by Lucy Inglis
The untethered days up here putting the place to rights have been perfect. So much of who she is was forged on this mountain, and in such a short time. Emily’s diary has become a touchstone, and Hope’s life has taken roads she never could have imagined on that first flight to Helena.
She stands and walks to where Cal is loading the rig, ready for the drive home.
‘Dearest Buddy.’ Hope puts her hand over the shirt in the small of Cal’s back, warm and damp from work, and looks at the spot near the tree where they once buried the funny, brave young puppy.
‘He was a good little guy.’ Cal wipes his face on his sleeve, and stoops to ruffle the white, grey-tipped ears of the wolf-dog lolling on the ground next to him. Another dumpster baby.
Hope crouches and kisses the dog’s head, laughing as he licks her cheek in a rough swipe. ‘Yes, Jake, almost as good as you,’ she tells the huge puppy. She stands. ‘How’s the shoulder?’
‘Not bad. Only a twinge.’ Cal pushes his fingers into his chest. ‘Can it really be five years now?’
‘What, five years since you died?’
He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Only for a minute.’
‘Might only have felt like a minute to you,’ Hope retorts.
‘Anyone would think you cared. Cared enough to try and restart my heart by yourself. Railing on the hospital staff the whole while.’
‘You don’t remember that,’ Hope says, accusing.
He smiles. ‘Mom and Dad paint a pretty good picture.’ He looks into the distance, towards the whitecaps, suddenly serious. ‘So, do I get my answer?’
She says nothing, for a while.
‘C’mon, y’know it makes sense. All this messing about with visas is getting to be a nightmare. And now you’ve graduated you said you wanted to take some time off anyway, with the new book. The plans for the house are finished. Mom and Dad are happy for us to start building whenever we like. And Zach will be the most incredible wedding gift!’
‘Stop saying the W-word,’ she interrupts. ‘I think I have an allergy. And I’m still too young.’
‘And that argument won’t wash for so much longer.’
Hope laughs, tugging on his shirt. ‘I want it in the vows that you’ll make sure I have the internet. I’ve agreed to live off grid, not in the Stone Age.’
He hides a smile, sensing victory. ‘I promised you, didn’t I?’
‘I really don’t see why we can’t keep living in the barn loft.’
‘Oh yeah? If we start now, we don’t have to share a shower block with two dozen hands all summer.’ He pulls a face. ‘And my folks are just about dying over the idea of us living on the ranch for good.’
Hope shakes her head. ‘Your dad. I swear, if he cracks one more grandpa or baby joke, I’ll . . .’ she threatens, undermining it by laughing as he wraps his arms around her waist.
‘I told him straight, we’ve got a few more years of practising before we start work on Cal Junior—’
‘What if he’s a girl?!’
He raises an eyebrow.
She sighs, conceding defeat on that one. ‘But what about Mum? She does her nut about settling down so early every time I see her.’
‘I thought we agreed we weren’t going to let Meredith tell us how to live our lives quite a few years ago?’
‘I know. But if it wasn’t for her, we’d never have met.’ Hope frowns. ‘I can’t even imagine what that would have been like. And she’s definitely chilling out a bit, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not sure I’m ever going to think of your mom as chilled, but yeah, she’s better. Since she got it that this isn’t like her and your dad. This – you and me – is for ever.’
Hope shakes her head but she’s laughing, forehead against his chest. ‘For ever. That’s a crazy concept, cowboy.’
‘So let’s just do it,’ he says, keeping his voice deliberately light.
‘Excuse me while I die of romance.’
‘Oh, I’ll romance you, Cooper, don’t you worry, but I want you to say yes first. And mean it.’
She sits on the tailgate of the rig and loops her arms around his neck. ‘Where would we have it?’
‘At home.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as we can get it organized.’
‘Where will we put everyone?’
‘There’s thousands of acres to put them in.’
‘Dad will want to come. And James and Tom. And I can’t invite them without Mags. What a mess that’ll be.’
‘Nah, we’ll keep them corralled. I’ll put Matty on segregation duty.’
The breeze is coming up from the lake, gathering pace as the day recedes.
‘You’re not happy. What’s wrong?’
Hope takes a breath. ‘I am – you know I am. It’s just, I’ve been thinking, a lot, about coming up here. About them.’
‘You think a lot, you know that?’
‘Yes. Probably too much, but I keep coming back to the minute you were gone. Emily lived a lifetime of that minute.’
For a while, he’s lost in thought, fingers tangling in the shreds of her hair. Finally the words come. ‘Emily lived a fine life. She knew love. Real love. And she loved. Stanton adored her. She was a great woman, an activist who devoted her life to making things better. She raised children who went on to be pioneers in their fields. A surgeon, a politician, a rancher. Maybe it wasn’t the life she would have chosen, but she made the best of it. And maybe that’s all we can do.’
Hope shivers. ‘Then to die in the San Francisco earthquake.’
‘Did she die? They never found her body. Only his. And sometimes, I wonder . . . if somehow, she made her way back. Like she promised. Those things we found – the shawl, the reading glasses, I just wonder. Maybe she lived out her days here in Montana.’
Hope glances back at the cabin. ‘They feel so close.’
‘Always. And I’m grateful to them. To Emily, for being the woman she was, starting everything here, making us who we are. But to Nate too, for . . . being Nate. Although, you know,’ Cal takes a deep breath, ‘he’s a lot to live up to.’
‘You’re not doing so bad,’ Hope teases.
He points to the rig. ‘We should get going.’
With a last look around, she nods. ‘Yes.’
‘Home by nightfall.’
Jake is scratching over in the dirt of the old corral, near an ancient tree.
‘Hey, boy, what is it?’ Cal walks over and bends to see what treasure the dog has unearthed. Half-buried in the dirt, moss and lichen is the corner of an old black slate stone. ‘Hope?’
Sliding down from the truck bed, Hope comes over. ‘What is it?’
Cal is already pulling the stone from the dirt, shoving it upright against the withered tree. The dirty black surface is etched with words and dates. No ceremony, no celebration, no sentiment.
NATE CROW
1867
and
EMILY
1923
For a long time, only the sounds of the mountain can be heard.
‘She did it,’ says Cal at last. ‘She came back.’
When Hope speaks, it isn’t to Cal, but to the stone itself. ‘OK, you two, I give in.’ She looks at Cal. ‘As soon as we can get it organized?’
He watches her. ‘You mean it?’
‘Yes. How can we argue with them? I stopped trying to on that porch five years ago.’
Cal’s yell of triumph echoes round the meadow as he lifts Hope clear off the ground and spins her around. Setting her back on her feet he kisses her. ‘Come on, let’s go home. We’ve got people to tell.’
Hope pops the driver’s door as Cal hups Jake into the back of the rig, fastening the tailgate. The sun is behind him, gilding his hair and skin. Everything is gold and silver. For a fleeting second her heart hurts, with love and pride, and with what she almost lost for ever
Then a movement near the cabin catches her eye. ‘Cal?’
The white horse stan
ds in the meadow, studying them through pale eyes. His hooves are four square in the wild flowers as his mane and tail are caught by the wind.
The world continues to turn, but on the Montana mountain where the tale of one American family began and so nearly ended, time is once more irrelevant and immeasurable. Radiant in the lowering sun, the stallion turns his head and looks west: the horse of a lifetime.
Maybe more than one lifetime.
And all the birds, singing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘The Montana Book’, as Crow Mountain is known by my family and friends, has had a fast journey to publication and my head is still spinning. The story was initially sparked more than a decade ago by a book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, introducing me to the history of the Native Americans. And by a lovely stranger on a long Miami Beach afternoon who laughed and told me the tattoo on the inside of her wrist was the state outline of Montana, ‘the most beautiful place in the world. Home.’
I worked in America for some time after that meeting and adored it: the sense of potential spinning across a continent, yet also that sense that no one is ever far from the edge of disaster. I read about settler marriages. And divorces. The stunning alpine wilderness of Montana, and in particular the Glacier National Park and St Mary Lake. I read about the railroads. The American Civil War. The terrible subjugation of the Native American people as the US government fought a hypocritical war to free the Southern slaves. But the story that stuck in my marrow was the near-extinction of the plains bison. Twenty-five million deaths in fewer than two decades. This story lies at the heart of the book.
How to tell it? That was the problem: I just didn’t know. Then in February 2014 I visited an Amish craft store in Ohio. I was lecturing on eighteenth-century childbirth in Cleveland and we were taking a day out. My host went to the restroom so I loitered, looking at the frying pans, washtubs and wood-fired stoves. There were also cute but complicated oil lanterns, ingenious wooden spoons, spatulas with hook handles for pulling out hot tins and a wall of pretty cookie cutters in the shape of every state. I picked up Montana immediately: an automatic reaction. Two dollars, I thought, who cares? Then I hesitated. Why should I clutter my already crammed kitchen drawer with it? Because of a beautiful girl with a now-outdated tattoo? Because since then I’d read dozens of academic articles and books on people who abandoned everything they knew to make a new life on the edge of a new world? The horror of exterminating a species? I put it back. Yet as I looked at it, I saw Nate and Emily, Hope and Cal. Just like that, I knew what they looked like and who they were, their voices crowding my head. My host returned. I grabbed Montana and paid. We walked into the car park and the cool sunshine of a new American Spring. In the car, I watched as we passed horse-drawn carriages, rolling hills, homesteads and barns, people still living in another century. I came home and wrote the book. Still haven’t made the biscuits.
As a historian, I wanted to make this book true to the remote young states of the second half of the nineteenth century, and as such the events – such as the Battle of the Wilderness, John Gantt’s wagon train and the construction of Fort Shaw from what was Camp Reynolds – are all real events. I’ve tried to do justice to the varied tribes of Montana, although I deliberately robbed them of a voice, apart from Dog Child, who is one of the only documented and photographed Blackfoot braves of the time. I can’t speak for them, and I wouldn’t pretend to: it was not my remit here.
But the writing of this book has been such a joy, and I thank everyone involved in it. Imogen Cooper, Barry Cunningham, Rachel Hickman and the wonderful team at Chicken House have supported the cast of Crow Mountain like friends. Thanks too, as ever, to Kirsty McLachlan and all at David Godwin Associates. Big thank yous must also go to Lucy Fisher, Essie Fox, Brigid Coady and Sally Harris for being early and such encouraging readers. To Richard, Mr Inglis, for his constant love and support, and for ignoring the tears streaming down my face during the days it took to write the end of Nate’s life and Emily’s final letter to him.
And thank you for reading to the end. This has been a wonderful part of my story, but if you take one thing from this book, take the last words my beloved Emily left in my head:
All our lives will be, in time, just stories. Live the best story you can.
ALSO BY LUCY INGLIS
CITY OF HALVES
London. Present day. Girls are disappearing. And strange creatures are on the streets.
When Lily is attacked by a two-headed dog, she’s saved by hot, tattooed and not-quite-human Regan. As Guardian of the Gates it’s his job to protect both halves of the City, new and old, from a world of restless creatures that threaten its very existence.
As the City spins out of control, Lily and Regan race to find the girls, discover the truth, and expose a terrible conspiracy.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-909489-09-7, £6.99 • ebook, ISBN 978-1-909489-53-0, £6.99
TRY ANOTHER GREAT BOOK FROM CHICKEN HOUSE
DARKMERE by HELEN MASLIN
Outsider Kate has a crush on the coolest boy in school, Leo. He’s inherited a castle, a menacing ruin on the rugged English coast. When he invites her along for the summer, she finally feels part of the gang.
But Darkmere’s empty halls are haunted by dark ghosts. Two centuries ago, Elinor – the young wife of the castle’s brooding master – uncovered a dreadful truth.
As past and present entwine, Kate and Elinor find themselves fighting for their lives – and for the ones they love.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-910002-34-6, £7.99 • ebook, ISBN 978-1-910002-75-9, £7.99
Text © Lucy Inglis 2015
First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2015
This electronic edition published in 2015
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Produced in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Cover and interior design by Helen Crawford-White
Horse illustration by AmyLyn Bihrle
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PB ISBN 978-1-910002-35-3
eISBN 978-1-910002-85-8