Page 1 of Uncharted

1

RENO

A crunch and a hard slap drew my attention from the notebook. I watched with a little smile as a wet, furry head appeared on the surface of the river. Large, dark eyes peered around and locked onto me, watching carefully. A knee-jerk reaction told me not to move, but I knew it wouldn’t make a difference. I’d been identified over an hour ago, and they were still keeping an eye on me. At least the beaver didn’t slap its tail on the water to warn me and the rest of the colony.

“You see me, I see you,” I informed it with a chuckle from my spot under a tree a reasonable distance from the colony.

My smile widened when an even smaller head appeared, then another, and a third. They were a lot bigger than they’d been the first time I’d seen them. It was always funny to see how quickly animals grew compared to humans.

Before I could get lost down the rabbit hole of random information, one of the smaller heads left the safety of its siblings and mother. Or maybe its father. Beavers mated for life and raised their kits together. In the next year or two, the three kits would grow up and move on to make their own families.

The kit had drifted away from the den toward the dam its parents had built before settling down to have a family. I recognized that one because of the lighter patch of fur that ran from the tip of its snout down the back of its neck. She, I thought of it as a she, had been bolder than her siblings from the first time I’d seen them. She was the first to explore something new, the first to wander off to test her boundaries, and always the first to need to be dragged back by her frazzled parents.

“I like you,” I told her as she mounted the dam and peered at me with as much caution as her parents but far less fear. “I was like you. Except it wasn’t my mom who was busy pulling me away from danger, it was my brother.”

Her boldness hadn’t gone unnoticed, and while the parent in charge was keeping a close eye, it was in fact one of her siblings that approached her carefully. Where there were bold explorers, there were always those willing to take the plunge after realizing harm wasn’t waiting for them.

Mom or Dad emerged onto the river’s edge, and while I could feel their attention on me, they didn’t give an alert. They were present, watchful, but apparently allowing their child to explore more than usual. The kits, clearly sensing the shift in allowed behavior, explored more boldly, which I was sure would eventually test their parents’ patience.

Pleased, I tried not to let the bitter feeling at the back of my head take over. It was a little goofy to be jealous of beavers of all things, but well, human beings weren’t the most reasonable of creatures despite our ‘higher’ thinking. We weren’t doomed to be slaves to our emotions, but we would forever be inextricably tied to them.

Which is why, despite being pleased as hell to watch the cute family do its thing while I stared at them like a creep, I envied their lives too. My brother and I had only been able to depend on each other growing up. It could be seen as adorable. Twin brothers who could rely on each other? That’s practically Chicken Soup for the Soul levels of adorable.

Until you realized we could rely only on each other. Our dad was…well, I didn’t know how to describe him, or my mother for that matter. The only way to put it was that our father showed up when he wanted to, and our mother showed up; she was there. Not so sure that benefited Mika and me, but she was definitely there and raised us to the best of her ability.

For most of my childhood, it was always Mika and I. Often; it felt more like he was responsible for keeping an eye on me rather than the people who should have been doing it. As much as I teased him I was ‘older’ by scant minutes; he had always been the sensible one and made sure the important things were taken care of. In a lot of ways, we had been robbed of our childhood but because of who Mika was, who he had chosen to be, he was the one who had lost the most as he tried to shield me from adulthood long before I should have worried about it.

There was a rustle of brush somewhere behind me, so soft I might have almost missed it if it hadn’t been so quiet. It wasn’t windy, and there had been no noise beforehand to give away that it might be a loose branch or acorn dropping. Yet there was no reaction from the woods either. The beavers were going about their business; the birds were still piping up with their occasional song, and there wasn’t that strange sense of unease that came with the presence of, say…a mountain lion.

So, a quiet, almost intentionally hushed noise that didn’t fit a random act of the forest, but something that didn’t immediately alert every prey animal? A human was the only thing that could have that kind of reaction around here, especially when I knew the dam wasn’t far from the Search and Rescue outpost. And there were only two humans who knew where I was, and of the two, only one could be that quiet; almost innocent.

“Don’t try it,” I warned without turning around, smiling a little. “You’ll scare the family.”

Which summoned him, a man far too large to be that quiet. I thought maybe he might have gotten a haircut on his trip to the nearby small town earlier, but it was hard to tell. Jake was fastidious, almost obsessed, with keeping his hair neat and short. Combined with a height closer to seven feet than six, a body mass that would have impressed a bear, and a deep, rumbling voice that sounded like a snarl, he cut an intimidating, almost terrifying figure.

Except it was Jake and when I met eyes that were a brighter green than I’d ever seen on any human being, his hard, thin mouth broke into a wide grin that made me think of a dog caught rolling in the mud after a fresh bath, or a little boy with a lizard in hand that he’d spent at least twenty minutes trying to catch.

“Sorry to steal your fun,” I told him with a chuckle, keeping my voice low. “I know how you like sneaking up on people.”

“Maybe,” he said in a coy way that I didn’t believe for an instant.

Not that I thought he was trying to play coy about enjoying startling people, but it was the way he was making it sound. It was all very…Jake. He didn’t actually try to scare people; it was just that most people understandably didn’t realize how quiet a human bulldozer could be when he wasn’t talking. He certainly got a kick out of watching people’s souls try to evacuate their mortal coil because they didn’t expect him to just…appear, but it was rarely his intention. Yet Jake always defaulted to the role of the joker who took nothing seriously, letting them believe it was an accident.

Better to be seen as an oblivious joking jackass than a potential threat.

“Liar,” I said lightly, being just as vague as he was because it was easier to hint that I knew better than to outright say it.

“He’s getting bold,” Jake said as he stared at the kit that hadn’t moved from her spot on the dam to watch us while her siblings had backed up at Jake’s presence.

“She, has always been bold,” I told him with a smirk. “Don’t make me tell Cait you’re being sexist about beavers of all things.”

“How can you be sexist about beavers?” he wondered, looking puzzled.

“You seem to manage it, and I’m sure she’d agree.”

“But how can I be? I mean, maybe like Mika, or Aidan, or Colin…or I guess Xander now too,” he said, his face screwed up as though he were trying to unravel the secrets of the universe. “But like you and me? We love beavers.”

“Shut up,” I said, not trying to hold back my soft laugh as I realized he was playing the fool so he could keep the joke about beavers going for way longer than should be allowed. “But pretty sure Xander is still good with beavers.”