4. Rob
Rob
I called it in from the cabin's landline while Jessie Walker organized forty-three volunteers with the quiet authority of someone who had never once needed a title to be in charge.
Greypaw dispatch confirmed: vehicles up the north access road, ninety minutes.
The two passengers she'd flagged, Margaret, seventy-one, and a retired engineer named Gerald who'd taken a knock to the head, would shelter at the cabin until the EMTs arrived.
The rest would walk out with the two physiotherapists running a calm, efficient rear guard.
By the time the main group moved off down the access road, the rain had dropped to a drizzle.
My cabin was not designed for company. One main room, a sleeping loft, the generator humming in the lean-to out back.
Twenty years of solitary patrol work looked exactly like what it was, functional, spare, personal in the way things got personal when no one was watching.
Books stacked on the windowsill. A carving half-finished on the workbench.
A photograph of the northern corridor in winter, taken from a peak I'd climbed alone.
Jessie assessed it then got to work.
She settled Margaret and Gerald near the woodstove with blankets from the emergency supply chest, took their vitals with a competence that made both of them visibly relax, and then found my kettle without asking and put it on.
"You have proper tea," she said, holding up the tin.
"Previous warden left it."
"And you kept it."
I looked at her. "The supply run comes monthly."
"Right." A small smile, quickly managed. She set the kettle. "How are your hands?"
"Fine."
"That's not an assessment, that's a deflection."
I held them up. She'd dressed them well, clean, tight, professional. They ached, but nothing that wouldn't heal by morning. Faster than morning, probably, though I wasn't going to complicate tonight's conversation further.
She poured tea for Margaret, then Gerald, then set a mug on the counter for me without asking how I took it. Black, as it turned out. She'd guessed.
"You should drink something warm," she said.
I picked up the mug. She leaned against the counter across from me, her own tea in hand, and for a moment we both just stood there while Margaret and Gerald dozed by the stove and the generator hummed and the mountain settled around us.
The mate scent was stronger inside. Enclosed space, shared warmth, it was doing things to my concentration that I didn't have a protocol for.
Twenty years as warden. Three clans' worth of boundaries to maintain, territory disputes to mediate, rogue incidents to contain. I'd built a life that worked because it was orderly. Solitary. Free of the particular complications that came with wanting things you couldn't plan for.
And then today had happened.
"You should know," I said, "that the clan has protocols. Around exposure. What you saw—"
"I understand discretion," she said. "Fifteen years of field medicine and I've kept harder secrets than this." She looked at me steadily. "I'm not going to tell anyone what I saw."
"That's not—" I stopped. Set the mug down. "That's not actually what I was going to say."
She waited.
"I was going to say that the protocols exist because exposure creates complications. And that I should, technically, be more concerned about that right now than I am." A pause. "I don't know what to do with that."
Jessie Walker looked at me for a long moment. Rain tapped the window. Gerald let out a small snore from the chair.
"How long have you been up here alone?" she asked.
The question landed differently than it should have. Quiet, without judgment, but precise, the question of someone who recognized the shape of a particular kind of solitude from the inside.
"Twenty years," I said.
She nodded slowly.
"I've been back in Canada for four months," she said. "And I haven't figured out what I came back to yet." She turned to check on her patients, shoulders set in that careful, competent line. "But I'm starting to think it wasn't nothing."