5. Doreen
DOREEN
Doreen woke to a crisp and lovely autumn morning. The rains had passed over in the night, leaving the world fresh and beautiful. She ate a simple but hearty breakfast with Hester and Mauro in the lodge kitchen, eggs and bacon and thick slabs of bread served from plates with little roses that looked too beautiful to be used for everyday.
“This is the fancy lodge china,” Hester said, seeing Doreen looking at it. “It came with the place when the owners sold it off. Technically, I suppose it’s for special occasions, like the Valentine’s getaways that the lodge used to do under the old management. Or a spa weekend.” She winked.
“You don’t have to get out your fancy dishes for me,” Doreen protested. “At home, I don’t have a single dish that matches.”
Mauro raised his head from shoveling forkfuls of eggs into his mouth and remarked, “She didn’t. We eat off them every day.”
Doreen looked at Hester, waiting to see if she was going to roll her eyes at Mauro for teasing, as seemed to be their way. But Hester smiled. “Yes, we do. I don’t see any reason to have good dishes and not use them. But I would have brought them out anyway for your spa weekend.” Reaching for the butter dish, she added, “What do you want to do today? I’m afraid we can’t promise the full range of activities on the website, or—er—any of them, but there are a few things still available. Mauro could get the sauna fired up, if you like.”
A sauna sounded lovely, but Doreen had something else in mind. “Actually, I wanted to take a nature walk and look at the beautiful leaves. That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
“Of course!” Hester exclaimed. “Just let me get the hiking trails map from the lobby.”
She hopped up from the table and was back in a minute with a folded map. “Here you go,” she said, spreading it out on the large kitchen island where they were eating breakfast. “There are a bunch of trails, as you can see. The ones closer to the lodge are well marked, so you shouldn’t have to worry about getting lost. But once you leave the lodge property, the trails join with a whole network of bridle paths, logging roads, and other tracks and trails on the mountainside.” She fetched a pencil from one of the kitchen drawers and made some X’s. “Mauro, can you check this for me and make sure she knows where the best views are? I’m not that familiar with the hikes around here yet.”
Mauro obligingly pointed out some paths. “This one’s a nice easy loop with a great view of some beaver lakes in the valley.” He hesitated briefly. “There’s private property around the lakes, so be careful about that.”
“It looks like a nice walk,” Doreen told them both, folding up the map. “Thank you.”
Hester pressed some sandwiches onto her, along with a cold bottle of water. Doreen tucked both into a canvas shopping tote from the trunk of her car, took a jacket in case of rain, and set out on her hike.
She didn’t mention that her main goal wasn’t seeing fall leaves, it was finding out where Wick lived.
It had been on the tip of her tongue several times to just ask, but she couldn’t think of a way to bring it up that wasn’t going to sound intrusive and stalkery. Also, if she asked , and then got caught wandering around the back side of Wick’s property, she couldn’t exactly pretend to be a turned-around hiker.
She wasn’t going to stalk him, she told herself firmly. She just wanted to find out where that local private property was, so that she could avoid it like a conscientious hiker. How was she supposed to know where not to hike if she couldn’t have a look at it?
The day warmed as she walked. Doreen tied her jacket around her waist, as she remembered that she and her brother used to do with their windbreakers on walks when they were kids, and sipped from the water bottle Hester had given her. Although she was in good shape from her work in the garage, her legs soon ached from climbing up and down the steep slopes. The paths had looked easy on the map, but she hadn’t known to account for all the elevation changes.
Occasionally she had to step over fallen branches half blocking the trail, and once an entire fallen tree.
It soon became clear to her that she probably had taken a wrong turn anyway. She had been walking for hours, Doreen was sure, and she definitely should have seen views and beaver ponds by now. Instead she had mainly seen trees, with occasional glimpses of vistas in the distance that she couldn’t quite make out with all the trees in the way.
When she finally came upon the beaver pond, or a pond anyway, she approached it from below instead of above, making her realize that she must have come all the way down the hillside into what Mauro had called “the valley.” Her narrow side track had run into a well-beaten path that curved around the edge of a very pretty pond, which turned out to be a lower pond connected to another pond in a chain of them that went up the valley. They reflected the trees beautifully, and for a while Doreen was too interested in gazing at the lovely reflections to remember that she might be trespassing. She hadn’t seen any gates or signs.
And these were definitely beaver ponds, not man-made structures. Not that Doreen was the world’s leading expert on beavers or ponds, but she could recognize the picturesque mud-and-stick dams holding the water back. She wondered if she might get a chance to see a beaver or two.
However, as she walked on, looking around her, she began to wonder about her first impression. She knew beavers were marvelous natural engineers, but these dams looked remarkably regular in design, plotted to the natural contours of the land, almost as if they had been planned.
Maybe beavers could do that, she reasoned. It might go along with the whole making-dams instinct.
She came at last to a very large pond with a house on the far side. Doreen stopped, recognizing that now she really was about to wander into someone’s yard. The house was an appealing cabin, framed by flaming mountain foliage with gorgeous autumn peaks in the background. Reflected in the water, it looked like it belonged on the front of a nature calendar.
Doreen turned to inspect the beaver dam holding back the big pond. The closer she looked, the more she thought her earlier idea was correct that the pond were a man-made landscaping feature constructed to resemble beaver dams. This one in particular was simply too regular and planned-looking. There was a lot less mud and more wood in its construction than in the beaver dams she had seen in pictures, and what looked like a path running along the top of it.
Feeling daring, although hoping she wasn’t seen from the house, Doreen ventured out along the top of the dam. It turned out to be more uneven than it looked, making her wonder once again if it really was a natural construct. But if so, where were the beavers? She could hear rushing water ahead, making her think that perhaps the pond had been abandoned and now water was breaking through. The rushing water was strangely rhythmic, producing a whump-whump-whump that she found hard to explain.
Then she came upon the source of the running water sound and discovered that the beaver dam’s spillway had a water wheel in it.
Okay, Doreen thought, nature’s engineers and all that, but beavers definitely hadn’t built that .
It was made of wood. In fact, it was made of exactly the same kind of wood as the dam, which was to say, smallish peeled sticks that looked slightly gnawed at the ends. It was as if someone had picked up beaver sticks and taken them and put them together into a water wheel shape. The wheel tumbled merrily as the water caught it, spinning briskly in the rain-swollen outflow from the lake.
Doreen saw with a mechanic’s eye that the water wheel was not merely turning idly. It was transmitting its spinning motion along a camshaft to a sort of ... gearbox? Could you call it that? The box, the wheels, all of it was also made of wood, and for lubrication and coolant, water spilled through, around, and on top of it.
She couldn’t see what happened after that, because there was a rubber hose that twisted among the sticks of the dam and vanished, but Doreen would bet her bottom dollar that this dam, unlikely and even impossible as it seemed, was generating power.
Even though the entire thing looked like something out of a beaver version of Flintstones.
“What,” she said out loud, “the heck .”
There was a splash and something popped up out of the water near her feet.
In the slow-motion instant as Doreen tumbled off the dam, she got a good look at it and realized that it was, in fact, exactly what you would expect to find in a beaver pond: a beaver, its water-slick whiskered face looking up at her.
A scarred beaver face, with some of the hair missing on one side.
Then she landed in the lower pond with a tremendous splash.