Stony River (5 page)

His room had the same bench-style bed built into the gable, but boasted two windows and more space—although it seemed smaller because of the snowshoes, camping gear, and other sporting equipment that crowded it. There was also an eye-opening amount of weaponry—rifles, pistols, knives, a bow and arrows, and boxes of ammunition stacked high. But that room contained more than the tackle of an outdoorsman. There were the books she’d been hoping for, more even than she would have predicted: three long shelves below the big window on the front wall, crammed end-to-end.

Sevana knew she didn’t belong in that room, but she stepped in just to glance over the titles, not only to see what she could expect to read that summer, but also to learn where his interests lay. She was startled, therefore, by the volumes that met her eyes: weighty tomes of ancient history and mythology, strange volumes of metaphysics and philosophy, malevolent chronicles of crime and war—books of a deep, even a morbid, thinker. Similarly, the few novels he owned were dark and macabre. Aghast, she took hasty leave of that foreign environment and went downstairs, soberly wondering if she and Fenn could ever be close, when they appeared to have so little in common.

Out in the cold sunshine, where the air rising out of the valley was bringing with it the river’s echo more clearly that morning, she tried to decide what to do with the day. Trapper was picketed under a spindly apple tree below the house, industriously clipping off the dewy blades of grass. She would have liked to take him for a ride, but didn’t dare without Fenn’s consent. More than anything, though, she just wanted to get to a high spot where she could see above the mountain walls and make some sense of this place where she had come to stay. Right now, she felt nothing so much as blind and directionless amid the mazelike ranges.

Thus compelled, she set up the lane past the homestead, and straightway entered a dark wood stifling the early daylight so effectively that only accidental glints of hazy sunshine hit upon the road. Thick-trunked trees with trailing branches flanked her on either side, towering over a damp green floor of ferns and forbs and stunted yew and cedar. The stillness of the forest was so oppressive, the caw of a raven startled her. Gargantuan shapes lurking between tree columns made her look twice to see they were not wild animals or monsters, but uproots of huge fallen trees covered with moss and lichens, bent and tied in eerily humped and erratic shapes. She began to question the intelligence of pressing through that foreboding wood, for it seemed rather unhealthy to be in it alone. But she had only rounded four or five bends when the road ended unexpectedly in a sunlit turnaround. Even more unexpected, a dusty black pickup was parked there in it.

Sevana was greatly perplexed by the presence of that truck. She was sure Fenn had said no one else lived up there. She darted a glance in all directions, but no one was in sight. Then she realized she could hear water bubbling somewhere in the woods nearby, and reasoned that a fisherman might have come to fish Avalanche Creek. This brought to her the interesting idea of exploring the woods to see if she could find the creek herself sometime—and feeling less alone with the prospect of another human engaged in that innocuous sport nearby, and the sight of a sunnier slope above making her forget the entrapment of the mossy cathedral behind, she ventured on.

From there, only a footpath littered with pineneedles switched up the mountain, unyielding in its climb. Sevana had to stop more than once to catch her breath, and her shins were soon sore from hitting against the rigid leather of her boots, but she pressed ahead, spurred by her goal to find an unobscured vista. The higher she went, the more the lonely feel of the mountain increased, making her acutely aware of how far she was straying from the safety of the house. Once in a while she looked back to see if there was a view yet, but always she saw only trees.

At last there was a break in the forest ahead and the blue of the sky, and she clambered eagerly up the last steep pitch. But when she came over the crest, she discovered she wasn’t at the top at all—but only on a level bench with the slope continuing beyond it. And in that opening, overhung by the boughs of some sheltering spruce trees, resided a maple-brown cabin of axe-hewn logs.

Sevana stopped in her tracks. A cabin was the last thing she had expected to see up there. Without meaning to, she’d blundered into someone’s property and was trespassing at that very moment. But before she could retreat, a man came striding around the corner of the house, having detected her presence before she was aware of his. Keeping his eyes carefully fixed on the slender, pixielike figure standing at the edge of his promontory as if he expected it to vanish momentarily like a vision, he crossed the grass to her—while Sevana remained caught to the ground, between two minds whether to stay or flee.

“Hello there.” He stopped a few paces from her, his face inscrutable of expression. “What brings you up here?” Then, as a thought occurred to him—
“She
didn’t send you up here…with some kind of message, did she?” he asked, a sudden tightness showing in the lean muscles of his face.

She had to look up to him, for he was as tall as Fenn. But while Fenn was fair, this man was dark, with uneven layers of black hair down to his collar, and deep obsidian eyes in a finely structured face. He wore faded black work trousers and a rough gray shirt with suspenders, easily fitting his spare frame. “No, I—I’m just out for a walk,” she stammered, confused by his cryptic question, and trying not to mind that a revolver hung readily at his side.

He dismissed his previous thought and addressed the situation from a plainer angle. “On a hike, are you? Are you touring?” he asked, the tension of his look passing as quickly as it’d come.

“No, I’m staying with my brother for the summer. I’m Sevana Selwyn.”

“Is that so?” He smiled then, and she saw his eyes were not purely dark, but had glints of light in them—like sunrays in deep water. “I didn’t know he had a sister.” He held out a hand to her. “I’m Joel Wilder, your brother’s only neighbor.”

She accepted the strong grip of his handshake. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your property, Mr. Wilder,” she apologized, feeling she hadn’t given him sufficient reason why she should be standing in his yard. “I didn’t know anyone lived up here. I just wanted to find a place to get out of all these trees and see out.”

“Like that?” He nodded toward something behind her.

She turned and gave a little exclamation of surprise, for rising high above the clearing, sharp rocks were etched in jagged relief against the morning blue, their snowclad summits dazzling. “Oh!” she breathed, pressing her hands together in delight. “I didn’t know those mountains were even there!”

He seemed gratified by her heartfelt reaction. “You can see them even better from up in the meadow,” he told her.

“A meadow!” she cried in excitement. “That’s what I’m looking for! Some open place where I can get a feel for where I’m at.”

“I was about to head up there with the sheep. You can come with me, if you’d like to.”

“So you are the shepherd,” she said, starting with him toward the barn in unspoken acceptance of his invitation. She was glad to have things straight. “Fenn did say there was a sheepherder in the mountains, but somehow I didn’t expect him to have any certain dwelling place.”

“Guess most do live out under the sky,” he agreed with a slow smile. “But I have a roof between me and the stars—most nights, anyway.”

As soon as he unlatched the corral gate, a small white avalanche of sheep came spilling out impatiently and made for the trail at once, led by one big ram. Only the lambs abdicated, breaking ranks to crowd Joel for his attention.

“Oh, they’re so little!” Sevana’s heart melted at first sight of the lambs. They were so small she could have easily picked one up in her arms. And they were so fuzzy white, with thin black lips curving around their muzzles as if they were smiling, brown eyes fringed by black eyelashes, and black noses and hooves, they were nothing if not adorable. She laughed out loud to see them vying for a word of good morning and a back-scratching from Joel, their ears perked straight up and their stubby tails wiggling so hard they seemed in a fair way to be stirring up the breeze.

“Funny little fellows, aren’t they?” Joel seemed to share her enchantment. “They play hour after hour, not a care in the world.” When he had acknowledged each one, he motioned with his hand. “Come on, let’s go!” At his command they bounded to catch up to the rest.

“They understand just what to do.” Sevana was observing the orderly procession up the trail in amazement.

“Yes, they know their way to the pasture by heart. The only thing they don’t understand is why they had to wait for it so long this morning. But while I was eating breakfast, I looked up to see one of my yearlings strolling past the front window, big as life. He’d found a way to squeeze under the fence. I took time to put up a new rail.”

Sevana could see the fresh-peeled sapling he’d set in place. “Did you get him back all right?”

“This time, yes. But I’m afraid I may be in for many such episodes. Last year he gave me no trouble, but he’s grown up with a mind of his own.”

He gave a call to Flint, and the sturdy workhorse ambled over placidly from beneath some well-spaced trees to join the string of sheep. This left Joel and Sevana to follow behind, and at first the trail was wide enough they could walk side by side.

“Flint’s a big horse,” Sevana said, observing the broad, tufted feet he was lifting and setting on the path in front of her. “I think the horses I rode in Toronto could practically walk underneath him.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“Yes. I just got here yesterday.”

“You’re from the flatland, then.” He looked at her closely. “No wonder you wanted to see out. Some folks say these mountains take a little getting used to.”

“Perhaps they do,” she agreed, glad to hear him say so. But after the majesty she’d just witnessed, she was beginning to think it might not be such a difficult adjustment.

The path was becoming steep and narrow. Sevana dropped behind Joel, and concentrated on not letting his heavy workboots get very far ahead of her as he gained the mountain in a long-legged gait. She was glad when she looked up and saw the bright-green meadow on the face of the slope above her.

Upon reaching open pasture, the sheep tried to scatter out at once to graze the tender grass, but Joel kept them all going toward the top. It was a much larger meadow than Sevana had expected, with too much of a curving angle to be seen as a whole from any one spot. Near the upper edge, Joel dropped his pack under a lone pine and stood waiting for a few stragglers to come into sight, but Sevana flung herself down on the ground to catch her breath. And there, with the grassy slope plunging giddily away below her, the blue-gray spires loomed up before her in unguarded splendor—almost as if there was no valley between. “The mountains look almost close enough to touch!” she marveled.

“That’s Graystone, Old Stormy, and Bearclaw.” Joel named for her the three closest peaks with a pardonable touch of pride, for there was no denying the magnificence of those granite monuments as they presided over the valley, glacial ice sparkling, and framed by the meadow and forests sloping in a grand descent into the river canyon. “All the years I’ve been here, I still see them every day as new.”

“Graystone, Old Stormy, Bearclaw,” Sevana repeated, to remember them. Their heights were so dominant, their beauty so vivid, it seemed an artist with a fancy for exaggeration had portrayed his ideal of a lofty mountain trio upon the sweeping canvas of the sky. “I want to paint them,” she said raptly—for from the first moment she’d set eyes on them, there had been no doubt.

“You are an artist?” he asked with interest, joining her in the grass.

“Yes—at least I hope to be. I’m going to study art in Alberta this fall.”

“So you’re out of school. I wouldn’t have thought you old enough,” he said candidly.

“I’m seventeen,” she said, unconsciously drawing herself a little straighter. But in the presence of the mature, self-possessed man beside her, it didn’t sound as impressive as she would have liked.

He smiled as if he saw something in her he understood. “I struck out to find my own way in life when I was seventeen, too.”

“Did you?” Her night-blue eyes rested on him inquisitively. “What were you hoping to find?”

“The very life I did find,”—and his look seemed to take in the pasture and the sheep and the high peaks at once. “I found in these mountains the home I was looking for.”

That statement went to Sevana’s heart. To hear him talk of his home and see the content in his eyes, made her deeply conscious that she had never known a home—not a true one, where she could feel at rest.

But it was impossible to entertain such introspective thoughts for long, with the sheep to watch. Most of the flock had settled down to graze the rich pasturage, but the lambs were having a real struggle deciding whether to eat or play. They would nibble a little grass, but then their nature demanded they be back to bounding and gamboling on the hillside in the most lighthearted way. Two of them got so caught up in play—butting heads, circling around each other, and leaping comically in the air—that they skittered heedlessly down the slope almost out of sight before Joel gave a shout that stopped them short. “Hawthorn! Blazingstar!”

They came running back up, snatched a few mouthfuls of grass, and went back to playing.