Nyla
One Year Later...
It's raining in that soft, insistent October way that turns the whole valley gold even as it soaks everything, and I'm on the cabin porch with my second coffee watching Cashew try to herd a pine cone.
He found the cone at the base of the big spruce about twenty minutes ago.
First he sniffed it thoroughly, then batted it twice to establish dominance, then sat back and regarded it with his head tilted as though conducting a full structural assessment.
He has apparently determined that the cone belongs at the far end of the porch rather than its current location, and he has been executing this relocation ever since, nudging it forward with his nose a few centimetres at a time, pausing to reassess, occasionally sitting down and staring at it as if it might cooperate on its own if he waits long enough.
He is not frustrated. He is not reconsidering. He is simply working. He has all day.
"That's not going to work, Cash," I tell him.
He ignores me. He always ignores me. He ignores me the way he ignores the fact of being a cat — comprehensively, without apology, with the serene certainty of an animal who has decided certain facts don't apply to him and has not yet been proven wrong.
I pull my knees up and wrap both hands around the mug.
The rain is changing the valley, softening the edges, turning the larch slopes on the upper ridges to amber and gold, laying a low grey sky over the peaks that have their first proper snow now, the white sitting up there clean and patient above the treeline.
I've been trying to photograph that specific combination for two months.
The gold and the grey and the snow and the particular quality of October light that lasts about forty minutes in the morning and then shifts into something entirely different.
I've gotten close twice. I haven't gotten it yet.
Two prints are sitting in the back room.
A ridgeline shot from last week — I went up with Dawson on a three-day client trip, carrying my camera and staying out of the way and letting the mountain show me what it wanted to show me, which is what he taught me without teaching it, by example, by watching him do it for a year.
And a tarn reflection I finally got last Tuesday at six in the morning when the light did something unrepeatable for about four minutes and I was standing in exactly the right place because I have been learning, slowly and with great patience from a man who has none of the shortcuts, how to arrive somewhere before the light does.
The prints go in the rack at Maple's hotel. No website. No inbox. No social anything. Just the prints in the rack and occasionally someone buys one and Maple leaves the money in an envelope under the counter with a note in her extremely neat handwriting.
My phone is on the kitchen bench inside.
It has been there since I woke up. I have not thought about going to get it, which is the thing I track now — not the days when I resist the pull, but the mornings when the pull isn't there at all.
When not reaching for it is simply the shape of the day, as unremarkable as the rain or the coffee or Cashew and his inexplicable projects.
He achieves his goal. The pine cone reaches the far end of the porch, its correct and rightful location, and Cashew sits back and surveys it with the satisfaction of a job properly done.
Then he turns around three times and lies down on top of it, tucks his nose under his tail, and goes to sleep.
Protecting it now, presumably. It was a lot of work to get it here.
"Well done," I tell him, sincerely.
He doesn't respond. He's busy sleeping.
I hear Dawson on the forestry road before I see him — the particular rhythm of his footfall that I know now the way I know the trail, the way I know the sound of the woodstove settling in the night and the way the creek sounds when the snowmelt is running high.
He's been on the traverse for three days.
October solo, same as he did before me and same as he'll do after, because that one trip is his and I have never suggested otherwise and don't intend to.
He needs the mountain, completely, without explanation, as a fact about himself that doesn't require defending.
Cashew hears him first. He lifts his head from the pine cone, both ears forward now, and then stands up and trots to the porch steps and down into the yard like he has an appointment.
Which he does, more or less. He meets Dawson at the gate every time, regardless of weather, regardless of hour.
I have watched him do this in the dark, in the rain, in the early September snow that surprised everyone including the mountain.
He is always there. It is the most devoted thing I have ever seen and it is performed by an animal who would be deeply insulted by that description.
I hear the gate, and then the crunch of boots across the yard, and then Dawson comes around the side of the cabin with Cashew at his heel and three days of the traverse on him, worn and weathered and entirely himself, the way he always is coming off a long trip, like the mountain has stripped everything back to the essential version.
He sees me on the porch and stops.
"Welcome back," I say.
Cashew trots up the porch steps, deems the reunion sufficiently supervised, and goes inside through the gap in the door I always leave for him.
Dawson comes up the steps and I unfold from the chair and he pulls me in — cold jacket, cold air, cold hands finding my face.
He kisses me the way he does when he's been gone for days, which is slow and deliberate and entirely certain, like he's confirming something he already knew.
I put my hands inside his jacket against the warmth of him and hold on.
"Good trip?" I ask, into his collar.
"Good trip," he says. “I missed you.”
The rain comes down soft on the porch roof. The valley is gold and grey and the peaks are white above it all. Inside, I can hear Cashew investigating the kitchen, probably supervising the state of his bowl, finding it inadequate, preparing to make his feelings known.
I take his hand and I bring him inside, out of the rain, into the warmth.
Summer Heat in Silver Ridge continues with Book 6: Surprised by the Loner Mountain Man.