Stony River (41 page)

“Sevana, you’re crying.”

“It’s nothing.” She dashed away the telltale traces. “It’s only that I’m finally here in the heart of the mountains, and all I can do is look and wonder as before. They still call me to something I don’t know—nor do I know how to find it.”

The spires had lost their gold and joined the shadows. Above them, the claret-tinted clouds burned brighter than the mountains had—and the odd-shaped lake simmered a deep, brooding cinnamon in reflection.

“Sevana,” said Joel, seeking neither the lake nor the mountains nor the sky, but only her eyes as they stood on that high aspect, “I told you I have also heard that call. The mountains stir up dreams, don’t they?—dreams so deep, you never knew they were there.”

“Yes,” she said, her heart aching because she had never seen anything so intensely mysterious or elegantly beautiful as that covert gem of a darkly shining maroon lake down in the rock cliffs of the bowl. “But are they real? Or are they only illusions, inventions of our minds?”

“The dreams are real,” said Joel. “I used to spend nights up here pacing under the stars, wondering what I could sense so near to me, yet just outside my grasp. Gradually I began to understand that in the mountains I was seeing the reflection of things that go on forever. And I think you, too, are aware of those timeless things—can hear them calling through the things you see.”

As the color faded from the clouds, the sunset wind died down in the sheltered basin, and the glassy lake became an onyx reflecting pond. Two little owls appeared, the undersides of their flapping gray wings flashing white in the quiet light as they circled and swooped in an air dance above the lake basin. As they dipped and swirled, at times synchronized and at other times a mirror of the other’s movements, Sevana thought of all the exceptional things she’d witnessed since coming to Stony River—right up to this point with the lake and the owls and the exotic gardens of heather—and had the inescapable conviction that as remarkable as those things were, there was a greater meaning to them, some undisclosed scheme in which such wonders could exist.

“Maybe so,” she said slowly. “But how can I find the reason they are calling?”

He smiled at her puzzlement, and she had a rare awareness of the difference in their ages as he said wisely: “Maybe, Sevana, they’re calling you to find your deepest dreams—to discover what life really is, rather than what it appears on the surface.”

Sevana watched the owls flap away from the basin toward all the shaded blue ranges that stretched in graduating tiers to the end of the world. Joel had said the call she heard was a call to her own dreams. Perhaps, she thought, it was because she was meant to be an artist, that she would always be restless until she had found herself in that life. Yes, she decided with newfound certainty, surely that call was—for her, at least—a call to pursue her destiny of art.

Of unspoken accord they began walking back toward camp over the uneven ground. Once she stumbled in the failing light and he reached out to steady her, so that even after he withdrew his hand, they went on close together—as if thrown so by the loneliness of the land. Although it was evening the wind still blew, and could be heard rumbling in the reaches below them.

“You were right about the wind—it
is
different up here,” Sevana murmured. “It has a thousand voices.”

“Do you like it?”

“I would, if it didn’t have such a mournful cry,” she answered honestly.

The sheep had bedded down just beyond the circle of campfire light. Joel offered Sevana coffee from the steaming pot, and she sat warming her hands on the hot tin cup while he piled more branches on the fire. “If you don’t like the sound of the wind, I will play some music for you to listen to instead,” he said, and got the violin from the tent. Sitting beside her on the log to tune the strings, he played songs he had played before and others she did not know—and his music tore at her more than the crying of the wind.

He played his mountain song, and if that song had been beautiful before, it was in that high place it truly belonged. The music had the force and character of the land it was released into: it sang to the heights, descended to the valleys, spoke of solitude, sorrow, and joy. And it stirred up in Sevana feelings already stirred up, so that every stroke of the bow seemed to be cutting into her heart.

When the song was ended, Joel held out the fiddle. “Would you care to play, Sevana?” For thanks to his diligence, her repertoire now boasted two songs and a fluid scale.

“No, thank you,” she replied soberly.

He laid the fiddle aside without comment. The sticks were burning outward from the fire, and he knelt to push them toward the center. “Any news while I’ve been gone?” he looked up through the smoke to inquire.

“Not much.” She had to think back over the past weeks. “Mr. Radnor caught the poacher…Fenn was gone fighting fire for a couple of weeks…I blew out his tire on the Billy Goat Mile…I had a night caller…and one of the loggers asked me to marry him.” This last she added to hear his clear laugh—and it rang out as she’d intended.

He sat back on his heels. “What’d you tell him?”

“The logger? ‘Gosh, I’d love to, but I’ve got to go make something of my life,’” she quipped, then felt a little guilty. “Trick’s a sweet guy,” she acknowledged fairly.

“But not sweet enough?” He shot her a quizzical look as he returned to his place. “How’d Randall catch the poacher?”

When she told him, he had one more question. “What about the night caller?”

Upon hearing the story of Rory, he said straight out: “Good thing you learned to shoot.” But then he was ominously quiet. “I’ll be glad when you’re away from there,” he confessed finally. “You know, Sevana, I haven’t been entirely honest about something. Remember the time Fenn’s girlfriend talked to you at the Lodge, and I said I didn’t know anything about it? It’s true I didn’t know anything for sure, but there were plenty of rumors around town last winter. Something about Fenn threatening her new boyfriend. I heard the constable was out at the homestead questioning him. I think he got a warning, and he might have had to pay a fine.”

Sevana thought of the bank statements under the stairs. That could explain how he’d gotten behind on his payments. “Fenn told me about it. He did threaten her boyfriend, but he said it was because he was drunk.”

“Yes, that was the general drift of what I heard. Well, things like that go on at the Whiskyjack all the time. The only reason I brought it up is so you can watch out. If you ever see Fenn in an irrational frame of mind, you’d better steer clear of him.”

“I will.”

“I’ll admit I’ve been a little uneasy about you, thinking what could happen if he went on a drinking binge,” he said. “But maybe that’s just because with my father, I’ve seen it firsthand.”

She shivered from the wind on her back, and Joel noticed. “Silly girl, why did you take off the coat?”

“The fire was hot.”

He draped the coat around her, and kept his arm against her shoulders. “Better?”

“Yes.” Another shiver went through her, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. He was smiling down at her, and for a minute everything seemed suspended. There was only him and her and some insistent force pulling them together. But then he dropped his arm, and she knew she had almost gotten caught up in the delusion of the place. For one moment they had been the only two people in existence; there had been no other world. Feeling slightly off-balance, she stood on the pretext of refilling her coffee, and also poured more for him. Then she sat across from him on a squat stump, where she proceeded to watch the russet firelight flickering over his lean-boned face with a disturbing joy, and a deepening wonder, and a curious sense of dread.

In search of a less unsettling view, she looked out to the night beginning in earnest beyond the flock. “You know you’re up high when the stars are below you,” she remarked, for it did seem she was looking down on the stars that winked on the far horizons.

“I’ve thought the same thing.”

She remembered a statement he’d made before. “If heaven is closer at night down in the river valley,” she said aloud, thinking it out, “then heaven up here among the mountaintops is—”

“An immediate reality,” he finished for her, when she paused for the right words.

“Yes,” she agreed softly—and their gaze across the fire communicated the satisfaction of understanding each other.

Joel fished the coffee pot out of the flames and left it on the ground to cool. Steam curled out of the spout. “It’s going to get cold tonight. I’ll sleep outside and you can have the tent.”

She had already taken his coat, she thought; she was not going to take his tent as well. “Please,” she said, “I’d rather sleep under the stars, just for tonight.”

“If you want to.” He didn’t try to dissuade her. He brought a blanket and laid it on the log. “Keep the coat on and stay near the fire to keep warm,” he instructed her. “If you get cold in the night and change your mind, I’ll trade with you.” Putting several good-sized chunks of wood on the fire and telling her to call if she needed anything, he left her alone.

Near the fire, wrapped in the coat and blanket but still cold, Sevana lay beneath the boundless heavens and sleep fled from her. The wind singing in lonely infinity over the uninhabited ranges filled her with a desolation beyond anything she’d known. She longed to call out to Joel just to hear his voice. Hour after hour, she tossed on the stonelike ground. The short summer sundown seemed endless.

Sometime in the night she got up for a respite from the hard earth and put a pitchy fir knot on the fire, turning her back on the sudden flare of light so it wouldn’t blind her from her surroundings. Even in the deep of night, the mountain peaks stood as dense black shapes against the lighter carbon sky. She looked up at the stars glittering so brilliantly in the high-altitude air. Beyond them, the night stretched away remote and unknowable, into the opaque darkness of imponderable space.

But as she looked into that limitless heaven, she knew the night did not go on and on in emptiness: something filled it. She remembered Joel’s certainty that God walked the high places of the earth, and felt a tingle of expectancy. Surely He was here right now, all around her. She felt on the verge of some pivotal revelation; she needed to catch it before it drifted out of reach. She paced away from the campfire, drawn toward the silver light radiating down from the starfire.

And for an instant she knew why Joel had said there was more beyond the world they saw—mystical things reaching into eternity. For just as when you looked at a mountain, its rock form couldn’t be separated from its intangible grandeur—so everywhere, the invisible glimpsed through the visible in ways that couldn’t be ignored. For she had the strongest persuasion, unsupportable but sure, that the One who had formed the fiery stars and the time-frozen whitebark pine snags was there in immediate nearness behind His work.

And though she was not acquainted with Him in any real sense, yet His presence was familiar, and she recognized it as what she had perceived in elusive hints and traces that summer—in the magic of a moonlit night…in the mystery present among the ancient cedars…in the river singing in half-remembered melodies at her window. For the wonders that had drawn her and the beauty she had come to know—they were the ways and faces of the One who had created them. And she would remember this, would not be blind to it when she looked at His handiwork anymore; for now she understood that in the voice of the river she had heard His voice, and in the might of the mountains she had seen His majesty, and in the silence of the cedar grove she had stepped into His sanctuary.

And then the glimpse seemed to fade and she was standing cold and alone in that stark land, so that she sought the relative security of her fireside bed. Floating up from the drainages came the spookish, low-throated howls of what must surely be wolves, but she closed her eyes with the assurance that if they came close, Joel would be out to defend his flock.

When the first pale suggestion of peach-hued light crept into the eastern horizon behind a rising, tarnished-gold crescent moon, she sat up wearily. Joel was seated on the stump, playing a stick in the low-burning fire. “Why are you up?” she asked, surprised to see him there.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Neither could I.” She folded the blanket back into a neat square and laid it on the log. A chill wind was still blowing, fresh and bracing, drenched with the spiciness of all the alpine plants it had passed over in the night. She stepped to the fire. “I don’t think I slept at all.”

“But you were asleep when I got up to check on the sheep.”

“Was I?”

“I wondered if you were cold, and I stood over you and spoke your name, but you didn’t stir.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“To tell the truth I was some worried about you—out in the cold, with the wolves and all. But you looked so peaceful. It was so strange, seeing you there…knowing at daylight you would go, and it would be as if you had never been here at all.”

“I know why you say that.” The solitude of the night was still with her in an indelible way. “It’s a lonely land.”

“Yes, it’s not often I have someone at my campfire.” He was looking at her in a queer way—or maybe it was just the dull, weird light of the fire and the dawn and the moon. For how could Sevana know the conflicting thoughts of his mind, brought into focus by the sight of her angelic face dreaming by the fire? In that instant, he’d had the strongest desire to kneel beside her and trace the contour of her face with his fingers. And that caprice had surprised him, and left him confused. For he had thought his heart solely captive to Chantal—and now it was showing him it was possible to feel an attraction for someone else. But maybe it was just because they were up there miles alone. It addled your mind, sometimes, the isolation. He needed to think it out. The stick caught on fire, and he ground it out in the ashes.