She nods. Like that's the right answer.
Across the table she's got both hands wrapped around her mug and she's watching me with that same quality of attention she'd given the hawk — like I'm something worth looking at and she's in no hurry to look away. I can't remember the last time someone looked at me like that. Like I was interesting. Like there was something here worth the patience.
It does something to me that I don't have a name for yet.
Walking back up Main Street she's not asking anything from me. No questions about the ridge or whether I get lonely. Just beside me, easy, going back to her afternoon.
At the corner where we diverge I stop. She stops. There's a beat that goes a second longer than it needs to, and I'm standing close enough to see that the directness in her eyes isn't a performance. It's just how she's built.
"I'll be on the trail tomorrow," I say.
The corner of her mouth moves. "I know where it is."
She goes left. I go straight.
I drive back up the ridge thinking about a woman who heard my shutter through a hundred metres of bush and knew exactly what it was. Who crouched next to me over a sparrow's nest and didn't fill the quiet. Who looked at me across a diner table like she was in no rush to stop.
I review the day's shots that evening and don't find what I'm looking for in any of them.
I used to be sure what I was looking for. I'm not sure anymore.
That's new.
three
Lara
ItellmyselfI'mgoing for a walk.
That's true. The morning is clear and cool and the kind of June day that feels like a gift, the light already doing that gold-through-the-firs thing that makes me want to be outside in it. I'm up and out before the diner opens for breakfast, trail map in my back pocket even though I don't really need it anymore. I know this section of trail now. I've been on it every morning for five days.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I know he'll be on it too.
That's also true, mostly.
He's coming down when I'm going up, which is new. I round a bend in the lower section and there he is, pack on, camera bag over one shoulder, moving down the slope with that unhurried ease that I have absolutely stopped noticing.
He sees me and slows.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning." He falls into step beside me, which means he's turning around and going back up, which he does without comment or explanation like it's just a thing that's happening.
I don't say anything about it. Neither does he.
We walk for a while in the good quiet. The trail climbs through spruce and then opens onto a section of meadow where the wildflowers are losing their minds — paintbrush, yarrow, something purple I don't know the name of. I make a mental note to ask him. He'll know.
"Owls come back to the nest?" I ask.
He glances at me sideways. "How do you know about the nest?"
"You mentioned it at lunch. The blind you set, the female that wasn't showing."
He's quiet for a moment. "She came back this morning. Both of them. I got what I was waiting for."
The way he says it — low, satisfied, like something long-held has finally resolved — does something to my chest that I'm not going to examine too carefully. It's the same quality I heard when he told me about the grizzly. The patience of a man who knows how to want something without letting the wanting make him frantic.
I've spent six years being frantic. I'd forgotten there was another way.
