She soon forgot her nerves at the glorious views that spread out underneath her. Farmland gradually gave way to tussocky grasses. A small lake spread out between two hills, smooth and shining like polished glass. A river meandered lazily through the foothills. A patch of bush, dark and impenetrable from the air, stretched to the far horizon.
A voice came through her headphones. “I’ll put you down just to the west of the lake,” the pilot said. “Jax said there was a good-sized stag there last week, and a half dozen does. The group he was with shot at them but missed. Hopefully you’ll have more luck.”
Alexis wasn’t sure if she wanted better luck or not. Deer might be a pest, but they were very cute, and who hadn’t cried at the story of Bambi. On the other hand, she also liked venison and she wanted to show Mason that she wasn’t a hopeless city girl. Showing him that she could aim a gun and shoot a deer would be a good way to prove herself.
The helicopter touched down gently on a plot of flat ground near the lake. She grabbed her bag, clambered out of the door and loped, bent over double, out of reach of those wickedly spinning rotors. Mason threw down a couple more bags and then jumped out after her.
The pilot gave them a jaunty wave, spun the rotors up, and took off again, buzzing over the landscape like an overgrown dragonfly.
Alexis watched it as it flew off into the distance and disappeared. There was no other sign of life around them. Just her and Mason, alone together in the middle of a vast wilderness.
A bird called, and she shook herself out of the momentary feeling of panic inside her. When she looked harder, there was plenty of life around her. Birds, insects, plants. And, somewhere, she hoped, a deer or two.
Mason gestured to the cabin at the other end of the clearing. “We’ll sleep here tonight,” he said, as he threw a couple of the largest bags over his shoulder. “It’s a good place to make camp.”
Alexis grabbed what she could of their remaining gear and hauled it behind her to the tiny cabin. It was dark inside but looked cozy enough. There were two small rooms. In the smaller room stood two sets of bunk beds squashed tightly against two walls. There was barely room for two people to stand up in what was left of the space. In the other room was an open fire, a tatty couch, and a wood box full of logs. Nothing else. She looked around both rooms twice. No, she hadn’t missed anything.
“Where’s the bathroom?” she finally asked.
Mason open the door to the cabin and pointed outside to a tiny tin shack. “Over there. It’s a long drop, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll just go check it out.”
“Wait a moment.” He rummaged in his pack and tossed her a roll of toilet paper. “Here. Take this with you.”
Face flaming, she caught it and tucked it under her arm. “Thanks,” she mumbled, and beat a hasty retreat.
A long drop. What on earth was that, she thought, as she pushed open the cobwebby door and ventured into the shack.
Her wondering was soon answered. The shack was just big enough to house a built-up wooden seat that was placed over a hole in the ground. In front of it sat an industrial-sized container of alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
Oh goodness, how Phoebe would laugh if she could see her now, Alexis thought grimly as she used the rudimentary facilities. She would never believe it.
Alexis wasn’t sure that she believed it herself. Somehow, she had never considered that “up in the hills” also meant “absolutely no facilities whatsoever, including a shower or a flush toilet”. Could she actually live like this for a whole weekend? Or would Ben bring the helicopter back right away if she begged him to?
She pushed the door shut behind her and stepped out into the chilly spring sunshine. The lake glittered like it was alive and from somewhere close came the sound of the bird calling again, a series of notes as clear as a bell.
Nope, she could do this. She wasn’t going to chicken out at the first hint of hardship. She was a New York woman. If she could brave the dangers of the subway and the Boxing Day crowds at Macy’s without quailing, then a weekend in the wilderness should be a snip.
Mason joined her outside in the sun. “Target practice first?” he offered.
She nodded. She had this. After taking self-defense classes and spending a few Saturdays on a shooting range, she was confident that she could hit the side of a barn door at six paces. Maybe not a deer yet, but she wasn’t a total novice.
The gun wasn’t a type she was familiar with and she watched carefully as Mason showed her how to load and fire it.
“Can I try now?”
He handed it to her and watched carefully as she went over the maneuvers she had just watched. “Excellent,” he said, as she loaded a cartridge. “Now, see that target over there?” He pointed to a faded target hanging drunkenly on the side of a tree. “See if you can hit it.”
She aimed carefully and fired. The recoil banged her shoulder hard, but she was rewarded with the sight of a large new hole, just nicking the outside edge of the target.
He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve been shooting before?”
“Once at a firing range,” she admitted.
“You’re not too bad. Now, reload and try again.”
Her next few shots went wide, but after a half hour’s practice, she was hitting the target reasonably consistently.
“I think we’re ready to hit the trail,” Mason said at last. “You ready for some venison?”
As ready as she would ever be.
They loaded up their packs with food, water bottles and, on Mason’s insistence, dry socks. “We may have to cross a stream, and walking in wet socks is the fastest way to get blisters.”
Then, guns in hand, they set out.
Hills.
More hills.
A bit of bush to scramble through.
Then more hills.
Alexis had prided herself on the fact that she could do two high-intensity workout classes at the gym back-to-back, but this required another level of fitness altogether. Slogging uphill with a heavy pack and a rifle, and then staggering downhill again and then doing it all over again. After a couple of hours of this without a single sighting of a deer, she called for a break.
Mason swung his pack off his shoulders and flopped down on the ground. He unscrewed the top off his water bottle and took a long swig before handing it to her. She took it gratefully and emptied half of it in a single pull. “I needed that,” she said, as she wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve and handed the water bottle back again. “It’s tough going.”
“You stay here for a bit.” He gestured to the top of the small rise they were on. “I’ll head up there and take a look at what’s in the next valley over. There’s a stream at the bottom, so there are often deer hanging around.”
Grateful for the rest, Alexis flopped onto her back and looked up at the sky. Up here in the hills, it was a deep blue, with only a scattering of small clouds to break up the brightness. No haze of pollution dimmed the sun. Everything was as clear and shining as if it had just been washed clean. She could feel herself relaxing. Her eyes closed and she drifted off.
She was woken by a pebble tossed onto her. “Wake up sleepyhead. Time to show off those shooting skills of yours.”
She blinked at Mason as he stood over her, blocking out the sun. “Where?”
“Bring your rifle up on the ridge, and I’ll show you.”
Together they walked quietly up the ridge. When they were nearly at the top, Mason got onto his stomach and waved her to get down as well. His fingers on his lips cautioned her to be silent. Making as little noise as a rabbit, he commando-crawled up to the top of the ridge. She followed as quietly she could.
They paused at the top, lying on their stomachs in the grass. In the valley below stood a beautiful stag, a large rack of antlers on his head. Next to him grazed a trio of does, heads down, munching on the tussock.
“How beautiful they are,” she breathed.
“Beautiful pests,” he mouthed back at her. “De
licious dinner.”
She went to bring up her rifle, but he gestured no. “Not close enough,” he whispered. “Follow me.”
Carefully he inched down the hill, making sure to keep cover between himself and the deer. She followed after, making as little noise as possible.
Just as they reached a small patch of bush halfway down the hill, Alexis snagged her arm on a thorny bush and let out an involuntary cry. At the unusual noise, the stag’s head went up in alert. He snuffed the air and then took off, galloping up the hill on the other side of the valley. The does immediately followed behind, bounding their way over the tussock. In a matter of moments, they were out of sight.
Alexis braced herself for an explosion. “I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t mean to scare them away.”
Mason sat up and dropped his rifle to his side. “He was a real beauty, wasn’t he?” To her surprise, he had a big grin on his face.
“You’re not mad?” James would have been furious with her if she had spoiled his shot like that. He had once yelled at her for sneezing and breaking his concentration when he was taking a shot while playing pool. He blamed his eventual loss on her and made her feel guilty for weeks afterwards. It was funny how she was starting to remember more of the bad things about James now instead of pining over the good things. Maybe it meant she was finally getting over him.
Mason laughed at her. “Did you scare them away on purpose?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why should I be mad? It was quite a kick seeing them, wasn’t it.”
“Yeah, it was.” And she was quite glad that she hadn’t had to shoot at them, either. “Are we going to follow them and see if we can find them again?”
He looked regretfully down the valley. “They’ll be miles away by now. We don’t have a hope of finding them. But where there’s one group, there’ll be another.”
That was the extent of their luck that day. They took a circuitous route back to the cabin, up and down yet more hills, but without seeing any more deer.
By the time late afternoon rolled around and they had reached their cabin again, Alexis could hardly put one foot in front of another. Her feet ached and her legs ached and her shoulders ached, but she’d actually had fun. A surprising amount of fun, considering what hard work it had been and that they had no venison to show for it.
She felt incredibly satisfied that she had kept up with Mason all day without flagging. She had seen deer, even if they hadn’t shot any. She had drunk fresh water out of a clear, cold mountain stream, walked beside a stunningly beautiful lake, and marveled at views of the hills and the sky that rivaled the best of any photos she’d seen in glossy magazines.
All day she’d heard nothing but the noises in nature: no rumble of traffic, no whir of machinery, nothing but the sound of birds and insects and running water.
She felt better than she could remember feeling in her life before. She felt tired and hungry, but also…at peace.
“Good day?”
She nodded, not able to put into words just how good she was feeling. “The best,” she said simply.
The sun was fading quickly behind the hills, and with the sun went the warmth. Alexis lit a fire in the open fireplace and fed it slowly with small twigs, and then bigger ones, until it was a cheerful blaze. Mason busied himself on the barbecue outside.
When dinner was cooked, they sat together in front of the fire eating steak and stir-fried vegetables and drinking a glass of red wine, which he had miraculously produced from his pack.
Alexis was amazed at how comfortable she felt with Mason. The two of them were alone in the middle of a vast wilderness, but there was no awkwardness between them. With anyone else, she would have felt self-conscious about her desperately unflattering clothes, the messy ponytail she had tied her hair in, and the fact that she had been walking all day and hadn’t had a shower. Sitting next to Mason in the tiny cabin, none of that mattered. She could focus on the taste of the wine, on the heat of the fire and the acrid smell of the woodsmoke, on the soft sound of the night birds calling to each other in the distance. She could be truly in the moment.
“So, what really brought you to New Zealand,” Mason asked, as he set down his empty plate. “It wasn’t your grandfather’s death. He’d died a few months before, and you said you’d never met him anyway. You could’ve sold the farm sight unseen easily enough and booked a package tour of New Zealand, too, if it came to that. Do all the things that adventure tourists do: bungee jumping in Queenstown, jet boating on the Shotover River, skydiving in the Southern Alps, visiting Hobbiton. Instead, you hop on a plane and come all the way out here to live on a sheep farm for a month or two.”
Alexis was feeling mellow from the glass of wine and saw no reason to lie. “A man,” she said simply.
He was silent as he poured them both another slug of wine. “I wondered if that was the reason. Were you in love with him?”
She shrugged. “Yes, I was. I still am, I guess. I thought he was going to ask me to marry him. Instead he dumped me. “
“That must’ve hurt.”
She blinked back a threatened tear. She could bear anything but pity. “Not that it matters anymore. He’s over there, I’m here, and it’s over between us.”
“His loss, if you ask me.”
She laughed. “I agree wholeheartedly. He doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.” She felt surprisingly little bitterness towards James. They had been friends, and she missed him, but less than she had thought she would. She was not drowning in grief or wishing that he was here with her. In fact, right at this very moment she was glad he was far away, or he would be complaining about the mosquitos and having conniptions at the thought of bunking down in a borrowed sleeping bag on a plain wooden bunk bed, and wanting to find somewhere with room service and chilled white wine. James was fond of his comforts: his designer clothes, his late model Audi, his Egyptian cotton sheets.
She chuckled to herself. A few weeks ago, she would have had conniptions too. “And what about you? Have you had your heart broken lately? Need a shoulder to cry on?”
Mason shook his head. “There aren’t many eligible women around here to break my heart. There was a serious girlfriend until a year ago, but she decided that sheep farming wasn’t the life for her. Last I heard, she was working over in Sydney as an engineer and loving it.”
“She wasn’t into going hunting for fun?”
“Not at all. She came with me once, complained that the rifle was too heavy for her to carry and there were too many hills, so she sat in our tent and drank an entire bottle of wine by herself while I went hunting. Then she complained endlessly about the mosquitos.”
“Funny. I was just thinking that James would be complaining about them too.”
He waved his hand in front of his face. “Mind you, they are pretty dreadful,” he admitted.
“Awful.” And they both laughed.
The fire burned down to embers and the bottle of wine gradually emptied.
“Fancy a walk in the dark before turning in?” Mason asked.
A walk sounded lovely. She rose rather creakily to her feet. “Uughh, I’m stiff. I’m going to be so sore tomorrow.”
He grabbed a torch and they set out. He grabbed her hand quite naturally as they shared the light of the torch and picked their way along the lake edge.
A night bird called close by. Mason shone the torch up into the surrounding trees. “There it is. See?”
She could just make out the shape of the small owl, his eyes shining with reflected light. “They are the ones that call all night?”
“They’re our native owls, ruru. You hear them all the time, but they’re shy and can be hard to see. The early European settlers in New Zealand called them morepork, because that’s what their call sounds like.”
Together they stood and watched it until it took off into the night, flying on silent wings.
“Magical,” she breathed, as it disappeared into the trees.
&nb
sp; He turned the torch off and they stood together in the darkness. “It’s so peaceful up here. Whenever something is worrying me, I come up here for a few days and let this place wash over me. When I get back to the farm, I find that somehow my problems don’t seem as big as they did when I left. It is easier to know what to do.”
“I can believe it.” She had felt something similar just that afternoon, a feeling that all was right with the world. She felt the same way now, standing in the darkness with his hand still clasped in hers. “Have things been troubling you lately? Is that why you wanted to come up here?”
His face glimmered in the light of the crescent moon. “Nothing out of the ordinary.” He hesitated for a moment, as if wondering whether to continue, but then forged on. “Georgia and I have some ideas that we want to try out on the land. We can’t do it on our folks’ farm. They may be semi-retired, but it’s still their land and we respect that. We’ll run it the way they want it to be run until the day it becomes ours. But I’m champing at the bit to try out some improvements, and Georgia is, too. I know I’ve been pushy about buying your place, but I want you to know how much it means to me.” His grip had tightened on hers until it was almost painful in its intensity. “This is my land. My home. It’s not a vacation for me. It’s my life.”
His obvious passion made her feel a little lost. A little alone. She had never belonged somewhere as fiercely as Mason belonged here. “You should be trying to run me out of the country,” she said, breaking up the somber mood. “Not bringing me hunting and showing me how beautiful it is.”
His teeth gleamed white as he laughed. “Everyone knows how to run a sheep farmer off his land. Set a few vicious dogs into the flock. That’ll do it every time.”
Could anyone be so awful they would deliberately allow their dogs to savage sheep? “That’s horrid.”
“Yeah, it is.” He turned the torch back on. “We’d better hit the sack. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
Together they picked their way over the uneven ground back to the cabin.
Head First (Quinn Brothers Book 1) Page 7
