Chapter 2
Jasper
The best hour of the day is the one where nobody needs anything from me.
It’s late afternoon. The sun is dropping toward the western ridge and the light has gone long and gold through the pines.
I’ve been splitting wood since three. No reason except the pile needed it and my hands needed something to do that wasn’t thinking.
The axe hits the round and the wood opens clean along the grain and the two halves fall and I set another round and do it again.
The rhythm is the point. The sound of the steel and the crack of the wood and the silence between them.
My property is forty acres on the north side of this mountain.
I bought it six years ago with money I’d saved from three seasons of shoeing horses across western Montana.
The cabin was here already, small and half-rotted.
I tore out everything except the frame and rebuilt it with my own hands over two summers.
The workshop I built from scratch. The fence line I repaired post by post. Every board, every joint, every hinge on this property is something I chose and placed and made right.
Nobody told me where to put any of it. That’s the point.
I set another round on the block. Swing.
The wood splits. I stack the halves and wipe my forehead with the back of my arm.
It’s summer and I’ve been at this for two hours and my shoulders are burning and I don’t care.
This is the work that keeps me level. My brother Sawyer runs cattle on three thousand acres in eastern Montana with a foreman and a bookkeeper and a marketing consultant.
He returns phone calls for a living. I hit things with an axe. We’ve both made our choices.
My mother called last week. I let it ring four times before I picked up.
She asked if I was eating enough. She asked if I’d thought about coming home for Dad’s birthday.
She asked if I was “still doing the horseshoe thing.” The horseshoe thing.
I shoe horses for nine ranches in this valley.
I’ve built furniture that will outlast most of what’s in my brother’s house.
But to my family it’s “the horseshoe thing,” which is a step up from what Sawyer calls it, which is nothing, because Sawyer doesn’t call.
I don’t think about this. I split wood.
The light shifts. Another twenty minutes and the sun will be behind the ridge. The temperature will drop ten degrees and I’ll go inside and eat something and read and the day will be exactly like every other day, which is how I want it.
Then I hear footsteps in the trees.
Not an animal. Animals move differently. This is a person. On my property. On the wrong side of a fence line that exists specifically to communicate that people should not be on my property.
I pick up the axe and walk toward the sound.
It happens a few times every summer. Hikers who wandered off the north ridge trail. They come through the fence looking sheepish and ask for directions and I point them east and they leave and the whole interaction takes five minutes, each one of which I resent.
I come through the tree line and she’s standing in the clearing near the old outbuilding.
Those hips. That’s the first thing I register that I shouldn’t.
She looks like a real woman. Curved hips a man could hold onto, full thighs, the kind of body that fills out hiking shorts in a way I have no business noticing.
Her tank top is damp with sweat and clinging to her chest and I look at the tree line because that’s where my eyes should be.
They go back. Her hair is pulled up and loose strands are stuck to her neck and her shoulders are sun-brown and there’s a softness to her that contradicts the heavy pack and the serious boots.
I notice all of these things before I realize I shouldn’t. I stop noticing. I notice again.
I see the camera bag next. Then the hiking pack, heavy, loaded for days in the backcountry. Then the dead phone in her hand, held out slightly like she’s still hoping it might come back to life. Then her face.
I know her.
The bar. Three weeks ago. I was in my usual booth at The Burning Tree, which is the booth in the corner where people generally understand not to bother me.
She walked over like the booth didn’t have a sign on it.
She had a camera around her neck and she looked at me like my face was a landscape she wanted to shoot.
“Can I take your photo?” she asked. Like that was a reasonable thing to say to a stranger in a bar. Like my face was public property.
I said no. One word. Most people would have been embarrassed.
She said “okay,” smiled like I’d given her an interesting answer to an interesting question, and walked back to her friends, swinging her hips.
I spent the rest of the night annoyed that she wasn’t offended.
And wondering what sounds she would make if I had her underneath me, my hands gripping those hips.
Which is a thought I haven’t had in years. And one I’m choosing to forget.
Now she’s on my land. With the same camera and an expression that tells me she’s lost and she’d rather be anywhere else than admitting it to anyone, especially me.
“You’re on my property.”
“I know.” She takes a breath. “I’m lost.”
“Lost.”
She explains. Backcountry trail. Off-trail. Dead phone. Can’t find the trailhead. Every word comes out like she’s paying for it with something she values. Her pride, probably. I understand that. I respect it. I don’t show either.
I look at the sky. Orange going purple at the edges. An hour of light, maybe less.
“The trailhead is three hours east. You’re not making it before dark.”
“I can try.”
“You can try and break an ankle on the switchbacks and then I’ll have to come find you. In the dark. On terrain you’ve already proven you can’t navigate.”
That lands harder than I intended. I watch her jaw tighten.
She doesn’t fire back. She does the math the same way I did: the terrain, the light, the distance.
She’s not stupid. She’s a professional who went too far and she knows it and I know she knows it and neither of us is enjoying this conversation.
“Do you have a phone I can use? I need to reach my friend. She’s expecting a check-in tonight.”
“No. Practically no signal up here.”
“Radio?”
“At the cabin.”
She stares at me. I stare back. Two people standing in the best light of the day on the most beautiful piece of land I’ve ever owned, and neither of us wants to be having this moment.
“One night,” I say.
“Fine,” she says. “One night. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
I turn and walk. I don’t say “follow me” because it’s obvious and I don’t waste words on obvious things.
She follows. I can hear her boots on the trail behind me.
Steady, even, tired. She’s been hiking all day with a full pack and she’s not complaining.
I note this and then I’m irritated that I noted it.
I catch myself slowing my pace. My normal stride on this trail is fast. I know every root, every rock, every place where the ground dips.
She doesn’t. I’m adjusting for her without deciding to, which is worse than deciding to, because deciding would mean I chose it.
This is just happening. I walk faster. Then I slow down again.
The cabin comes into view through the trees.
I built the porch last summer. Cedar posts, no railing.
It faces east for the morning light, which I don’t care about because I’m not a person who sits on porches and watches sunrises.
I built it facing east because the structural support worked better on that side. That’s the reason.
I open the door. The cabin is one room done right.
Kitchen along the north wall, woodstove in the center, my bed against the west wall.
Two chairs by the stove that I built from the same larch as the table, with woven leather seats I re-laced last winter.
A rocker on the porch that took me three months because I kept reworking the curve of the back until it sat exactly the way I wanted.
Workbench running the length of the south side.
Shelves above it, tools hung on pegs. A half-finished chair on the bench, cherry wood, the joints cut but not assembled. Books on a shelf by the bed.
A bathroom through a door at the back, small, just a shower and a toilet. I plumbed it myself the second year with a gravity-fed line from the spring above the cabin.
Everything is where it belongs.
She steps inside and I watch her eyes move across the room the way they moved across the clearing. She’s reading the space. Not judging. Cataloging. The same look she gave my face in the bar, like everything is a composition and she can’t turn it off.
“Radio’s there.” I nod toward the shelf by the kitchen where the two-way sits in its charger.
She crosses the room and picks it up. She knows how to use it, which means someone taught her, which means someone in her life worries about her enough to make sure she can call for help. She finds the channel and the static clears and a woman’s voice comes through, tight with relief.
“Jenna? Oh thank god. Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I went off-trail, my phone died, I ended up on someone’s property on the north side. He has a radio.”
“He? Someone’s property? Whose property? Jasper?”
“Yes.”
Jenna glances at me. I’m leaning against the kitchen counter with my arms crossed. I don’t move. I don’t react. I hear every word. The woman on the radio is not quiet.
“Marissa, I’m fine. I’m safe. I’ll head back to the trailhead in the morning.”
“I’m sending Levi with the truck first thing.”
“You don’t need to send Levi.”
“I’m sending Levi, Jenna. North ridge trailhead. What time?”
“Seven. Eight. I’ll be there.”
“Check in with me on the satellite phone by seven tomorrow night. And Jenna? I’m glad you’re okay. I was twelve minutes from calling search and rescue.”
“I know you were.”