“Not me. There’s more to Muir’s philosophy than that-about rivers flowing, not past, but through us, vibrating every fiber and cell of our bodies, making them glide and sing. Those aren’t the exact words, but it expresses the way I feel when I’m here. Part of nature.”
“Part of nature.” She breathed the words. “I never knew you had that kind of poetry in you.”
Made a little uneasy by what he’d revealed about himself, he gave her a casual-too casual-smile, “I try to hold on to what Gray Cloud told me because I believe there’s a timelessness to his wisdom.”
“Yes, there is. I’ve never thought about that before.”
“Not just him. I’ve found other sources, Indian prayers-Rachel Carson, William Wordsworth, George Washington Carver. Carver said that if you love something enough, it will talk with you. I love being out there where I can hear nature talking. I can’t imagine that ever changing.”
“That’s-” Her eyes glistened. “Beautiful.”
Without knowing he was going to do it, he touched a tear caught in her right lashes. She smiled, a slight, shy gesture. “Anyone can become tuned in with nature,” he went on, the words tumbling out of him simply because she’d smiled at him through tears he was responsible for. “All they have to do is listen and observe and love that world. You live out of doors. You must know what I’m talking about.” “I…think so. I don’t have the words you do to draw on, but they touch me.” She blinked away her tears and tried another smile. “Obviously they do.”
Although he turned to gaze at his green and brown and blue world, he sensed her eyes still on him.
“I don’t think you would have done that at eighteen,” she whispered. “Told anyone, not even me, about the poetry that has meaning for you.”
“No,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have.”
“Maybe it’s because you were still finding out who you are. I say that because I felt the same way. Growing up takes longer than we think it’s going to, doesn’t it? Eighteen isn’t nearly as mature as we’d like it to be.”
“No. It isn’t.”
After a few minutes of silence, she began talking about caring for orphan rabbits and a fawn whose mother had been hit by a car. Then, when he thought she might have run out of anything to say, she told him she’d seen so many deer this year that she barely paid any attention to them. But she could never dismiss the sight of an elk. Matt, too, had a fixation about them and when one occasionally came into the pasture with the horses, he considered his day complete.
Then, when the trail they were. on briefly became as clear as a highway, she admitted she wanted to buy a mountain bike so she could find and explore paths like this. She said she enjoyed most of her customers. A few had unrealistic expectations of what horseback riding on a well-worn trail was like and she’d had to learn how to deal with her customers’ reactions.
His attention spread between her and Matt’s erratic progress, he told her about competition between different law enforcement agencies and how that sometimes complicated his work.
He described the untouched view of natural forest land from his deck. She smiled, a little wistfully, he thought, then asked if he’d ever gotten the wide-angle lens for his camera he’d been talking about. He had, he said, surprised that she’d remembered.
As the day dragged on, he learned more about Shannon’s interests than he’d ever known and felt gifted because she wanted him to understand those things about her. Listening to her talk about her admiration of a local wildlife photographer, he was again struck by her enthusiasm for life.
That was what he’d fallen in love with-that and the way she’d freely given him her body and, he’d thought, her heart. What had scared him back when he was too young to truly understand the complexity of love had been the totality of his response to her body. Even with her walking behind him, out of sight much of the time, his body remembered.
Getting his work off the ground had put a great deal of strain on their marriage, but it had been nothing compared to the aftereffects of Summer’s death. Was it possible to mend what they’d once had? Maybe he-they- shouldn’t try. After all, they’d each built new lives for themselves. However, life had brought them back together, at least briefly.
He was halfway through telling her about his reaction to spotting a massive grizzly while being flown into Denali Park in Alaska by a ground-scraping bush pilot when he spotted a series of unexpected prints. Because he’d stopped to study his surroundings innumerable times, he didn’t think she would be alarmed when he did it again. Still, he was glad she couldn’t see inside his head.
Three or four people-men, probably, by the size of the prints-had been here in the past couple of days. The rain had washed away some of their tracks but not enough that he couldn’t draw out the information he needed but didn’t want. Their boots were new; they carried considerable weight on their backs, which altered their stance; they walked not like people out for a leisurely stroll, but cautiously and with purpose in mind.
Hunters?
The men followed the deer trail for another fifty yards before veering away from it. Although he continued to look for them, the prints didn’t reappear. Hadn’t they known what they’d come upon? he wondered. He wanted to go back to where he’d last seen the tracks, but if he did, Shannon would ask why he’d left the trail, and he’d have to tell her he was being forced to ask himself whether it was more important to find Matt or men with rifles.
Matt, his heart decided for him. Besides, the men had been here before his son. They might be miles away by now and no longer representing a danger to Matt.
Maybe.
And if they were, all the police in the world couldn’t do any more than he was. But was it enough?
“There.”
Shannon had waited hours to hear Cord say that. Now it was nearly dark; there was precious little strength left in her legs, and the thin air at this altitude had given her a headache. She stood near Cord and watched him spread his fingers over what looked to her like nothing except a thousand years of forest litter. “What? What is it?”
“Where he spent last night.”
Last night seemed so incredibly long ago. Hadn’t they gotten any closer than that? “That’s all you know? That he slept here?”
“He slept well. He barely moved.”
“Oh. Thank heavens.” She sank to her knees beside Cord and, as she’d done before, touched the ground he indicated. No matter that she was deluding herself. For a few seconds at least, she could pretend Matt had left some of his heat behind for her. What had Cord said earlier? That if someone loved something enough, it would speak to that person without words. He’d been referring to nature; she thought of Matt. And of Cord. “He seems so far away.”
“I know.”
Despite everything that was going on inside her, her thoughts caught on the emotion laced through Cord’s words. They shared a parent’s love for a child, and that love would bond them for as long as they lived. Why had she not allowed herself to see that earlier? “I feel cheated,” she admitted. “There ought to be a string attached to him. I should be able to pull on it and bring him back to me.”
“I know.”
“That’s how you feel? As if he’s just out of reach?”
“More than just. Damn it, much more.”
“Cord? Don’t, please.”
“Don’t what?”
“Talk like that. It scares me.”
“What do you want, then?” He spoke with his hands on his thighs and his head turned toward her, but his face was in the shadows, making it impossible for her to read his emotions. She would have to go by what he said, and that wasn’t enough; his few words had never been enough. “I can’t tell you I’m not frustrated. You have to know that.”
He sounded much more than just frustrated. He’d told her that everything in nature could fit inside the human heart, but right now he didn’t sound at peace with either himself or the world they were in. Was it because he’d piled the long, disappointing day on his shoulders and didn’t know how to shake it off?
Or maybe he knew more than he’d told her.
