Trapline (13 page)

twenty-seven:
wednesday, mid-day

Late summer raspberries hung
on the bush, dabs of bright and pale red. Allison grazed her way around the edge, ate enough to call it a light meal. Juice burst in her mouth, a delicate balance of tart and sweet. The berries could have used a bowl of vanilla ice cream. She wished she could pick a few pints and bring them to Trudy for jam or compote.

It was high noon. She'd seen elk sign, but nothing fresh.

Actual elk?
Nada.

Actual deer? Double
nada.

Any mammal worthy of a hunt? She may as well have been scouting in Times Square.

When she had passed Lumberjack Camp an hour ago, she had stopped for a long stare, using the vista up the hill as a movie backdrop and imagining chase scenes playing out, scenes from National Geographic specials, the ones she watched as a kid with cheetahs flashing across the African savannah, streaking low and so fast the background was an indecipherable smudge of green grasses. The scenes had scared the crap out of her. She'd cover her eyes whenever the cat leapt at the wildebeest or other frightened prey of the day. The ten-minute stare down of the area around Lumberjack produced no such imaginary documentary that was credible. It was all science fiction, B-grade stuff. At least the mountain lion problem and the half-corpse question had taken her mind off Kerry London and his evil proposition.

Back on Sunny Boy, she worked her way out to the broad east-west plateau.

East would take her back past Lumberjack and offer a straight return to Sweetwater in plenty of time to check on progress around the barn. West, more scouting.

Allison chose south. A rocky high point beckoned. The ridge jutted into the valley like the prow of the
Titanic
. She tied Sunny Boy to the largest tree in a small thicket of aspens. An animal trail snaked up the treeless east side of the high knoll. The valley floor dropped away. Allison let her thoughts tumble and drift.

The half-corpse drew the most hits, with the rooftop of the apartment building a close second. She observed the ideas from a distance, found a way to not let them gnaw.

Blue flax dominated the route up, other than the usual green smudge of late-summer grasses. She inhaled with her eyes. If a wildflower bloomed on a hillside and nobody was there to see it, was it really color?

The ridge top was no wider than a country road. The opposite side dropped farther and steeper than the one she'd climbed.

The knife edge narrowed down to sidewalk width at the prow of the rock ship. The view opened her heart. The view was real and the view cared nothing about her trivial woes. She didn't exist. The view sent the same message it had delivered when she first plunged into the Flat Tops.
You ain't nothing.
She was meant to be here, at this spot and at this point in time. She would look for elk, sure, as soon as she took in everything else.

She wondered what this spot looked like as the mountain ranges crumbled, as seas moved in and receded, as the land masses took after each other in their slow-motion demolition derby. Basalt from volcanic eruptions formed the Flat Tops, but the geological violence that shaped it was impossible to picture. If the resulting evidence of their clash was this beauty, and its dense kaleidoscope of nature, let a million more battles commence. What was impossible to accept was that the scene before her was changing, evolving still. That the continents were relaxing between rounds in their respective corners, getting water squirted into their mouth and their cuts patched while they waited for the next round in the ring. She was watching evolution. Time ticked. Sand dripped. Rocks eroded. Gene codes cooked, stewed, adapted. The universe, said the experts, was flying apart. In three billion years, this would all be ice. Somewhere out there were elk, deer, big horn sheep, bears, coyotes, rabbits, porcupines, chipmunks, squirrels, mice, voles, beaver, muskrats and every kind of bird and waterfowl that enjoyed a lush, elevated alpine climate and a hundred million or billion bugs at the bottom of the food chain. Her kind of melting pot. But Allison's view was wonderfully inert, a still-life landscape for some future painter to add the life forms. How could 30,000 elk hide so easily? Or 80,000 deer?

The sun was high, set to braise. Late summer days at elevation in the mountains rarely carried the ferocity, say, of the New Jersey shore boardwalk. Allison thought she could sit there all day, the air temperature matching her skin.

What about this thing called work? If human activity was low, there was always the possibility of spotting elk out for a graze. She popped a Fig Newton like a happy pill and scanned the broad valley through binoculars, encouraging any brown, four-legged mammals to move a muscle. Nothing. She lay prone, her forearms stiff like iron pipes. She looked a mile down the valley. She inched her way along, trying to accomplish in minutes something that might have taken hours on horseback.

If she got lucky.

The vast view overwhelmed her. It sank into her marrow. Her whole system smiled. The scene was either pure design or pure art, take your pick. Or maybe some magic combination of both, a seamless marriage of expression and purpose, of soul and brain. Surely the vista couldn't be improved. It was a life-giving, life-producing valley that spoke to her like the finest music, the most moving art. It confirmed her humanity and at the same time, made her thoroughly forget it.

Was she being selfish? Greedy? The question towered up over her like a sudden dark cloud. Coincidentally, Allison noted the shaft of a blue-black thunderhead that had encroached on the otherwise unblemished western horizon. The cloud appeared to be an alien renegade, an interloper who drifted into the wrong party on the wrong block in the wrong city on the wrong planet. It looked fat and loaded.

“Scram,” said Allison.

The thought ground into her—the happy loner was by definition selfish. She was keeping all this to herself. She had re-wrapped herself in a precious cocoon and wasn't going to allow one strand to come unraveled. Colin fit fine inside her tight little world because she had found him there. Trudy fit fine inside her tight little world because she had found her there. Trudy belonged, a natural student of the earth.

All other would-be intruders had to be checked at the door or go through the kind of months-long physical and mental shakedown that would scare away even the most determined suitor. By definition, she was selfish. Snarling at Kerry London had proved the point. She was so determined to keep her world intact and she was so dead set on getting herself drunk on Flat Tops serenity as frequently as possible that she was really no better than a desperate junkie, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, guarding her last score.

The big question ahead was if she could open up to strangers. If she could commit to Colin, if she could imagine bringing a child into this scary, frightening world and being responsible for its well-being, if she could reconcile with the city and all its crazy crap.

Choosing to ignore the dark blotch on the high horizon, Allison aimed the binoculars along the edge of the forest, where the open meadows gave way to dark dense timber. She scoured the nooks and crannies, the transition areas. She willed elk from their hiding. She drilled holes through the dim corners with her X-ray vision. Soon, she would have to return to Sunny Boy and the less efficient method of scouting from bush to bush, tree to tree on horseback.

Out of the waves of green and brown, a flickering orange-red dot.

Flickering orange meant only one thing. Flickering and dancing orange confirmed it was the one thing. With her naked eye, the dot didn't register. Had her survey position been an inch to the left or right, the dot might have been obscured by a tree. The dot was more than a mile away, maybe two. It was hard to gauge its size, but at least it wasn't growing. And that meant it was being tended and that meant campers or scouts and human activity and that meant the odds plummeted for seeing elk or deer in this stretch of the Flat Tops.

Allison scrambled down quickly, no melancholy good-bye to her precious view. Sunny Boy was happy to see her—ears gently forward, a relaxed whinny. His ears said it:
what's next?
They rode up the throat of the valley, a wary eye on the darkening cloud, now producing intermittent flashes of jagged white cracks that connected ridge and cloud. The flashes were silent and carried no clout.

“Stay put,” she told the storm. “Or, at least, hold your horses.”

As if in spite, the air cooled and the treetops swayed like they'd been kicked in the gonads. The light dimmed. Allison caught a whiff of smoke. She tied Sunny Boy to a thick fir. Now that she was near the orange dot, she had the gut-grab sensation that she didn't like the firestarters. But since the fire was a fire and she wanted to make sure it was being tended and didn't pose further risk, she was obliged to investigate. It was her duty, given the badge she'd pinned on her chest and the silent oath she'd administered to herself.

The fire sat in a neat fire ring, minding its own business. Its flames were waist-high, bending a bit to the oncoming wind. No Hollywood special effects expert could have created a more typical, well-groomed campfire. It must have been recently fed or tended, but the camp looked empty. No pots or dishes rattled in the small canvas wall tent. If someone had gone to the trouble of building the fire, then why wasn't it being used or enjoyed? The camp looked old and well-worn, but it wasn't on Allison's radar. It was fifty yards off the main valley, tucked away. Private. Every bone in her body said get the fuck out.

But there was the fire, ridiculously perky and cheerful, waiting for a circle of hunters or cowboys and bottle of Wild Turkey or Patrón Silver, her new favorite.

“Help you?”

The man stood by the opening to the tent, but Allison hadn't seen the flap open.

“Saw the fire,” said Allison. “Going down the valley. Saw the fire back in here.”

“Hiking?”

“My horse is—” She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “I've got a horse. Saw the fire.”

“Fire's not going anywhere,” said the man.

“I can see that,” said Allison.

And in my permit area, she wanted to say.

The man was a beefy six-footer. Even so, his head was disproportionately large with thick curls of gray hair and matching muttonchops. His cheeks could have been stuffed with acorns. His jaw was slack and his mouth didn't look like it ever closed. He wore a navy baseball hat with a round insignia in white but it was too small and too far away to read the words. It had a quasi-military look. He wore green camo pants, thick brown boots and a maroon pull-over, the sleeves yanked up to his elbows, revealing weightlifter forearms. He could probably pick her up one-handed for a chat like she was Fay Wray.

“We like it neat,” he said. No offer of an introduction.

“Do I hear female?”

A second man from the tent was taller and had gaunt cheeks and pinched, deep-set eyes. His blue-jean jacket had a large American Flag patch over the front pocket. He wore a black baseball cap that said “iPack” in the same font as all the Apple gear. His neck was heron-long.

She didn't like the camp. She didn't like them. She also didn't like the fact that they had both managed to quietly emerge from the tent and
she hadn't heard a grunt, a fart, a cough, a clang, a step, or a word. She hadn't interrupted a Buddhist sit. They weren't opening the hand to thought. Every follicle in her scalp buzzed with alarm.

“You're a long way from home,” said the second man. Was he implying he knew who she was?

“On horseback,” said Allison.

“We've already covered this,” said the first man. “She's got a horse around here somewhere. Guess he's shy.”

Allison did a fast-scan check of the camp. No bows. No quivers. No black powder guns. The ground around the tent looked well-
tram
pled. Steady use had pushed the forest back. She saw a hitching rail and turned slightly to double-check—it was a double-wide rail with room for ten or a dozen horses. The apron of dirt around the well-trampled camp was, in fact, covered in horse tracks. Two horses stood at the rail for now. A crooked blaze gave one horse a lopsided-look. A small star dotted the forehead on the other, a chestnut Spanish Mustang.

Sunny Boy opted right then to issue a call of boredom or alarm, a forceful but distant whinny. Maybe he'd known she was studying other horses.

“There's your guy now,” said the second man. “Why did you tie him up so far?”

“No reason,” said Allison. “Just wasn't sure what this fire was all about. I guess I'll be on my way.”

The men were inert. There wasn't a welcoming gesture between the two of them. Maybe she needed to leave before someone else arrived. Their beefy silhouettes didn't reek of
Brokeback Mountain
, but the thought flashed. The inhospitable undertones reeked of conspiracy, not love.

“Glad to see the fire has an owner,” said Allison. “You guys have a good one.”

Allison had the distinct feeling that the tent held another warm body or two, that they were guarding something or somebody. Backwoods etiquette wasn't exactly in the well-established protocols of say, a White House dinner, but she'd venture to say that in the chapter covering chance encounters it was considered polite to offer coffee, water or a scrap of something edible. Staring and glowering were likely listed as
don'ts.
Allison got their message, no semaphore decoder needed.

To add to the chilly reception, the sun blinked off. It wasn't a slow fade. It was if someone had turned down the Flat Tops rheostat setting from noon to dusk with a twist of the hand, no different that dimming a dining room chandelier so mom could walk in with the birthday cake all aglow. The accompanying chill was instant. Wind cut through the woods with a cold bite and the flames in the fire pit cowered like a scared puppy. Embers fired horizontally across the camp like red bullets. The sky went black.