, and Randall will drive up a few minutes later to say hello—because he’s read your mind. You can cast in your fishing line one more time after you’ve caught your limit and he’ll glide by on the other bank just to let you know he’s there. You’d think with all the territory he has to cover, you’d never see him. But there are rumors of him walking sixteen miles cross-country before breakfast. If you want to get the boys at camp going, all you have to do is say his name. Pete got handed a violation last fall for catching a fish one inch over size at a lake he hiked nine miles into, and Emery got one just last weekend camped up Cache Creek for having too many fish in his ice-chest, even though he caught them in two legal days’ limits.”

Sevana was pursuing a thought, which gave her little room to consider the omniscient Mr. Radnor at the moment. “That doesn’t change the fact that if you find the trapper before he does, you’ll get the money,” she said. “He said there’s a reward for turning him in.”

“Sure, there’s a standard payout for bagging a poacher. Why? Are you interested?”

“Why not?” If she or Fenn could find the poacher, Fenn could use the money toward his debt.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Fenn agreed. “But nobody’s going to be poaching in broad daylight, and I’m not going to lose any sleep out looking for him.”

Sevana saw Fenn off to Trail at dawn, then went down to the river with renewed interest to look over the area where she’d seen the unexplained light, envisioning a trap sitting tidily on the bank like the ones in Mr. Radnor’s photographs. Breaking out of the forest into the open channel, she was surprised to see how much the river had changed. The water had settled back into its banks, no longer in a hurry, the golden shallows revealing a blurry mosaic of the round, colorful stones of its bed. And along the edges, the grass had recovered from the shock of being drowned and was beginning to grow thick and tall. She walked along the bank until she encountered a robust alder thicket taking up all the space between the water and the trees. By then, having found nothing of note, she went home to get Trapper, for she was planning to finish her picture that day.

Joel was at the corral coating the sheeps’ muzzles with a protective oil when she rode up. When she laughed at their greasy noses, he explained it was to safeguard them from the biting flies that were becoming a nuisance. Not his favorite job, and the sheep didn’t think much of it either—but without it, they were driven to such distraction they couldn’t graze properly.

He said he’d join her later, and did so within the hour, coming up with his freshly anointed flock. He was at her side sanding a fiddleneck when she put in the final strokes on the canvasboard and laid down her brush. “There,” she said in relief, “I’ve done it, the best I could.” It was not a very big picture, but the detail was so meticulous that it looked starkly real—from the faceted rocks with their gleaming snowfields, to the many varieties of meadowgrass.

Joel took it by the edges to study it, then looked up with a mixture of merriment and perplexity in his face. “I don’t think you need to go to art school to learn how to paint, Sevana.”

“Oh, but I do,” she insisted. “There are so many things I don’t know.”