Rocky Mountain Lawman

by Rachel Lee

  They dropped six logs beside the stove in a wooden box, then Craig went out to split some kindling. Once again she followed him, feeling a bit like a puppy. He was good at splitting wood and asked her to carry a few handfuls of splinters and dust inside while he gathered up thicker strips of wood.

  Sitting on the chair she had occupied the night before, she watched him build the fire with quick, practiced movements. “How would somebody do that if they didn’t know how?”

  He glanced over his shoulder as he squatted in front of the stove. “There’s a small propane torch in one of the cabinets. Even a tyro could get a blaze going.”

  She chuckled, and was glad to realize her mood had improved dramatically. For all the wrong reasons, but it was still an improvement.

  With the touch of a single match, the tinder caught and soon flames were dancing along the thicker strips and igniting the bark on the split logs.

  Craig remained squatting, watching until he was sure it was burning well, then closed the stove’s door.

  “So how did your day go?” he asked her.

  “Absolutely nothing happened. I didn’t see anything, either.”

  “Good. I guess Buddy got the message.”

  “Apparently. What about your day?”

  “That was a little more problematic. I tried to radio you to tell you I was headed your way, but you didn’t answer.”

  “Really? The radio didn’t even crackle all day. Oh, sheesh!” Rising, she went over to her bag and pulled it out. “I can’t believe I did that! It was off.”

  He straightened and gave her a crooked smile. “I guess you really didn’t want to be disturbed.”

  But she didn’t find it amusing. Still holding the radio, she returned to the chair and sat staring at it. This wasn’t good. “This isn’t like me.”

  Craig pulled up the split log bench and sat close, facing her. “Maybe it’s the altitude change. We’re just about eight thousand feet here.”

  “Maybe.” But she doubted it.

  “Talk to me, Sky. I’m sure I’ll understand at least some of it.”

  He probably would. The question was how much of herself she wanted to expose.

  “Okay,” he said after a minute. “I’ll tell you something about me. Fair enough?”

  She nodded and reluctantly looked up from the radio. She didn’t want to gaze at that attractive face again, into those gray eyes that seemed almost bottomless at times. He drew her, and she was uneasy about that pull. It couldn’t possibly lead to anything good, not in the long run.

  “I’m thirty-four,” he said. “I separated from the marines at twenty-two, then went to college. I studied biology and I’m a thesis away from my master’s in wildlife conservation.”

  “Really? That’s impressive.”

  “It’ll be impressive when I finish the thesis. I’m planning to spend the winter on it. I’ve been collecting data since I joined the Forestry Service six years ago but the university is starting to get impatient with me.” Another of those half smiles. “Can’t say I blame them. Anyway, never married, never felt the urge. Most women can’t stand the way I live my life.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m in the woods a lot. Even in the winter. Too much of a free spirit, I guess.”

  “I can understand why you like it out here. I like it, too. If I made enough from my painting, I’d get myself a cabin just like this one and paint full-time.”

  “Yeah?” He seemed to like that. “You wouldn’t go crazy from isolation?”

  “I hardly notice isolation when I’m painting. Maybe that’s one of the things that drove my ex-boyfriend crazy about me. He said I didn’t pay him enough attention.” She resisted mentioning the lousy lover part. “Between my work with veterans, which sometimes drained me, and the times I’d lock myself in my studio endlessly, he felt neglected.”

  Craig tilted his head a little, clearly thinking about it. “The guy sounds selfish to me.”

  “He sounds ordinary,” she argued.

  “Maybe so. I guess I’m strange. I wouldn’t have a problem with any of that, maybe because I’m the same way myself. I occasionally stay in the field for a week or more at a time. Sometimes I get radio calls asking if I’m still alive.”

  Sky felt her mouth tip into a small smile. “For me it was a knock on the door.”

  “Ha!” He slapped a hand lightly on his thigh.

  “But what exactly do you do in terms of law enforcement? Is it dangerous?”

  “Not usually. I run across campers and hikers, check them out, make sure they aren’t headed for trouble, that they’ve got the proper permits if they’re planning to hunt or fish. Sometimes I run across poachers. That’s a little more dangerous.”

  “What in the world do they poach? Elk? Moose?”

  “Some of that, of course, but my biggest headache comes from bears. There’s a demand in Asia for bear parts—paws, claws, gall bladders. Lots of money in it for a poacher.”

  “I never thought of that!”

  “Most people don’t. These types go far beyond someone who kills an elk for food. They can kill dozens of bears on a single trip.”

  “I admit I don’t much like bears. Well, actually I’m afraid of them. But going after them like that is wrong.”

  “Bears will mostly leave people alone if we don’t get in their way. But to go out and kill dozens of them just for small pieces that can bring a lot of money—that goes way beyond killing to eat, or even killing for a single trophy.”

  He gave a slight shake of his head. “Then we have any number of people who, if left to their own devices, would drain every stream and creek of fish. There’s a reason for size and catch limits. We do what we can, but somehow we always wind up having to restock in some places.”

  “What other things do you deal with?”

  “The whole gamut, basically. Right now I’m worried that there isn’t enough water in the stream in the valley where you’re painting. We had enough snow, the spring thaw didn’t start much earlier than usual, so there’s no obvious reason that stream should be running so dry so early. It looks more like late July or early August. That suggests there may be some obstructions causing problems on the feeder creeks. So far nothing.”

  “You have a full plate.”

  “Keeps me busy,” he admitted. “But I like it most of the time.”

  “How much trouble do poachers give you?”

  “Most skedaddle, figuring they can come back. They’re only likely to get angry when I confiscate their booty or equipment, or want to arrest them.”

  “Do you often?”

  “Every now and then, if I have evidence. The ones who really tee me off are those who use traps.”

  “Traps have always struck me as so inhumane.”

  “I agree with you.”

  Relaxing, she was finally able to put the radio aside. The cabin was warming, and she slipped off her jacket. When he fell silent, she guessed he was waiting for her to do her share of talking. She wasn’t quite ready yet, though.

  “So these trappers. They can hurt more than animals, too, right?”

  “They sure can. They cover the traps with pine needles so they’re not obvious. They could just as easily trap a hiker, but so far we’ve been lucky.”

  “Do you have help?”

  “It’s a big forest. I only cover part of it. And if we catch wind that something big is going on, we work in teams.”

  “Good. It’s got to be dangerous enough facing down a couple of poachers, never mind a larger group.”

  “You’d know.”

  She supposed she did. Benefit, if you could call it that, of having been in a war zone. “It’s funny, but I never thought about this stuff. I think of national forests as peaceful places where people going hiking, fishing and camping. I don’t even think about the hunting, and never poaching.”

  “No reason you should.”

  “When I first saw you I thought you were pretty heavily armed and I wo
ndered what happened out here. Now I know.”

  His smile was almost as warm as the fire. She liked the easy way he smiled, and wished she could emulate him.

  “So you’re on vacation?” he asked.

  “I guess you could call it that. A little R and R of my own.” And this was it. The questions would start coming and she’d have to decide how much she wanted him to know. Then she wondered why it should even matter, since she probably would never see him again. There was nobody safer to confide in than a stranger. But she deflected anyway. “Any more problems with Buddy?”

  She saw it happen. His face closed, and she sensed his withdrawal, telling her that he realized she was putting up barriers. And if she was going to put up barriers, so was he. An unexpected ache struck her then. Man, surely she didn’t really care yet what this man thought of her.

  “Well, he’s building a watchtower along his fence line. Seems a little extreme.” Then he rose and went to open her cooler, keeping his back to her as he checked on what they could make for dinner.

  She was being hypersensitive, she told herself. Way too much. It wasn’t as if she had some deep dark secret in her past. Well, except for her ex telling her she was a lousy lover, and there was no reason to broadcast that. But Craig had already seen the one thing she most didn’t want others to know about her, that she could dissociate, however rarely. If she had any real secret, that was it.

  “My boyfriend broke up with me a few months ago,” she volunteered. “It was ugly. I started to feel dead inside, you know? Eventually it struck me that I was holding back with the vets I was working with, and that wasn’t fair to them, or even helpful, so I decided to get away from everything. Try to find the parts of me that seemed to have gotten either gutted or worn out.”

  He pivoted as he squatted, and looked at her over his shoulder. His expression was kind. “You picked a good place to refresh. Well, except for Buddy.”

  “Yeah, there is that.”

  He turned back to the cooler. “You spared no expense, I see.”

  “I figured since you were kind enough to offer me lodging for a few nights, a mini banquet was the least I could do. I hope it’s possible to cook on that stove, though. For all my military training, I never got much past heating an MRE.”

  He laughed and rose. “Trust me, nobody can outcook me on a woodstove or open fire.”

  “Show me how?”

  “With pleasure.”

  But something had changed, and she was quite certain she was responsible for it. She had caused him to grow cautious with her shutdown, and now that she had she wished she could backtrack and be more open. Yet she didn’t know where to start. There was a lot of her past she didn’t want to look at, and working with vets had made her more of a listener than a talker. So what now?

  What now proved easy with Craig, though. He walked her through cooking chicken breasts with some of the Marsala wine she had brought to drink, boiling pasta in a small pot, roasting some yellow squash and zucchini on a flat pan. “Not a whole lot of spices to work with, but we’ll manage.”

  She wondered if she was going to remember any of his tutelage at all, because her awareness of him as a man seemed to be overwhelming her thoughts. Each accidental brush of their hands or arms made flame leap to her nerve endings. A deep ache was trying to grow between her thighs, and it seemed far more important than how to cook on a woodstove.

  While they ate, she managed to suppress the longings he awoke so easily, or at least bank them like the fire in a stove. All the while, she knew they were apt to burst into flame again. Desperate for a different line of thought, she tried to bridge the gap again. “Did you always want to be a forester?”

  His gray eyes twinkled in the lamplight. “Well, I can vaguely remember wanting to be a fireman, then a policeman. Or maybe it was the other way around. At one point I was determined I was going to be a truck driver.”

  “When did that change?”

  “I was about twelve at the time. We were on a vacation, Oregon I think, and I saw clear-cutting for the first time in my life. Don’t ask me why, but that offended me at such a deep level I mentioned it, and my dad responded that they’d plant new trees.”

  “But?”

  He shook his head. “I looked at the big old trees, and those huge swaths of scars over the mountainsides, and thought about how long it was going to take for those big old trees to grow back. I’d be an old man, I figured. Then I started wondering about what all the wildlife did after the loggers came through. The birds, the bears, the raccoons, the beavers, all of it. Then it began to rain as we were driving through one of those cuts, and I watched soil start to wash away.”

  She put her fork down and studied him. “You were very aware for a twelve-year-old.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I just know by the time we finished that trip I was into it. Researching everything I could find about the effects of clear-cutting and so on, and before long I’d made up my mind I was going to save forests.”

  “That’s wonderful. Truly. But how did the marines fit in?”

  “Military family all the way back. Tradition. Every son must serve. Frankly, it never occurred to me to do anything else. It was how I was brought up. What about you?”

  “Much more mundane. I needed a job, my father wasn’t well and the army seemed like the answer as well as a place where I could do something really useful.”

  “Some answer. Did you always want to paint?”

  She picked up her fork again. “This chicken is really good, Craig. Thanks. As for painting...” She looked back over the years. “I guess it’s something I’ve always done. It’s always been when I was happiest, usually. I’m not sure it was ever a conscious decision, but I know one thing—if I can’t paint, I get unhappy very quickly.”

  It was, she thought as she listened to herself, a very boring story. But only on the surface, because there had been nothing boring about her tours in Iraq, and there was certainly nothing boring about working with vets who had serious problems.

  But at least he didn’t press her for more detail. Boring as it all sounded, why would he?

  After dinner and dishes, he suggested they sit outside for a while. The night woods seemed magical to her, with a whole different atmosphere than the daytime. The air had grown cold but she hardly cared as she stretched out on her tarp on a bed of pine needles and looked up at a sky so full of stars she could hardly believe there were so many. She had seen them before, of course, in the desert when the air was clear and there were no lights, but it was a hard thing to remember exactly, just because of the sheer volume.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” she remarked. “So peaceful. It’s hard to believe anything bad could happen here.”

  “Depends on what you mean by bad. Nature can be as ugly as it is beautiful.”

  “So you don’t romanticize it?”

  “No way. I just love it the way it is.”

  She liked that attitude and figured it was probably the best one to have about most things. Of course there were exceptions, but she didn’t want to think about the ugly side of life right now. She was enjoying the stars and company too much. And that awareness she had been tamping down sprang to life again. Damn, he was close, but not close enough. “I have a friend who has one of those fancy cell phones with a GPS. She points it at any place in the sky and it will tell her what stars she’s looking at.”

  She heard him stir. “Let me guess,” he said with gentle humor. “You’d rather not know the names.”

  “What good would it do me? The names are artificial. The beauty isn’t.”

  “Like wildflowers?”

  “Exactly.” A shiver ran through her as a cold breeze snaked under her jacket.

  “Want to go inside?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then let me help keep you warm.”

  He startled her by curling up beside her and slipping his arms around her. He did it so naturally, as if it were something they’d done before, but she fr
oze anyway. Was he making a move? Part of her hoped he was, and part of her feared it. But already she could feel a warm tingle between her legs, feel her nipples grow firmer as if reaching for a touch. All sense seemed to be slipping away, and even the stars seemed suddenly filled with aching anticipation.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “Given my job, I’m a categorizer. I have to be able to describe every damn thing in order to understand and report on what’s happening. I can’t imagine seeing things the way you do.”

  So he wasn’t making a move. Disappointment washed through her, but at least it allowed her to relax, at least a little. “Labels have their uses,” she finally said. “I imagine it wouldn’t do you much good to report that something spongy and green seemed to be eating holes in trees.”

  His body shook a little, probably with a silent laugh. “I think I’d get fired.” Then, “Sh. Listen.”

  She heard nothing at first except the sigh of the breeze in the trees, and the hoot of a distant owl. Straining her ears, she waited, holding her breath as much as possible.

  Then, from a long distance, she heard a lonely howl. “Wolf?” she whispered.

  “Sh. Wait.”

  Half a minute later, the howl sounded again, but this time before it finished, another joined it. Then another. Each one was differently pitched, making an incredible harmony. As she listened, she could almost hear the howls moving even farther away. Then, rather abruptly, they stopped.

  “Wolves,” he said, answering her finally.

  “That was so eerie, but beautiful. How many?”

  “Just a few of them. When they harmonize like that, it sounds like there are more. If you wait, it shouldn’t be long before the coyotes start. They often let the wolves know they’re around, claiming territory.”

  “Is it different?”

  “A lot higher pitched, with yips. More like a dog than the wolves’ howls.”

  She had totally relaxed into his embrace, feeling warm and secure, and now it seemed natural to turn her head a bit so that her cheek rested on his shoulder. After a while, it appeared the coyotes had no urge to stake their claim. She didn’t care, though. It suddenly seemed like staying right here forever would be a great thing to do.