Nell's Mountain Man (Mountain Men of Harrow Peak #1)

Nell’s Mountain Man

NELL

I slow the car. The chains I put on at the last gas station rattle against the road — overkill for dry pavement, but the attendant was insistent.

The road narrows — single lane, no shoulder, gravel eating into asphalt at the edges like the mountain is taking it back inch by inch.

The air is thinner up here. A faint tightness in my chest that says you're not where you belong.

Story of my life.

The town appears around a bend and it's raw — tight buildings pressed against a massive sky, the peak itself dominating everything, snow on the upper ridges even now. A place that doesn't care if you showed up.

I pull up outside Prentiss General because it's the only building that looks like it expects visitors. Walt Prentiss rents me the studio upstairs. He's seventy-something, says twelve words total, and gives me a look when I say one night.

"You'll want to be back before the light goes," he says when I ask about the waterfall. "Weather changes fast up here."

I check my phone. The forecast is clear until midnight — not a cloud on the radar for sixty miles. And the falls are only a twenty-minute hike from the trailhead according to the sign I saw driving in. I just need the photograph. One shot in good light, then back.

I thank him and head out with my camera.

The trail to Harrow Falls climbs through pines that smell like cold and something sharper underneath — resin, maybe, or stone cooling in the shade.

I walk fast. The altitude pulls at my lungs and my thighs burn on the switchbacks — thighs that were not, it must be said, built for mountain climbing.

I'm soft where hikers are lean, round where this trail wants angular, and I am sweating in places I refuse to acknowledge.

But it feels good. Honest. The kind of tired that lives in your body instead of your head.

The light is golden, late afternoon, making everything look like it matters. I can hear the water before I see it.

I'm not worried. I checked the weather. I know how far I'm going. I've built a whole career around being smart in unfamiliar places — forty-three states, no forwarding address, nobody waiting up, and I've never once needed rescuing.

It works. It's always worked.

So far.

THANE

End-of-day sweep. Solo. The others are off-rotation and the base is quiet in the way I need it — no one talking, no one wanting anything from me, just the hum of the radio and Sergeant's breathing from his spot by the door.

I check conditions on the board. Northwestern ridge system has been sitting offshore all week. Models disagree. I don't trust models. I trust the mountain, and it has been too still for two days. Pressure building with nowhere to go.

I know what that feels like.

I check gear. Rope bags, ice axes, the med kit I restocked yesterday. Everything in its place. The radio crackles — Mace, off-rotation but never off-frequency.

"You still there, brother? Go home. Pet the dog. Talk to a woman. In that order or any order."

I turn the volume down. Don't respond. Mace has opinions about my life that I have never asked for and will never act on. I live alone on a mountain with a dog. That is a choice I made and I'd make it again.

Sergeant lifts his head. Not the rescue alert — just the ears-forward, body-still attention that means something. I follow his line. East face. The sky above the ridge has changed color in the last ten minutes. Gone from blue to a gray heavy enough to feel in my teeth.

The models were wrong. The mountain was right.

I'm pulling on my jacket before I've made a conscious decision about it — the heavy SAR shell that barely fits across my shoulders anymore, the one Mace says makes me look like I'm trying to intimidate the weather.

Sergeant is already at the door. I clip his lead and step outside.

The cold hits the back of my neck and I let it.

My body knows what this is before my brain catches up.

Two tours as a SEAL will do that — wire you so tight that your hands are moving before the thought fully forms. The Navy trained it into me. The mountain kept it sharp.

There's a car at Prentiss General that wasn't there this morning. Out-of-state plates. And the trail to Harrow Falls — the east face trail, directly below where that sky is building — has fresh boot prints heading up.

Solo prints. Recent.

Something primitive tightens low in my chest. The thing that wakes up when someone is out there alone and doesn't know what's coming.

The mountain doesn't care. I do.

I radio in my position and heading. I don't wait for confirmation. Sergeant and I move fast — the wind already picking up on the exposed ridge, the light going like someone pulled a shade down. Whoever walked up that trail alone with a storm building has no idea.

Lucky for them, I do. Their weather app probably said clear skies. The storm wall building over the east face proves it wrong.

I'll get there first. That's not a hope. That's a fact. I have never lost someone on this mountain and I am not losing someone tonight.

The trail climbs into the treeline and I follow it. I don't think about the out-of-state plates or the solo prints or the fact that someone trusted a forecast over a local. I think about cold finding bare skin. Altitude thinning breath. How fast a mistake becomes a body.

That's all I need.