Stony River (2 page)

She was still trying to make sense of that freakish exchange, while averting her gaze from the spooky, pale-blue eyes of the collie, when a faded red pickup truck careened to a stop across the street in a cloud of dust, and a young giant with flaxen-colored hair like her own got out without preamble and came striding toward her. Gladly she jumped up and ran to meet him—for she recognized him at once, even though he had changed considerably in the five years since she’d seen him.

Something in his quizzical attitude made her stop short of hugging him; nevertheless, her eyes were shining as she looked up to him. “Oh Fenn, it’s so good to see you again!” she exclaimed, her joy doubled by the fact that she wasn’t stranded alone in that wilderness town.

“Been a while, hasn’t it?” He made no move to embrace her or take her hand, but perhaps it was just as well—as his work trousers, cotton jersey, face and hands all were coated with dirt and sawdust. He asked if she would mind waiting while he picked up a few things from the store.

In a short time he came out with two boxes of groceries. After wedging them with her baggage into the tangle of logging equipment in the truck bed, he got in the cab and revved the engine. Sevana, clutching the portfolio case she wanted up front for safekeeping, climbed in before he could leave without her, and they were off down a one-lane road past a few unimposing houses and out of town.

“What happens if you meet another car?” she asked what seemed a reasonable question to her mind as they bumped along.

“It’s wide enough to pass if you drive on the shoulder, most places,” Fenn answered. Sevana started to ask what happened in the places it wasn’t, but then gave it up. He lived here and his truck was in one piece, so there must be some kind of system.

“Did you see a—a mountainman-type person in the store?” she asked to his silence. For she had waited outside to watch her belongings, not being aware that crime in that outlying town was not common—was not, in fact, sufficient to employ the constable fulltime, so that he led guided fishing tours on the side.

“You mean the graybeard with the dog?”

“Yes. Who was he?”

“Just an old codger who wanders into town occasionally.” Fenn seemed content to leave it at that.

But it was still puzzling to her, the things that eccentric backwoodsman had said
…“You’re never getting out.”

She took up a different topic. “What about the shopkeeper? Why can’t he talk? And what happened to his leg?”

“Logging accident on both accounts. Got hit by a falling tree about twenty years ago. Mangled him up pretty good.”

The road had slipped through a notch in the row of mountains, and now they were in an even tighter canyon, with a river surging bankful beside the road in a whitewater dash toward the lake they had just left behind.

“You live way out here—in the middle of nowhere?” Sevana, grappling with so many new impressions, voiced the idea to see what she thought of it.

“What’s the matter…you want to go back?” Fenn slowed the jolting truck as if ready to carry out the proposition.

“No, of course not.” She shook back her hair, painstakingly curled at the night stopover and still falling in waves over her shoulders even after the bone-jarring stint aboard the
Selkirk Stage
. “It’s just—I knew you lived out in the country, but I didn’t imagine it to be all so—wild.” She couldn’t explain better than that the feeling over her. “Anyway, you know I have to stay with you for the summer.”

“Yes, that’s right—while your father indulges in another round of globe-trotting. London this time, isn’t it?” he said acrimoniously.

Sevana thought about pointing out he was his father as well, but decided to let it go. She’d always suspected that Fenn had come out to this unheard-of place just to get away from Bryce and everything he stood for. Only, she hadn’t realized until now, just how far away that was. “I can’t believe how long it took me to get here,” she volunteered. “First two days on the train, and then so many different buses. Nobody had a direct line to Cragmont. The travel agent had never even heard of it.”

“That’s the way I like it.” Fenn was driving the winding road with one hand, his other arm resting on the open window ledge.

“Yes, I figured you must have liked it, to stay out here.”

He snorted. “As if I had any reason to go back!”

“I’ve always meant to come see you, Fenn,” Sevana confided, turning to him as much as the metal hardhat, lunchbox, and canteens between them on the dusty seat would allow. “But I didn’t dream Bryce would send me out here for a whole summer. It’s very kind of you to let me come.”

“That’s all right,” he said ironically, drumming his fingers on the metal ledge. “It would be asking too much for him to look after you himself, wouldn’t it? Besides, how could I refuse, seeing he pays so generously for the favor?—although I’m not sure this is quite the life he would choose for his young and tender daughter, if he ever stopped to think.”

Sevana heard the hardness in his tone, but she couldn’t blame him for being resentful, for Bryce had never been a true father to them—only a provider who made sure his children were properly cared for, while he devoted all his time to a classified military career. She, too, knew the sting of neglect and the lonely years of boarding school, and tried to reach out to him on common ground.

“We didn’t have much of a family growing up, did we, Fenn?” she asked softly. “I admire you for coming out here and making a life for yourself. I hope I can do as well as you.” But whether the appeal had any effect on him, she couldn’t tell, for he made no reply and his profile remained impassive.

She faced forward again, but continued to study him surreptitiously from the corners of her eyes. He resembled the boy of eighteen he’d been when he left Toronto to come west, but he was much bigger and brawnier now, and his face no longer had a boyish contour. It was a hard face—sharp-planed, resolute in line, streaked now with dust and sweat. His arms were tanned and muscular below the short sleeves of his white jersey. It was almost difficult to believe that the powerful, obstinate-looking individual at the wheel was her brother. At twenty-three, he had grown up more than just in stature: he had the attitude and bearing of a full-grown man.

Sevana found the changes in him disconcerting. Even though they had never spent much time together, she’d expected to find some vestiges of familiarity in him just because he was her brother. And she had looked forward eagerly to this visit as a chance to catch up on some of what they had missed growing up—had even hoped this summer they might become the best of friends. Now she wondered if she would ever know the hard stranger beside her, much less be his friend.

She turned her attention to the way ahead but immediately regretted it, for the road lay between two perpendicular bluffs that opposed each other blackly from across the river channel. A passageway had been blasted out of the nearer cliff to the width of one car only, with a straight drop to the torrent below. Fenn drove forward with the confidence that his was the only vehicle in the corridor, but Sevana wondered greatly what he would do if he met another one coming his way. “How much farther?” she asked, to cover her nervousness.

Fenn looked over from the wheel. “Another hour.” His attention swung back to the road just in time to dodge a fallen rock the size of a pumpkin, by swerving to the very edge of the dropoff.

Sevana released her death-grip of the door handle when the truck was back in the middle of the road. Another hour! Surely, she thought, he must be joking. They had been traveling into uninhabited country almost an hour already. She was careful not to speak again until they were through the worst of the narrows, and the rock walls slanted back for a bit of light and sky. There was still no gentle ground anywhere, however, only an irregular terrain of trees and scree slopes soaring to excessive heights overhead—down which little whitewater streams zigzagged like lightning bolts. She stopped trying to find the tops of those climbing-to-the-sky elevations, and cast her gaze to the ground-level river flashing in snatches of sun-reflected silver through the trees. “What river is that?” she asked.

“That’s the Stony.”

She craned her neck for a better look, but couldn’t see even one rock in all that wave-tossed water. How odd, she thought. It didn’t look like a stony river at all.

Suddenly she spoke up urgently: “Fenn, look out!” From impossibly far above them, a stream was cascading down the mountainside to run foaming across the road. But Fenn didn’t even slow down as he drove through the swift water, the truck taking a hard bounce as it hit the rut. “What was that?” she exclaimed, wiping away the drops that had splashed her face through the open window.

“Two Shadow Creek.”

“No, I mean, why was it running over the road? Is it flooding?”

“It’s a low-water crossing. Instead of a bridge.”

For a second time that day, she thought he was joking. This was, after all, lower British Columbia, only a few decades shy of the twenty-first century. It was not the undeveloped country of the upper territories. Regardless of that uncontested fact, the truck soon jarred through another axle-deep creek.

Once or twice they had passed some inconspicuous byroad forking up a side drainage, and an occasional small wooden sign named a creek they were passing; but there had been no other evidences of civilization—not even another car on the road—until they passed a group of barracks clustered on a rare flat along the river. “What’s that?” she asked, keeping her gaze on the settlement as long as she could, to assure herself human life really did exist out there.

“That’s the logging company I work for.”

“
That
is?”

She sounded so unconvinced, Fenn felt obliged to elucidate: “Not the company headquarters, of course. Just the work camp where the crew lives.”

“Not year-around, I suppose,” she said, secure in making such an obvious statement.

“Some don’t, some do,” was his unexpected reply.

She couldn’t even imagine it. “It must be awfully rough to camp out here in winter!” she exclaimed.

“It’s not for everybody,” he agreed casually.

Traveling deeper into that forgotten valley, after what was beginning to seem an interminable distance of jostling over rocks and ruts, they forded one more creek designated
Avalanche
C
by a broken-off sign. Then Fenn made a sharp turn off the river road onto an even cruder track that sheered almost straight up the mountain, through a forest so tall and dense it threatened to swallow them. The truck strained and slipped around in the grooves left by the spring mud, but Fenn gunned the engine and kept it shimmying up the harrowing grade. Just as the slope was moderating to an angle more commonly associated with steep roads, he steered to the left and stopped. Before them, a weathered log cabin and barn sat nestled in a sunny clearing of spring grass, all miraculously tucked into the slant of the mountain.

      Uncurling her fingers from the door handle, Sevana picked up the art case at her feet and emerged from the truck to alight unsteadily on solid ground. The air that greeted her was unexpectedly cool, and fragrant with resins of unfamiliar plants and trees. She turned wonderingly once around, to take in the scope of the homestead—which although perched so grandly on a mountain itself, was overshadowed by an even higher mountain on the other side of the narrow valley. But Fenn had already hoisted the heavy trunk out of the back as if it weighed nothing at all, and was halfway to the house with it.

Sevana tugged her dust-coated satchel free from the steel logging cables and followed him up the path to the cabin. Crossing through the open door after him she stepped into darkness, for the smoky-smelling interior was dim even by the light of day, thanks to its age-blackened logs and ungenerous windows. Fenn was negotiating a flight of stairs with his load, but Sevana stopped to accustom her eyes to the gloom.

As she gained a sense of her surroundings, she saw the kitchen where she stood was separated from the back half of the house by the staircase Fenn was climbing. A black iron cookstove was set against the wall made by the stairs. She went to peek into the other room and saw a fireplace built of river stones, a stuffed leather chair with a bearskin rug draped over its back, and a long-barreled musket bracketed to the wall. Then she mounted the stairs in search of her brother.

Fenn had set down the trunk in the room to the right of the landing. The pitch of the roof infringed on the small chamber, but Fenn’s belongings had been pushed under the eaves to make room for her habitation. The bed consisted of a plywood bench built into the window gable, topped by a thin camping mat and a folded wool army blanket Sevana had no doubt still belonged to the Canadian military. Noting a fat white candle in a can on the bedside crate, she looked up at the log ceiling beams curiously. “Don’t you have lights?”

“Sure, I’ve got lights.” Fenn met her eyes with a challenge. “Candles up here, and lanterns downstairs.” He seemed to take pleasure in the fact that she had no choice but to live as he did, while she was there. “I’m going to start dinner—” and he disappeared downstairs directly.

Sevana slowly set down her satchel and propped her portfolio against the wall. She couldn’t help but be hurt by Fenn’s brusque manner, but she sought valiantly to excuse it. The hopes she had treasured at school had been too high, she told herself, made unreasonable by long, lonely hours in which she had wished with all her heart for someone to love and count on—someone to be her family. He couldn’t be expected to greet her with open friendliness when he scarcely knew her. She would have to be patient, and allow them time to become reacquainted.