“You were right about the wind—it is different up here,” Sevana murmured. “It has a thousand voices.”
“Do you like it?”
“I would, if it didn’t have such a mournful cry,” she answered honestly.
The sheep had bedded down just beyond the circle of campfire light. Joel offered Sevana coffee from the steaming pot, and she sat warming her hands on the hot tin cup while he piled more branches on the fire. “If you don’t like the sound of the wind, I will play some music for you to listen to instead,” he said, and got the violin from the tent. Sitting beside her on the log to tune the strings, he played songs he had played before and others she did not know—and his music tore at her more than the crying of the wind.
He played his mountain song, and if that song had been beautiful before, it was in that high place it truly belonged. The music had the force and character of the land it was released into: it sang to the heights, descended to the valleys, spoke of solitude, sorrow, and joy. And it stirred up in Sevana feelings already stirred up, so that every stroke of the bow seemed to be cutting into her heart.
When the song was ended, Joel held out the fiddle. “Would you care to play, Sevana?” For thanks to his diligence, her repertoire now boasted two songs and a fluid scale.
“No, thank you,” she replied soberly.
He laid the fiddle aside without comment. The sticks were burning outward from the fire, and he knelt to push them toward the center. “Any news while I’ve been gone?” he looked up through the smoke to inquire.
“Not much.” She had to think back over the past weeks. “Mr. Radnor caught the poacher…Fenn was gone fighting fire for a couple of weeks…I blew out his tire on the Billy Goat Mile…I had a night caller…and one of the loggers asked me to marry him.” This last she added to hear his clear laugh—and it rang out as she’d intended.
He sat back on his heels. “What’d you tell him?”
“The logger? ‘Gosh, I’d love to, but I’ve got to go make something of my life,’” she quipped, then felt a little guilty. “Trick’s a sweet guy,” she acknowledged fairly.
“But not sweet enough?” He shot her a quizzical look as he returned to his place. “How’d Randall catch the poacher?”
When she told him, he had one more question. “What about the night caller?”
Upon hearing the story of Rory, he said straight out: “Good thing you learned to shoot.” But then he was ominously quiet. “I’ll be glad when you’re away from there,” he confessed finally. “You know, Sevana, I haven’t been entirely honest about something. Remember the time Fenn’s girlfriend talked to you at the Lodge, and I said I didn’t know anything about it? It’s true I didn’t know anything for sure, but there were plenty of rumors around town last winter. Something about Fenn threatening her new boyfriend. I heard the constable was out at the homestead questioning him. I think he got a warning, and he might have had to pay a fine.”
Sevana thought of the bank statements under the stairs. That could explain how he’d gotten behind on his payments. “Fenn told me about it. He did threaten her boyfriend, but he said it was because he was drunk.”
“Yes, that was the general drift of what I heard. Well, things like that go on at the Whiskyjack all the time. The only reason I brought it up is so you can watch out. If you ever see Fenn in an irrational frame of mind, you’d better steer clear of him.”
“I will.”
“I’ll admit I’ve been a little uneasy about you, thinking what could happen if he went on a drinking binge,” he said. “But maybe that’s just because with my father, I’ve seen it firsthand.”
She shivered from the wind on her back, and Joel noticed. “Silly girl, why did you take off the coat?”
“The fire was hot.”
He draped the coat around her, and kept his arm against her shoulders. “Better?”
“Yes.” Another shiver went through her, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. He was smiling down at her, and for a minute everything seemed suspended. There was only him and her and some insistent force pulling them together. But then he dropped his arm, and she knew she had almost gotten caught up in the delusion of the place. For one moment they had been the only two people in existence; there had been no other world. Feeling slightly off-balance, she stood on the pretext of refilling her coffee, and also poured more for him. Then she sat across from him on a squat stump, where she proceeded to watch the russet firelight flickering over his lean-boned face with a disturbing joy, and a deepening wonder, and a curious sense of dread.
In search of a less unsettling view, she looked out to the night beginning in earnest beyond the flock. “You know you’re up high when the stars are below you,” she remarked, for it did seem she was looking down on the stars that winked on the far horizons.
“I’ve thought the same thing.”
She remembered a statement he’d made before. “If heaven is closer at night down in the river valley,” she said aloud, thinking it out, “then heaven up here among the mountaintops is—”
“An immediate reality,” he finished for her, when she paused for the right words.
“Yes,” she agreed softly—and their gaze across the fire communicated the satisfaction of understanding each other.
Joel fished the coffee pot out of the flames and left it on the ground to cool. Steam curled out of the spout. “It’s going to get cold tonight. I’ll sleep outside and you can have the tent.”
She had already taken his coat, she thought; she was not going to take his tent as well. “Please,” she said, “I’d rather sleep under the stars, just for tonight.”
“If you want to.” He didn’t try to dissuade her. He brought a blanket and laid it on the log. “Keep the coat on and stay near the fire to keep warm,” he instructed her. “If you get cold in the night and change your mind, I’ll trade with you.” Putting several good-sized chunks of wood on the fire and telling her to call if she needed anything, he left her alone.
Near the fire, wrapped in the coat and blanket but still cold, Sevana lay beneath the boundless heavens and sleep fled from her. The wind singing in lonely infinity over the uninhabited ranges filled her with a desolation beyond anything she’d known. She longed to call out to Joel just to hear his voice. Hour after hour, she tossed on the stonelike ground. The short summer sundown seemed endless.
Sometime in the night she got up for a respite from the hard earth and put a pitchy fir knot on the fire, turning her back on the sudden flare of light so it wouldn’t blind her from her surroundings. Even in the deep of night, the mountain peaks stood as dense black shapes against the lighter carbon sky. She looked up at the stars glittering so brilliantly in the high-altitude air. Beyond them, the night stretched away remote and unknowable, into the opaque darkness of imponderable space.
But as she looked into that limitless heaven, she knew the night did not go on and on in emptiness: something filled it. She remembered Joel’s certainty that God walked the high places of the earth, and felt a tingle of expectancy. Surely He was here right now, all around her. She felt on the verge of some pivotal revelation; she needed to catch it before it drifted out of reach. She paced away from the campfire, drawn toward the silver light radiating down from the starfire.
And for an instant she knew why Joel had said there was more beyond the world they saw—mystical things reaching into eternity. For just as when you looked at a mountain, its rock form couldn’t be separated from its intangible grandeur—so everywhere, the invisible glimpsed through the visible in ways that couldn’t be ignored. For she had the strongest persuasion, unsupportable but sure, that the One who had formed the fiery stars and the time-frozen whitebark pine snags was there in immediate nearness behind His work.
And though she was not acquainted with Him in any real sense, yet His presence was familiar, and she recognized it as what she had perceived in elusive hints and traces that summer—in the magic of a moonlit night…in the mystery present among the ancient
cedars…in the river singing in half-remembered melodies at her window. For the wonders that had drawn her and the beauty she had come to know—they were the ways and faces of the One who had created them. And she would remember this, would not be blind to it when she looked at His handiwork anymore; for now she understood that in the voice of the river she had heard His voice, and in the might of the mountains she had seen His majesty, and in the silence of the cedar grove she had stepped into His sanctuary.
And then the glimpse seemed to fade and she was standing cold and alone in that stark land, so that she sought the relative security of her fireside bed. Floating up from the drainages came the spookish, low-throated howls of what must surely be wolves, but she closed her eyes with the assurance that if they came close, Joel would be out to defend his flock.
When the first pale suggestion of peach-hued light crept into the eastern horizon behind a rising, tarnished-gold crescent moon, she sat up wearily. Joel was seated on the stump, playing a stick in the low-burning fire. “Why are you up?” she asked, surprised to see him there.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Neither could I.” She folded the blanket back into a neat square and laid it on the log. A chill wind was still blowing, fresh and bracing, drenched with the spiciness of all the alpine plants it had passed over in the night. She stepped to the fire. “I don’t think I slept at all.”
“But you were asleep when I got up to check on the sheep.”
“Was I?”
“I wondered if you were cold, and I stood over you and spoke your name, but you didn’t stir.”
“I didn’t know it.”
“To tell the truth I was some worried about you—out in the cold, with the wolves and all. But you looked so peaceful. It was so strange, seeing you there…knowing at daylight you would go, and it would be as if you had never been here at all.”
“I know why you say that.” The solitude of the night was still with her in an indelible way. “It’s a lonely land.”
“Yes, it’s not often I have someone at my campfire.” He was looking at her in a queer way—or maybe it was just the dull, weird light of the fire and the dawn and the moon. For how could Sevana know the conflicting thoughts of his mind, brought into focus by the sight of her angelic face dreaming by the fire? In that instant, he’d had the strongest desire to kneel beside her and trace the contour of her face with his fingers. And that caprice had surprised him, and left him confused. For he had thought his heart solely captive to Chantal—and now it was showing him it was possible to feel an attraction for someone else. But maybe it was just because they were up there miles alone. It addled your mind, sometimes, the isolation. He needed to think it out. The stick caught on fire, and he ground it out in the ashes.
But it was not just her appealing beauty, so allusive of hopeful dreams and wistful innocence, that had held his gaze while she slept. He’d always been aware she was possessor of a charm far beyond the ordinary, and it had not mattered or moved him at all because he saw only Chantal. No, it was the fact that she had turned up there, despite the odds against her. How well he understood the compulsion that motivated her! And it had been reckless, and she had suffered for it, but she was there. She looked delicate and demure, but she had grit. She had shown herself to be more than a glamour girl enduring an obligatory confinement in the backwoods. She had embraced what it took to live in that primitive set-up, showing kindness to a surly, undeserving brother—had even taught herself to shoot, and run off someone he’d heard rumored to be a hard character with one or both feet on the wrong side of the law.
And yet it was not even that, entirely. It was because she loved the place, because her eyes shone with the wonder of that Stony River country. He tossed the stick in the fire and bent to tighten his bootlaces.
Sevana was watching him. She wanted to tell him the discovery she’d made in the night, but she didn’t know how. “Do you sleep with your boots on?” she asked.
“Up here I do. And with one eye open, and my revolver handy.”
“Why do you choose this life, when it’s so hard?”
He straightened to meet her gaze. “Wouldn’t you?”
Despite the loneliness, the hardship, the skin-tingling wail of wolves in the night canyons…to live in this vaulted world scraping up against the sun and stars if she had the chance—“Yes,” she said recklessly, “yes, I would.”
His face broke into a grin. “I wouldn’t know you if you said otherwise. And I wish you could stay.” He kicked the logs aside to make room for the coffee pot.
But Sevana couldn’t wait for coffee. Already the lightening horizon was enabling her to detect the nearer features of the land in the feathery darkness. Refusing his offer of breakfast, she gave back his coat and went to untie Trapper. Joel followed, and she could sense his helplessness in letting her go as he said: “I wish I could see you safely home.”
“I’ll make it all right,” she avowed. “Goodbye, Joel. See you—next time.” There was frustration behind the words, because there was no set time ahead to count on. The only thing she could count on with any certainty was the fact that they would never be together in that high place again, the rest of their lives.
“Goodbye, Sevana.” With his hand cupping her shoulder in farewell, Joel saw her face lifted to his—her creamy skin brushed by the apricot of the pre-sunrise sky, her hair blowing free in all the flaxen shades of meadowgrass on a late-summer day, her eyes like the tumbling little brooks of that land, so dark and sparkling they stole the focus of her face. “It was an unexpected pleasure.”
Time was slipping away, she had to tell him now. “Joel—last night—under the stars—” she spoke up even though she hadn’t framed the thought, “there was something I can’t explain. But I think it’s true, what you said—God really does walk on these high mountains.”
Joel looked at her, really looked at her, with an expression she’d never seen before. “Up here, so close to heaven,” he said quietly.
She nodded, caught in his look, full of an inexpressible feeling. Then, breaking the spell, she mounted her horse and sought his eyes a last time. “Thanks for everything.”
“You take it easy on the trail,” he warned, entertaining visions of her urging the horse forward at breakneck speed. “Let Trapper set the pace.”
“I will.” She shook the reins and started off abruptly. She knew she was leaving him standing alone in that flower-filled meadow, but she didn’t turn for a wave or a final look. She didn’t want to look back and see all she was leaving behind.
CHAPTER 27
If Joel had known at what pace Trapper would choose to go down the trail, he would by all means have told Sevana to hold him back. As it was, the stallion went for home as if he’d been away from his oat box far too long, and Sevana merely held on and let him go—thankful his sentiments matched hers so she didn’t have to be tempted to break her word to Joel. Even so, the sun was high by the time they crossed the bridge and galloped for home.
As she entered the yard, Fenn left the porch at a long stride. “Where the blazes have you been?” he demanded, looking far more angry than relieved.
“I was out riding,” she replied evasively. She slid to the ground and trailed a hand over Trapper’s mane in appreciation of her safe return.
“All night?” he said pointedly.
She drew a breath and faced him. “I went up to Stormy Pass and I meant to be back by dark, but—”
“Stormy Pass?” he interrupted. “Are you out of your mind?”
“But there was a thunderstorm, and Joel wouldn’t let me go home in it,” she finished.
“Good for him,” Fenn said. “I suppose you would have tried to ride through it, had he not.”
She didn’t answer. He knew her well, all right.
“Sevana—” Fenn said severely, taking hold of Trapper’s rope, “if you want to risk your life doing lunatic things, that’s your business. But not with my horse. Wander where you like, but stay off m
y horse, do you understand?”
“Yes, Fenn,” she said dispiritedly. “I didn’t want to take Trapper, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get there.”
“You could have stayed home and stayed out of trouble, but I suppose you didn’t think of that,” he mentioned with cutting sarcasm, and led the winded horse away to be watered and curried at the barn.
Sevana, wishing to avoid him, went for a walk directly. She was sorry she had gone against his wishes, but she couldn’t be sorry she had gone. Now, whenever she wanted, she could wander that highland paradise again in her mind.
As she roamed the woods, she spied a bush heavy with purple berries. Joel had once told her that later in the summer, huckleberries would be thick on their mountain. She nibbled at one cautiously and recognized the flavor of the dried berries he had shared with her on occasion in the pasture.
She ran back to the house for a pan, forgetting in her excitement that Fenn was at odds with her. But his truck was gone. She spent the next few hours picking berries as fast as she could, and whenever she looked up the hill, she saw just as many ahead.
Fenn still not home when she returned, she set about making a pie to appease him. It was the first pie she had ever attempted, but despite some rather significant difficulties, it came out of the oven intact and almost evenly browned. She covered it proudly with a cloth, and was peeling potatoes when Fenn walked in with a stringer of fish.
“Saw a bunch of huckleberries today,” he remarked as he began cutting off fishheads on the counter. “You ought to find some and make us a pie.”
With a broad smile she produced the pie from the warming shelf, and laughed at his evident surprise.
Bear fat made a good piecrust, Sevana had to admit. And one taste of those tangy-sweet berries made her want to go after more. She did so next morning and gathered an even bigger panful, with which she made another pie and a small batch of jam. The jam failed to set, but that didn’t stop Fenn from spooning the syrup onto his toast at breakfast or making sandwiches with it for his lunch. Seeing how he liked it, Sevana cooked a thicker batch and stored the jars in the cupboard beside the few home-canned goods already there, made by some unknown benefactor—Melanie, she had no doubt. All week she picked, until she had filled all the empty jars she could find, and they were tired of huckleberry pie.
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