Stony River (28 page)

Next she weeded the vegetable garden, which after a slow start was beginning to grow with encouraging vigor. After lugging water to each garden, she went inside to rework a portion of her river picture, ready to run upstairs if she heard Fenn drive in—for she had no desire to encounter him in the state she expected him. But Fenn still hadn’t come by the time she was ready to quit for the night. She paced to the window over the counter—and stared. There it was again: that tiny pinpoint of light down among the trees. It flickered out almost immediately.

Without taking time to think past the fact that Mr. Radnor had asked for her help and Fenn needed the money, Sevana flew into action. Putting on a dark hood, she ran down to the river road in the faded light and crouched behind some willows in the ditch. Almost at once she saw a figure with a flashlight walking her way.

She stayed absolutely still. The person on the road was shining his light back and forth, but she couldn’t see who it was through the bushes. He was coming closer, and then he was passing her. Afraid he would get away and remain forever unidentified, she stood up boldly for a better look. Just then he swung to shine his light on something to the side, and Sevana muffled a scream. It was Fenn. At the sound, he wheeled to point the beam of his logging lamp full upon her.

“Looking for your poacher?” he asked dryly. “What would you have done if he’d pulled a gun on you?”

Thoughts were rushing through her head. Most of all was the fear that Fenn himself was caught up in the illegal activity. “What are you doing down here?” she croaked.

“I was on my way home from town when I saw a light down in the trees. All the talk of a trapper had me curious, so I decided to check it out. Didn’t find anything, though. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.” She saw his truck parked in the ditch when she stepped into the roadcut. “You’d better be careful,” he admonished her. “If someone
is
smuggling furs out of here, he’s probably armed. Not to mention plain loony.”

Walking beside him, she could smell alcohol. Surely he was telling the truth: he had been to Cragmont and was on his way home. There were boxes of groceries in back of the truck. But what if he had parked here long enough to…check a trap? She tried to shut out the unwelcome thought. Just how desperate for money was he? Desperate enough to do something that could send him to jail, and cost him the very piece of land he was trying to save?

“Fenn?” she ventured as they drove up the hill. “I’ve been thinking…if you wanted to pay off your place, I could ask Bryce for a loan.”

“Who says I haven’t paid it off?”

She decided to be honest. “I found some bank notices under the stairs.”

“I can pay it off without his help.” Predictably, Fenn was mad. “I’m doing all right now. Things just got a little tight last winter.” He jolted the truck to a hard stop in the yard.

Sevana helped him put away the supplies. It was quite an occasion when he came home with the things they were out of, and her spirits rose a little at the sight of the butter and eggs and fresh produce. She tried to be creative when making dishes for which she didn’t have all the ingredients, but the fare was so basic to start with, that if she left anything out it was usually something critical. When Fenn settled down with a book and a new bottle of Old Crow, she went to her room and slid the trunk against the door.

In the morning Sevana left Fenn sleeping off his whisky and made her own search of the riverbank. She found nothing of interest except a wildrose bush in full bloom near the sitting rock. As she scrambled up to the road bearing a single, dark-red rosebud, the warden’s truck came upriver. Mr. Radnor braked alongside her and rolled down the window. Launching out with no social preliminaries, he said he’d been whisked off to help with a salmon project near Vernon and had just gotten back. But he had a possible lead on the poacher.

Sevana listened to him say he’d found a wall tent pitched up Alder Creek, but hadn’t been able to locate the owner. He had watched it all afternoon yesterday and had yet to see a vehicle parked by it. He was going to stake out tonight and see if someone was coming back to it late at night.

“What will you do if someone shows up?” she asked.

“Talk to them. If they seem on the level, I’ll leave them alone. If they seem suspicious I’ll get tough, ask a bunch of questions, maybe search their tent.”

“You haven’t searched it yet?”

“I can’t without legitimate reason. This whole trapping business is only speculation. Maybe my informant saw a shy fisherman with a funny-looking tackle box. This could all be a waste of time.” His wide forehead wrinkled with the processing of so many rapidly presenting possibilities. “But something tells me it’s not. I’m reasonably certain this camp is connected to the poacher. He’s probably hiding his truck to avoid identification. He checks his traps by night and meets someone who takes the furs directly out of the area. If I searched the tent, I wouldn’t find any evidence to nail him. I need to find out who he’s meeting.”

Sevana had to agree the theory was plausible.

“As a matter of fact, I tried that one this morning. I parked on the river road near town about zero-four-hundred—four a.m.,” he translated, not realizing she was an army daughter who needed no such enlightenment, “to watch for cars. Just saw the usual early morning logging traffic, nothing else—unless one of those loggers is in cahoots with him.”

Sevana’s stomach tightened. Did he mean her brother? “It’s not Fenn,” she said quickly.

“No, of course not. I’m not suggesting that at all.” Randall draped a fleeting smile over his grimly lined, suntanned face. “Fenn’s a real conscientious sportsman. I’m just saying it would be an awfully good ploy—all these loggers supposedly on their way to work, their tool boxes stuffed with gunny sacks of illegal pelts—right under my nose. Of course logging pays so well, none of them would ever
think
of adding a little extra money to their income.” He gave a dour chuckle.

The mirthless laugh grated on Sevana’s ears. “Fenn wants that trapper found as much as you do,” she said boldly, still feeling the need to defend him. “He even went looking for the poacher himself. He saw the same light I did last night, and went to investigate.”

Randall was alerted by what she had to say. “You saw that light again?”

“Yes. And when I went down to see what it was, Fenn was already down there looking for it.”

Randall nodded in an offhand way, but a minute later she saw him jot something in a book on the seat. Too late, she realized that instead of helping Fenn’s credibility, she may have hurt it. And then a new thought came to her. All this attention Randall was paying her, asking for help with the case when it was downright laughable to think he needed any kind of assistance to get the job done—maybe it was all contrived as a way to get insight into the life of Fenn Selwyn, one of his chief suspects. She rolled the prickly rose stem back and forth between her fingers.

Just then a truck with a camper shell approached. Sevana stepped off the road so Randall could pull over to let the truck go around them. Randall’s eyes followed it upriver.

“I saw that truck once before,” Sevana volunteered. “Up on Snowshoe Summit. And both times, there’s been mud dried on it.”

“Yes, covering the license plate.” Randall was already snapping to action. “I’m going to see where it goes.” And he was off as quickly as that, hands clenched on the steering wheel and leaning ahead in his taut, fixated way.

Sevana was upset by the whole encounter as she walked up the hill, but with some careful rationalization was able to convince herself Fenn was not involved. Hadn’t he said trapping in summer was plain loony? If there was anything Fenn was not, it was loony. He knew summer pelts had no value, so of course it wasn’t him. Still, she wanted to talk it over with Joel for her own assurance. She decided that tomorrow she would visit the pasture. She didn’t need to be down at the river to put the finishing touches on her picture.

Fenn was splitting shakes in the front yard when she arrived home. While he worked on the roof, Sevana did laundry and made dinner, with the special treat of a green salad. Fenn never bought more than one head of lettuce at a time because it didn’t keep, and after they ate it up in a few days, they were out of it again for long stretches. At dinner she told him of her latest conversation with Randall, watching for his reaction. But either he was a good actor or had nothing to hide—for he didn’t look the least bit guilty, and his only remark was completely typical, asking cynically if she’d told Randall the part where she’d gone flying down to confront the poacher and could have gotten herself killed.

That evening he greased his boots on the front steps. If Sevana knew anything about Fenn by now, it was that he treated his boots like kid gloves, despite the inevitable scars gouged in them from the rough work. He oiled them generously and regularly to keep the leather supple, and whenever they got the least bit damp they had to be thoroughly dried and re-greased. She had learned from Pete that all the loggers wore those same kind of twelve-inch boots made with topnotch handsewn leather, deep-patterned tread, and leather laces, and they cost a small fortune. But every logger depended on his high-quality footwear as much as the top-of-the-line chainsaw he wielded in his hands. Most of the crew owned a pair of regular workboots plus an equally expensive pair of spiked caulk boots for better traction on slippery logs.

Sevana had come to view the loggers as some kind of select mountain cult with the odd way they dressed, the strutting gait that came from walking on thick-heeled soles, their special lingo. It gave her the feeling of an insider to know what Fenn meant when he called his caulk boots
korks
, his brown rainy-day trousers
tin pants
, or referred to his saw and workboots only by their commercial brandnames. Surprisingly, it even held an aspect of romanticism to her—though she had told Fenn the very opposite. For if not poetic in their close-up, tobacco-chewing incarnations, yet those lumberjacks with their unheard-of ways, working in terrain that would conquer the average man, living handily in primitive conditions most people would deem uninhabitable, did possess an undeniable mystique. Which was totally incompatible—and she knew it—with the sentiments she shared with Joel about the damaging effects of cutting down those beautiful, big trees.

Sevana set up the mountain early in the morning, but didn’t find Joel at the corral or the pasture—or even in the next little meadow up the trail. She returned to the pasture disappointed, but still hoping to see him before the day was through. Settling at the top of the meadow, her heart rose in exhilaration to be on that open perch again. There was Old Stormy proudly skyward, with its clefted north-facing snowfield Joel had said would never melt. There was the red-tailed hawk adrift over the valley, defending its territory with a rasping scream. And here the meadow itself, plunging into the deep valley, making her feel as high and aloft as a soaring bird herself. At that moment and in that place, she didn’t wish for anything else.

Choosing her smallest brush she began the last details of the riverbank, stopping at noon only to eat the sandwich she had brought. The dry brown bread and greasy bear salami tasted good, better than they did at home. The day was very warm, the sun-heated pines permeating the air with their sweet-vanilla scent. When she went to the spring for a drink, she discovered the water had slowed to a trickle, and it took a good minute to fill that small tin cup.

It was hotter after lunch—the sun drying the paint almost as fast as she put it down—but by early afternoon the glare was diffused by a high overcast. She was adding a shadow here, a highlight there, happy because the composition was as close to what she’d intended as she could ever hope, when sheep began spilling into the pasture and she turned to watch them come. Joel appeared last of all, a lamb on his shoulders, wearing his blue shirt unbuttoned and sleeves rolled high.

“Sevana,” he said by way of greeting, walking down the slope to her. He knelt on one knee, lifted the lamb to the ground, and gave a long breath. He looked hot and dusty.

“Is Blazingstar sick?” she asked anxiously of the lamb still standing where he’d set him down.

“No, he’s fine. I just had to walk so far up the mountain to find pasture, that’s all. I carried Goldthread part of the way to baby him, and then I gave all the other lambs a turn so they wouldn’t feel left out.” He appeared half-amused at himself for admitting to such indulgence.

The sheep had already gravitated to the shadiest part of the meadow, and most of them were lying down. Joel, too, seemed in no hurry to depart the hillside, taking a place beside her on the slope instead. It was that kind of afternoon, warm and subdued and still.

“Pasture is getting scarce, is it?” asked Sevana.

“It’s been so hot, the grass is drying up. I don’t want to overgraze the meadow.”

The grass
was
a duller green, she noticed—tending toward yellow-brown in places. “I’m glad I got the mountains painted when I did,” she said. “The snow is almost gone from them.”

“Soon it will all be gone from this view, except for that one snowfield that stays year long.” Joel looked up from reknotting his leather bootstring. “Guess these days in the pasture are gone, too, Sevana. Tomorrow in Nelson I’m getting my grazing permit, and day after that, I’m heading for summer range.”

Her heart fell at his words, even though she’d known he would be leaving anytime soon. She had hurried back up the trail to take refuge again in those wonderful days, but already they were changing. “Oh, Joel, these days are just beginning, and already we see their end,” she said sadly. “I wish they could go on and on.”