Stony River Page 4

  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 Sevan
a 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.

  Sevana laughed in merriment, her eyes dancing with a light new to them. The lambs’ cavortings mirrored the feelings she had in that carefree place: she wanted to run and join in the fun. “Could you tell me their names?” she asked, irresistibly on her feet.

  Joel obliged her, taking her through the flock to introduce her to Glacier, the bellwether, and the other fifteen or so bucks and ewes. The lambs he saved for last, for they were off playing by themselves—the frolicking pair he had just called back, along with Thistle, Goldthread, and the cunning Gyrfalcon who measured the newcomer to the meadow with a calculating stare. It was a lot to learn, he knew. But Glacier and Goldthread were easy—the biggest and smallest respectively. Woodrush had a notch in his ear from a dispute with Hemlock. Arrow had a scar on her muzzle from a dispute with a thornbush. She would get them all in time.

  Wandering there on the slope, Sevana tried to miss nothing that magical place had to offer. The mountains were beautiful, astonishingly so, and the meadow was so clean and sweeping and open that it gave her a feeling of freedom—even, curiously, of peace. As they returned to their sitting spot, she was already plotting how best to immortalize it on canvas. “Would it be all right if I came up here to paint?” she asked.

  “Anytime you wish.”

  “Thank you. I’ve never painted outdoors before, nor used a real-life subject, so this will be quite a challenge,” she said, wishing she could start that very second. “Having this to paint will almost make up for—” She stopped with an odd look, and made no attempt to finish her sentence.

  But she didn’t have to say the words, for Joel studied her face with keen perception. “You don’t want to be here?”

  “Not exactly—out here in the sticks.” She shook her head with a disbelieving little laugh. “Fenn doesn’t even have running water.” Then it occurred to her that Joel probably didn’t, either. But it was too late to make pretense of her true opinions, and the words tumbled on recklessly, “And he eats bear meat.”

  Joel was gentleman enough not to smile as he inquired: “Do you mind if I ask why you’re here then, Sevana, if you’d rather not be?”

  “Because my father wanted me to stay with Fenn after I graduated.” She plucked a fragile yellow glacier lily from the grass. “I’m not sure why it made such a difference to him, whether I moved to Lethbridge now or in the fall. But to his way of thinking, being four months closer to eighteen mattered a great deal as far as me living on my own.”

  Joel nodded as if he might agree with such fatherly logic, but only remarked, “So it’s Lethbridge you’re off to. That’s where I bought my sheep when I was first starting out, from a breeder over there. And I have a friend who moved there from Cragmont about five years ago.”

  She was interested that he knew of it. “What’s the town like?”

  “It’s a good-sized city on the plain. It’s not bad, if you like open country.” The inference was there, ever so slightly, that he did not. “Do you have friends or relatives there?”

  “No, I just chose it for the art school.”

  “Where does your father live?”

  “He’s on a restricted military base in London. He’s a special intelligence analyst and goes from place to place—and I have been in boarding school until now.”

  “What about your mother?” he asked, if a bit hesitantly.

  “She left my father when I was very young. She married again soon after and broke all ties with us.” There was no pain in Sevana’s clear eyes as she spoke, for to her it was merely a fact to be related. “My father never remarried. He’s always been too busy with his career to have much time for anything else. Fenn and I spent a few years with him when we were young, and some of the summers, but mostly we lived at school. Fenn came out here when he graduated from military academy, and this is the first time I’ve seen him since then.”

  “I confess, for all the years Fenn’s been here, I don’t know him very well.” Joel’s voice took on a guarded tone. “Are you very close to him?”

  “I don’t know him very well myself,” she admitted, adding a tiny, pink-striped spring beauty to her fairylike bouquet. “But it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other, it’s bound to take some time to get caught up.”

  “Reckon so—” and if Joel had other opinions on the matter, he did not speak them. But out of a silence he’d lapsed into, he asked, “Sevana, has your father ever been out to visit Fenn?”

  She tilted her head at him. “Out here? No, he never has.”

  “So he has no knowledge of what Fenn’s life is like?”

  “You mean—like not having electricity, and being so far from town?”

  “Well, not so much that. It’s more—well, the loggers out here are a rough bunch, and their lifestyle—” He was trying to be diplomatic, placing the blame on the whole class of loggers instead of one in particular. “It’s just not something I’d necessarily want my seventeen-year-old daughter in the middle of.” As if regretting having spoken at all, he got abruptly to his feet. “Are you thirsty?”

  After the long trek up the trail—“A little,” she admitted.

  “I should have asked you sooner,” he apologized. “I’ll fetch some water f
rom the spring.”

  Not inclined to sit idly by when there was something new to see, Sevana followed him. Just within the trees in a shallow draw, a spring had carved out a small rocky hollow in the hillside. From this cavern, a miniature stream freefell a few handbreadths into a gravelly pool. “Here’s my running water,” Joel teased her. He unhooked a tin cup from a hemlock branch and held it under the spill. “I’m afraid it’s a community cup,” he gave fair warning as he handed it over.

  She remembered his cryptic reference to a ‘she’ at his first greeting. “Do you have a family up here?”

  “No, I live alone. I just meant it’s the cup I use, also.”

  “So, a community of two.” Sevana found herself teasing him in turn. “That’s a pretty small town. I think I’ll take my chances.” She took a reckless gulp, and instantly felt her mouth and throat ache with the excruciating cold. “That’s ice water without the ice!” she gasped. She drank the rest much more cautiously, then gave the cup back so he could have a turn.

  When they returned to the sheep, Joel opened his knapsack. “I didn’t bring any company fare for lunch, but you’re welcome to share what I have.”

  When she refused out of politeness, he insisted, saying he had plenty. So she accepted portions of his homemade brown bread and cheese and dried apple rings, and thought how good it tasted—out where food was so much more precious because it was so hard to come by, so far to get more.

  There was such a stillness when no one was talking. A wind stirred the grasses lightly, and now and then a sheep called to another, but those little sounds were swallowed by the large presence cast by the overlooking mountains. And in that silence, Sevana felt something calling to her—drawing her toward something unknown or far away. It was almost as if the mountains themselves were calling her, beckoning in some inexplicable way.