He nodded at Joe, another pilot, who gave the prop a pull and pushed the plane out to the water. Bryn had two huge duffels with her this time and several bags of groceries. Eli ran through their combined weight one more time and, satisfied that they weren’t overloaded, cruised out to the end of the lake, radioed Talkeetna’s air traffic control, and, when cleared, took off.
The trip to Summit took about ninety minutes, and much of it was spent listening to the roar of the engine and watching the fast moving, lowlying clouds move in on the Susitna Valley. “You okay?” he asked Sara.
She nodded quickly, her wide eyes never leaving the front windshield. “Fine. How long till we reach the lake?”
“Another ten, fifteen minutes.”
“That cloud bank,” she said, motioning toward the wall of silver before them, directly over the mountain pass. “We’re going through it?”
“Yes. We’ll be fine. I’ve flown through stuff like that plenty of times.”
She nodded again, a bit too eager to agree. He glanced back at Bryn, who stared wordlessly out at the tundra beneath them. She was more beautiful than ever; the five years had given her the gift of more pronounced curves and a mature look that enhanced everything right about her. But there was a touch of mournful sorrow in her eyes, and the crow’s-feet at the corners seemed deeper, the shadows beneath, darker. She was plagued by something unhappy. He cleared his throat and stared ahead again.
Ben always said Alaska was filled with people who were running either away from something or toward something. If Eli were a betting man, he would wager she was running away. But from what? Where was her father? Coming in soon? His questions would have to wait until he could return to Summit, without Sara.
They dropped Bryn off at her cabin while the heavens softly rained, reminding her of flour coming from her grandmother’s sifter.
“You going to be okay, Bryn?” Eli asked after bringing her duffel bags up to the cabin. He looked troubled, as if he wanted to say more but knew he had to get back to the plane and Sara.
“Oh yeah. You hop in; I’ll push the plane out.”
“Okay. Let me know if you need anything, all right? We’ll be here until tomorrow evening. I’m coming back next week with supplies for Ben. He’s home. Radio me in town if you need something.”
“All right,” Bryn said, thinking about him and Sara alone in that snug little cabin across the way. “Here until tomorrow evening.” Surely Eli and Sara wouldn’t … She resolutely pulled the hood of her parka up, and they ran back to the plane. She smiled as Eli’s face reappeared in the cockpit window and she called, “Thanks for the lift! See you around!” It was none of her business what Eli Pierce did or didn’t do these days. Never mind that she couldn’t even get the man to kiss her five years ago. There had been plenty of others who had been willing in the interim. Unfortunately, none of them seemed worth her while. Not like Eli.
She pushed them off again, and Eli ran up the engine and motored across the perfectly still lake, marred only by the tiny raindrops and the wake behind the plane. Within minutes, they had landed on the other side.
Suddenly Bryn felt bone-cold and very alone. Sighing, she made it up the beach and under the protection of the porch roof she and her father had built. Bryn ran her hands up the nearest pole, her eyes scanning the length and breadth of their work. It was holding up well. “Oh, Dad,” she whispered. It made her ache inside to recognize how lonely she was, how different Summit was without him.
She knew she had come here to feel closer to him, to remember when he was still trying to reach out to her. But she had also come here for her. To look forward, to find rest and rejuvenation and direction. It was a challenge to spend two months on Summit alone. And a good one. From the looks of things, Eli wouldn’t be around much, with Sara in the picture and tourist season soon coming to its zenith. It was up to her. To figure out where she had been, where she was now, and where she was going.
Bryn fished for the old key in her pocket, slid it in the lock, and then pushed on the lever. The door creaked open. Even her father hadn’t been back since they had left, pestered by her mother, plagued by an intense work load, then caught up in his new …
She hauled one heavy duffel into the sitting room and then the other and her groceries. The fire was laid in the wood stove, just as they left it—“I like to know it’s here, ready for me to come and light it,” her father had said upon their departure—and thankfully, with a quick strike of the match, the dry tinder immediately blazed to life. She left the cabin to gather more wood, pulled from beneath the higher, wetter logs. She dumped her armload beside the stove and set about unpacking.
Within a week Bryn had settled into the cadence of her days, beginning with stirring the coals in the stove, adding wood, uncovering the jar of sourdough starter, and dumping two-thirds of it in a bowl. She put three heaping teaspoons of flour back into the jar, added some lukewarm water, stirred, and capped it. If she did it every time, Ben had told her, she could have sourdough forever.
Bryn wasn’t wild about the taste, but it allowed her to have fresh bread and pancakes and biscuits on a daily basis, and made her feel somehow less the cheechako. She had been given her starter by Ben, who had been given it by another, who had been given it by another. Who knew how far back the origins of it were? She smiled, thinking of the miners and trappers who had first settled this land, bringing their white man’s concoction with them. After a sourdough summer, maybe she wouldn’t be considered an Outsider at all.
Conscious that a week had passed since Eli and Sara had roared down the lake, taking off just as the mild summer storm lifted, Bryn jumped at every unusual sound. She was waiting for his return, she acknowledged to herself. Hoping for his return, like a stupid schoolgirl with a crush. Get a grip. Bailey, she told herself. This summer was about her, not about rekindling old flames. I need a project, she decided, sliding biscuits in the oven. After three overly crispy, overly blackened attempts, she had finally mastered the needed heat of the fire to perfect her baking. In twenty minutes, she’d have them out to accompany her maple bacon, sizzling in a pan, and fried eggs. She ignored the cholesterol count. When in Rome …
Project. What could she do? She looked around the cabin. She’d already added a couple of rough-hewn shelves. Made them herself by carefully following the instructions in a pioneer-era guide she’d discovered in the back room. She picked up the book and thumbed through it. A fireplace. In the book there was a river-rock fireplace and step-by-step instructions on how to construct it. Wouldn’t her father love a fireplace? Love knowing that there was not only a wood stove for heat but also a real fireplace, with a hearth and chimney and a crackling fire, ready to be enjoyed? She supposed there was a part of her that still wanted to please her dad, connect with him, however angry she might be. And yet she could do this for herself, too. To expand her mind, keep her hands busy.
She looked to the end of the cabin. There was no window to contend with—the fireplace would add charm to the structure. It wouldn’t have to be huge. Bryn smiled. It was the perfect job. There was only so much reading and fishing she could do. The hard, manual aspect of it would be cathartic. That’s it. After breakfast she would begin to gather rock, a process that she guessed would take at least a week. Later she’d paddle down to Ben’s to ask his advice and input. Maybe he’d even help get her started or pitch in during the times she would undoubtedly need another set of hands. Eli certainly appeared unavailable. She quickly turned her thoughts toward breakfast.
She flipped the bacon and placed it on her plate, then added the eggs. Her dinner the night before had been a cup of beef bouillon and cold biscuits, so breakfast smelled heavenly. She sat down with her meal, ate quickly, and then geared up for the task at hand, gathering a canteen of water, some smoked sockeye salmon—Squaw candy, the natives called it—and the last biscuit in the pan, as well as her father’s fly-fishing gear. Bryn laced up her hiking boots and set off for the south end of the lake, toward the t
rout spawning area where Eli had fished with her, and then to an ancient, dried-up riverbed full of stones that were perfect for fireplace building.
It was perhaps a half-mile away, and the weather was great for hiking. The sun was out and warmed her skin with the hint of true summer in Alaska, though it probably only hovered around sixty degrees. She wore thick twill chinos to protect her legs from the underbrush and mosquitoes and an old lavender turtleneck sweater that had always reminded her of her last summer in Alaska. While at the river, she planned to fish. If they weren’t biting, she would scout for a few perfect rocks to begin her collection.
She had just settled in to casting, feeling the rhythm of the line, when she heard the metallic whir of a prop plane in the distance. Within sixty seconds, the Beaver cleared Gevanni Pass and came into view, flying low over the length of Summit Lake. It was Eli. She waved as he passed by, and he tipped his wings, then swooped up and around to prepare for landing. She resisted watching the whole process, concentrating on her casting, which was suffering dreadfully from the distraction.
Bryn selected a silvering spruce carcass, and the shadow it cast into the silver blue waters, as a likely hiding place for a rainbow trout, and placed her fly directly over it. She had a bite within seconds. The fish ran, trying to take the line beneath the safety of the old tree, but Bryn pulled the rod up and walked with it, trying to set the hook and bring it out at the same time. In another minute the fourteen-inch fish was flapping and flipping over on the hot, dry stones, his mouth opening and closing as if hoping he could get one more ounce of the ice-cold water. “Sorry, buddy,” she mused, crouching and pulling the hook out. “You’re going to be dinner.”
At least she hadn’t forgotten everything her father and Eli had taught her about fly-fishing, regardless of the fact that it had been five years since she held a rod in her hands. Still got it, Bailey, she smugly told herself. If she caught any more, maybe she could invite Eli over for dinner. Or build a smoker and dry the meat for another day. Or maybe borrow Ben’s old nets and try that method again. She grinned. She felt alive and vital again, as if every pore on her skin was open wider, every nerve a bit more aware, her eyes bigger, her focus sharper.
She put more oil on the fly and worked the area for another twenty minutes, but the fish she had caught appeared to be the only one under the old tree. Bryn walked upstream, fishing all the while, but still there was nothing. After twenty minutes, she climbed over a logjam and stopped suddenly. Nerves she thought were awake turned into an electrical system carrying live voltage.
Straight ahead was a mother grizzly. Swallowing slowly, as if the bear could hear even that, Bryn froze. Her eyes moved to the right, where a cub played in the shallows of the river with a flopping, not-quite-dead trout. “Only three kinds of bear will attack,” Eli had said once, “a sow with a cub, a bear with a kill, or one with a bad attitude.” She was considering where to go, what to do, when Eli’s low voice sounded behind her. “Stay absolutely still. Don’t look back. Keep your eyes at her feet.”
But his arrival alerted the mother bear. She stood up on her hind legs, a frightening eight feet tall. She raised her mammoth head, sniffed the air once, and then without further warning charged.
She came fast, impossibly fast, and Bryn’s first instinct was to turn and flee. Only Eli’s command to stay right where she was kept her feet frozen in place. “Eli,” she cried under her breath, watching the bear rush them as if she was in a movie theater and none of this was real. But it was real.
“Duck and cover your head and neck,” he said quickly. “If she attacks you, play dead. Remember, play dead. Do not move.”
“Eli,” she cried again, as if he could stop the oncoming bear. When the grizzly was twenty feet away, Bryn curved into a ball and covered her head and neck, feeling as if she were in third grade, doing an earthquake drill at school. If only I had a desk to protect me, she thought, her mind spinning wildly. They were going to die, die there together on an old riverbed of Summit Lake. Duck and cover. Play dead. Stay still.
But Eli was not still. He had taken off over the rounded rocks toward the far bank. Shouting and waving his hands to draw the sow’s attention and make her chase him. Protecting Bryn. It worked. The bear quickly changed direction and charged after Eli. The confused cub cowered for a moment by the logjam and then tentatively lumbered after his mother.
It was quickly obvious that Eli could not outrun the bear. In horror Bryn watched as the grizzly took him down with a swift rake of her huge paw. Eli plunged to the grassy bank, disappearing behind her massive brown form.
“Eli!” Bryn screamed, starting to run toward them and then hesitating. What could she do? “Eli!” she screamed again.
CHAPTER FIVE
The bear moved to his side, and Eli turned and hit her full in the face with pepper spray. The bear backed off, mewling like a newborn cub and rubbing her eyes with a furry brown arm. Eli rose and sprayed her in the face again, yelling wildly, and the combination of disorientation, confusion, and lack of sight made the sow turn and run, her fat cub close behind.
Eli sank to the ground, his face a grimacing mask of pain. It was then that Bryn saw him cradling his ankle and the bright red trail of blood seeping down his jeans. “Eli!” she yelled. “I’m coming!”
When she reached him, she pulled up his pant leg to expose his leg. His ankle was already swelling, probably sprained, and there were multiple, deep lacerations in the flesh where the bear had raked her claws across him. “We have to get you to the cabin. I can treat you there.”
Eli only nodded as he accepted her help up, and they began making their way back to his canoe.
“That was an incredibly brave, incredibly stupid thing to do,” she said, huffing with exertion. Eli’s arm was around her shoulders, and he winced with each step. She could almost feel the pain herself each time he dragged his leg across the stones.
“Told you I was a bear magnet. Lucky for me I had a doc to save,” he said through clenched teeth. They were close to Eli’s canoe, but he was losing a lot of blood and was growing weaker. “Think I’ll have to call you that, after you stitch me up.”
Bryn’s mind was not on nicknames. “What do you weigh, two, two-twenty?” she pretended to complain.
“Two-twelve,” he answered softly.
She looked up at him, studying his eyes, the sickly pallor of his skin, the sheen of sweat that coated it. “Eli? Gonna make it?”
“Going to … make it,” he said with determination. He stood up a little straighter as if to take weight off her shoulders, stepped forward, dragging his left leg behind … and immediately fainted. He was too heavy for Bryn to catch, and she stumbled forward when he fell. Worse yet, his head hit a rock on the way down. She shuddered as she heard bone meet granite.
“Eli!” Quickly she turned him over and grimaced as blood rolled down his face and into his eye. Wanting to cry, she looked up at the sky and yelled, “What do you want from me? A little help! I need a little help!” Her eyes ran from Eli’s canoe, just twenty feet away, down the lake to the north end and Ben’s cabin. He was out in his canoe, already paddling hard toward them, apparently having heard her cries. “Benjamin!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Ben! Hurry! I need help!”
She turned back toward Eli, opening first his left eyelid and then the other. She fought to remember all her medical training. The pupils looked good. It was dangerous if one was larger than the other. But Eli’s were both normal.
“Bear attack,” she said through her tears, when Ben finally reached her side. “We were trying to get back to his canoe when he passed out.”
“Easy, easy,” he said to her tenderly, looking Eli over for himself. “It’s not too bad. I’d bet that wound at the head is mostly superficial.”
“I don’t know, Ben. He’s still out. I was hoping he’d rouse by now.”
“All right. You’re the doctor. What do we do next?”
Bryn took a deep breath and surveyed Eli as
if he were a nameless patient in the teaching hospital. She assumed he was suffering from a concussion. Her next concern was the blood he was losing down his leg. “If we can get him to my cabin, I can stitch him up.”
“Done,” he agreed.
Together they moved Eli in a woolen blanket that Ben had in his canoe to Eli’s wider, more stable vessel. Working quickly, she wound an extra T-shirt around his leg and tied it as tightly as possible to help stanch the flow of blood. Then they climbed in and started paddling for Bryn’s cabin, the closest shelter. She had medical supplies there—a full kit of bandages and medicines. Even some emergency surgery necessities she had brought with her from the hospital. Bryn was thankful for her mother’s insistence that she be prepared for “the worst.”
By the time they neared the cabin, Eli awakened as if from a nightmare, disoriented, his forehead dripping with sweat.
“Eli! Eli, it’s okay,” Bryn soothed, turning to talk to him while Ben kept paddling.
Eli grimaced and groaned lowly. They soon made it to shore and carried the man up to the front room. Ben stoked the fire while Bryn attended to Eli, first cutting away his jeans to expose the entire lower half of his leg. “I think your ankle is just sprained, Eli.”
“Better stitch those wounds fast, girl,” Ben directed.
Bryn cut off the top of a small plastic bottle of saline and began irrigating the wounds. Then, with trembling hands, she covered them with Betadine. Eli winced at her first touch, and she pulled back.
“Go on,” Ben coached. “He can take it.”
Bryn’s eyes flew to Eli’s face, clenched in pain. He opened them briefly and nodded at her. “Go on,” he agreed. Bryn swallowed hard and quickly cleaned the long, deep lacerations and soon moved to inject twenty cc’s of lidocaine along the gashes.
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