Stony River

by Ciarra Montanna

  Sevana was on her feet, feeling her nerves tighten with the knowledge that the only time Hawthorn could have wandered off was when Joel had gone to get water for her. Wanting to help if she could, she crossed through the trees after him, and spotted him on an open bluff. He held up a hand to caution her from approaching too quickly. Hawthorn was on a ledge below him, nibbling some shrubs that had taken his fancy. “He’s in danger of stepping backwards off that ledge, but doesn’t realize it,” Joel said to her in a low, controlled voice. “Maybe you could try to keep his attention while I find a place to tie off the rope.” He pulled up some violets at his feet. “These are his favorite.”

  Again came the sound of Aurora calling for her lamb, a deep-noted, raspy lowing that echoed eerily among the spaces of the canyon.

  Heart in her throat, Sevana began calling Hawthorn’s name. The lamb looked up, but went right back to nosing the patch of shrubs. She held the flowers forward temptingly—but Hawthorn couldn’t be persuaded to ignore his shrubbery, even for a handful of violets.

  After a search, Joel returned to report, “There’s nothing nearby for an anchor point. I’ll go down without a rope. It was just a precaution anyway.”

  Sevana eyed the stalwart man who was almost twice her size. “You could hold the rope while I go down,” she suggested practically.

  Joel didn’t like the idea. “I could probably hold your weight if you slipped, but I don’t want to put you in any possible danger.”

  “I’m not afraid, Joel,” Sevana said. “Give me one end of the rope, and I’ll go after him.”

  She was so insistent that he consented against his better judgment. He cinched the rope around her waist, leaving a length free. “Ready,” he said. “When you get down to Hawthorn, tie the free end around his middle and lead him up. Trust me, Sevana, I won’t let you fall.”

  Secure in that knowledge—knowing that if there were any truths in the world, one of them was that she could trust Joel Wilder—Sevana inched down the rocks calling Hawthorn’s name. And when she slipped a little, Joel didn’t waver but held her firm. Reaching the lamb, she tied the rope around him and began leading him back up the bluff. He followed on his thin little legs, his small hooves delicately grasping the rocks.

  They were almost to safety when Hawthorn suddenly realized something was amiss. Not understanding the rope restricting him, he panicked and tried to sprint away from it. He jerked Sevana off her feet so she fell prone on the rocks, while he tumbled off the drop and hung there suspended. Scrambling onto her knees, Sevana frantically reached over the edge and tried to pull him up by the rope. “Joel!” she screamed, “the knot’s coming loose!”

  It was true. The amateurish knot she had tied was unraveling under Hawthorn’s full weight. But Joel had already taken command of the situation. Jumping down to Sevana and diving flat on his stomach, he held her from slipping with one arm while he grabbed Hawthorn’s scruff and hauled him up to safety.

  They were all a little shaken as they huddled on the bluff, Joel still holding onto both of them as if he was afraid to ever let them go. But then he stood up and tucked the lamb under one arm, leading Sevana with a sure hand back to safe ground. There, Hawthorn forgot about his ordeal as he discovered the heap of violets at his feet, and they laughed to see him gobble them so, breaking the tension. Nothing more was ever said of the incident, but Sevana knew it was Joel’s fast action and raw strength that had saved them all.

  Soon after the wayward lamb was reunited with its mother, Sevana left the meadow, for she wanted Trapper home before his owner. She didn’t intend to hide the fact that she had ridden so far up the mountain, but if Fenn didn’t ask, she wasn’t going to volunteer the information. The less he knew of where and how often she rode, the less chance she felt there was of him forbidding her to continue.

  Arriving at the homestead, she lost no time in starting a venison roast. It was impressive, actually, how long meat stayed frozen in the icebox after Fenn brought home a batch from the locker at logging camp. And he kept quite a store of smoked meat, along with sacks of vegetables and a pail of rendered bear lard, in the root cellar behind the house. This life might have its disadvantages, but it was by no means impossible.

  Once the roast and vegetables were in the oven, she started a batch of biscuits. Now that she knew the lard in the can was bear fat, it bothered her—but it didn’t really taste any different than any other kind of shortening. She cut the dough in squares instead of dropping it from a spoon the way Fenn did, and put the pan in the oven.

  But when Fenn stomped the mud from his boots and walked in the open door, she had more to concern herself with than simply setting the food before him, for he had a bandage around his left hand and a long rip in the trousers down his leg. “Oh, what happened?” she cried.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Fenn said harshly, setting his lunchbox on the counter with a clank. “The genius I was working with started tightening the haul-back line before I finished setting the choker. It’s a good thing it only got my hand.”

  He unwrapped the bandage over the washbasin, and Sevana saw the red gash across his palm. As he opened it wide and began cleaning it out, she had to avert her eyes—and got a glimpse of his stoical, rock-hard profile as she looked away. “Here,” she said faintly, handing him some clean toweling.

  He tore off a strip of cloth and stood at the counter wrapping it up again. “When I get enough money I’m going into business for myself,” he muttered, and went upstairs to change his torn trousers.

  At dinner he had nothing to say about the quite-edible menu or the new shape for the biscuits; and although he wolfed his food in the usual quantity, Sevana doubted he even noticed what he ate. She could see he was silently seething.

  While she washed the dishes, he sat at the table engrossed in a thick historical volume. He truly was smart, she thought, casting glances at his closed face as she moved about the kitchen. He probably did know more than most of the people he worked with, and had to endure the ignorance of those less perceptive than himself.

  When an unfamiliar truck pulled into the yard, Fenn growled to say he wasn’t home—so Sevana went out somewhat reticently to see who it was. Luckily the visitor wasn’t for Fenn, but for her. It was Pete, the logger who had given her the phone number, and he wanted to take her to the moose wallow.

  This was totally unforeseen, for she hadn’t thought anything would come of the names she’d thrown away. But now, fully aware of her dearth of social opportunities, and glad to escape Fenn’s brooding presence, she accepted the friendly invitation. She ran in to tell Fenn, and went to the wallow with Pete. Although no moose materialized, it was still interesting to sit in the tree-stand the loggers had built near their camp, waiting to see if one of those monstrously big—according to Pete—animals would appear below.

  After giving up on the moose, Pete gave her a tour of the camp. He showed her the row of individual bunkhouse cabins, the cookhouse, the tiny office that housed a base radio programmed for emergency contact with the constable in Cragmont, the shop where they kept their tools and equipment, the shed with the droning oil generator that powered their lights and walk-in cooler. She asked what the loggers thought of living out there, and he said it was all right with them to be out where there was so much fish and game, although the drive to town could get old. The biggest complaint was the lack of communication: the canyon was too deep for radio or television reception, and it could be downright aggravating not to have a telephone.

  Back at home, she told Fenn about her educational outing while he sat on the front steps greasing his boots with an old toothbrush dipped in a can of mink oil—but he looked a bit glassy-eyed, and she wasn’t sure he was fully cognizant of her report. She thought he might have been drinking again.

  She went inside to do some artwork. Fenn came in later and set his boots behind the stove, building a fire so the waxlike grease could melt and soak into the leather. Even before the stove began to put out heat, the mi
nk oil had a peculiar odor, and when the tallow was warm, its smell was strong and somewhat rancid. “How’s your hand?” she asked, as he clumsily tried to wash up for bed without getting his bandage wet.

  “It’ll mend,” he said, with narrowed eyes.

  The next evening, after a day of painting in the meadow and a dinner of fried ham and mashed potatoes, Sevana witnessed another truck pull into the yard, and this time it was Trick. He took her mushroom hunting, and she came back with a variety of little-known mushrooms Fenn said neither she nor he would eat, because he didn’t trust Trick to know the difference between a morel and a muffin. And the fact that Trick was still alive didn’t prove anything, because he was too dumb to know he was supposed to die after eating something poisonous.

  “I doubt that,” she said skeptically. “He seemed pretty intelligent to me.”

  “Intelligent?” Fenn was on the porch making an adjustment to his chainsaw, using his bandaged hand almost as freely as the other. “Hawk called him this morning to ask where he was. Perfectly serious, he gets on the portable radio and says: ‘I’m about a half mile from my present location.’”

  “Well,” Sevana gave it some thought, “maybe he meant he was heading to where he was supposed to be, but hadn’t gotten there yet.”

  “With Trick, there’s no telling.” Fenn was unwilling to cut him any slack. “He’s a one-delta-ten-tango from the word go.”

  Sevana remembered that joke from her childhood. If you wanted to insult someone discreetly, you used the military alphabet: 1D10T.

  Right on cue Clyde, the third logger, showed up the following evening to take her gold-panning in Willow Creek, and sent her home with a tiny bottle of sand he swore up and down contained a few genuine flecks of gold. And so on, until every bachelor from the camp had come, and Sevana had been shown Foxtail Falls and the finer points of animal tracking.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t have a good time. And she liked very much the chance to see some of the country. But she was having trouble keeping Pete and Trick and Clyde and Emery and Milt straight, as they all had stocky builds and short-to-medium whiskers, wore white jerseys and suspenders with their sawn-off trousers, nursed perpetual wads of tobacco in their bottom lips, and lived primarily to fish and hunt. And since she couldn’t picture herself continuing to see all five of them simultaneously, and not wanting to single out any specific one, thereby hurting all the equally nice others, she told Fenn to pass on the word that she would regretfully decline any future outings because she was so busy in the evenings practicing her artwork. Excuse though it was, it was no untrue one—for she was dead serious about her talent, determined to become a great artist for as long as she could remember.

  Fenn said he didn’t mind having her out of the house in the evenings, but supposed he couldn’t expect her to put up with their dimwitted company when it was something he wouldn’t do himself. Besides, if there was even a one-percent chance one of them might end up as his brother-in-law, that was way too high a likelihood for him.

  Sevana laughed at that. She said the last thing she wanted to do was marry a logger with a dead-end job in the heart of nowhere, even if it did look like paradise out there. “No offense,” she added quickly, realizing she had just insulted him and his livelihood.

  Surprisingly, Fenn grinned. “None taken.”

  “Really, I didn’t mean that.” She knew she had spoken condescendingly. “I admire anyone who puts in a hard day’s work. It’s just that the group from camp—they don’t seem to have a lot of—well, poetry in their souls.”

  “Not unless you consider snoose-spitting and hunting stories poetry, they don’t.” Fenn was still remarkably complaisant. He himself was known to chew, but was one of the superior breed who swallowed the tobacco juice for extra buzz, making him much more esthetic to live with.

  Sevana didn’t know what he told his fellow workers; she doubted it bore much similarity to her original message. Probably it had been blunt and not extremely tactful. She rather regretted handling it that way when it was over and done. She didn’t like to think that downriver was a whole campful of loggers she had snubbed, especially when they had been so friendly to her.

  But whatever Fenn told them, it proved effective: no logger set foot on the place after that. So ended Sevana’s brief social whirl in the upper reaches of Stony River valley—with one notable exception. The day Joel asked her to Snowshoe Summit, she accepted the invitation immediately, without the slightest intention of turning him down.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sevana had passed the Spruce Creek pack-bridge several times in her excursions up the river with the loggers, and when Fenn disappeared on foot Sunday morning without telling her where he was going, she decided to investigate it. Leaving Trapper home in case Fenn wanted him later, she strapped the gun to her belt and walked the mile upstream to the sturdy structure of railroad ties spanning the river. Crossing the plank walkway to the other side, she found a fern-fringed path leading into shady woods, and a bare weathered board nailed to a tree with only the routed grooves of the letters remaining: Stormy Pass—10 miles.

  The trail to the high country! Sevana started up it at once toward the worlds of beauty she was sure waited at its end. The hike took her on a challenging climb through squashy moss-green draws and witchy dark stands of ancient hemlock and spruce, and eventually to a landmark of sorts—an imposing, two-post signboard bearing three lines of freshly painted white script.

  ATTENTION HUNTERS

  HEAVY SNOWS COMMON BEYOND

  THIS POINT AFTER OCTOBER 15TH

  She stopped to take in the warning, feeling a tingle of adventure because the country behind that sign was so unaccommodating the government had been obliged to post a cautionary message. But it was also deflating. There she stood at the portal of the absolute untamed wilds, and she had not the time or resources necessary to journey further. She took a few steps past the sign so she could say she had entered that primitive territory—and then with one last reluctant look, turned her back on it.

  On the bridge she stopped again, leaning over the splintery railing to watch the amber-green water slipping swiftly beneath her feet. She had walked a long distance and she was tired. The gun in its holster was heavy and cumbersome, to the point she couldn’t decide if it was worse to be mauled by a bear or be too exhausted to care. Hiking was not the best way to reach Stormy Pass, she saw that now. The only solution was to take Trapper. But could Trapper go the whole ten miles in one day? No—make that twenty, because she would have to come back, too. She didn’t think Fenn would let her keep his horse out all night! In fact, he might not let her go at all. But if he did, could she make it? It took Joel three days with the sheep, but just she alone, flying on a horse…

  Startled, she looked up. Joel was walking onto the bridge, as if he had just appeared out of her thoughts. She hadn’t heard him over the noise of the water. Behind him, his dusty truck was parked in the pull-off.

  “Hi, Sevana.” He came to lean on the railing beside her. “Saw you as I was driving by. What are you up to?”

  “I took a hike up the trail,” she answered, still trying to account for his unexpected presence there.

  “How far did you get?”

  “To the hunters’ warning sign.”

  “That’s a good three miles.” He sounded impressed.

  “It wasn’t far enough to see the high country, though.”

  “No.” He seemed to understand her disappointment. “You would have hit snow before you got there, anyway,” he pointed out, as consolation.

  She had forgotten about the snow, in addition to everything else. Of course it was still snowed in, or Joel wouldn’t be here. Always, in every way, the alpine country stood out of reach! She put the subject out of her mind for the present. “Why have you left your sheep today?” she asked.

  “I’m taking a quick run up to Snowshoe Summit to catch a few brook trout,” he answered, although in fact he seemed in no hurry to leave the bridge. He
was looking down the channel as if enjoying the sight. “Dropping fast, isn’t it? Soon it will be clear and shallow, and you’ll know the reason it is named.”

  “I’m glad I’ll get to see it at both high and low water,” she said happily. “It’s such a pretty river.”

  “I’ve never found another river equal to the Stony—not here, nor up north,” he said with feeling. He turned to seek out the rivercut in the other direction. Finally, his eyes found hers. “Would you like to come up to the summit with me?”

  “Oh yes!” Delighted he would ask, she followed him off the bridge. Before climbing into the truck through the door he held open for her, she unstrapped her sidearm and laid it on the seat.

  “I didn’t bring my gun, so you’ll have to defend us today,” Joel kidded, but added more seriously, “I thought you gave up shooting.”

  “I decided to try again. It wasn’t as bad the second time.”

  When Joel was in the driver’s seat, he took the pistol out of its holster. “It’s a .44, all right,” he confirmed. “Fenn started you out with the biggest caliber there is.” As he started the engine, he looked over to offer: “Want to go back and let him know where you’re going?”

  “No, he’s not home. He doesn’t care what I do, anyway,” she added, meaning to sound as if it she didn’t mind.

  Joel drove up-canyon, following the river’s crooked course at the base of the mountains. “Truth is,” he remarked after a time, “I’ve been wondering how you were getting along with Fenn. Seems to me he’d rather keep to himself—the impression I’ve gotten.”