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Had she always reacted this way? She remembered him teasing her on the hike to Willow Lake, calling her Cass when she tried to break the trail, how it had made her cheeks flush. From exertion, or with pleasure?
And it wasn’t just her. Silas was looking at her like he’d just let a curse word slip in the middle of class, not used a silly nickname he’d invented on a whim. He stuffed the map back into his pack and set off briskly in the direction he’d just charted, Meg scrambling to follow him around the lake, fighting the underbrush as the way grew more difficult.
Honestly? She could go for one of Silas’s pranks right about now, just to make this all feel more normal. A sudden cry of “Bear!” maybe. Though it wouldn’t have worked, she realized. Nothing about Silas scared her. Maybe it was his self-reliance, the way he subscribed so loyally to his faith in himself, that made her feel safe around him. Or maybe it was her own self-confidence she was sensing, rising in tandem with his. Whatever it was, Silas was the kind of person to gravitatetowardin the event of uncertainty, not flee from. Which made it tricky now, Meg realized, her stride faltering, knowing that the source of her uncertainty was, in fact, him.
As they continued to navigate the lakeshore, Silas settled into a less frenetic pace, though he remained uncharacteristically well behaved. He placed a few strategic stomps in the vicinity of the waterline where the strip of sand they traversed narrowed, splashing Meg with the icy water, but the sun was already high in the sky, and besides, her legs were already wet. She hardly noticed the intermittent sprays of droplets up her calves. They reached the end of the lake more quickly than she had anticipated, and Silas stopped, reaching again for his compass.
“Okay, this is it,” he said, lining the needle back up with North and turning the dial to 80 degrees. He must have felt Meg’s eyes on him, because he looked up at her. “You know how to do this, right?”
When she shook her head, Silas frowned. “You should know how to read a compass and a map, Meg.”
The use of her given name felt pointed, and every bit as charged. It put her on the defensive. She was out here, wasn’t she? On his wild-goose chase.Because you want to be,she reminded herself.
“You could teach me,” she said.
Silas smiled at her tone. “Come here.” When he held out the compass, she came to stand in front of him, letting him place her fingers around the edges of the baseplate. He turned her by the shoulders until the red tip of the needle aligned with North, and then guided her hand around the dial until the index pointer at the top of the compass fell even with 80 degrees. “What you want to do,” Silas said, looking over Meg’s right shoulder in their direction of travel, “is find a point of reference some way off, in line with your course.” He pointed to a large spruce in the distance as the proximity of his breath in her ear sent a shiver down her spine, despite the sunshine. “Let’s head for that tree, and then recheck our bearings.”
She was grateful for the excuse to move. They made their way to the tree, then to a low outcropping of stones, then to a splintered pine lying on its side, and before Meg knew it they had traveled almost a mile at a steady 80 degrees, mostly uphill, and Silas began looking in earnest for any sign of a mine shaft. At his triumphant whoop, she felt the thrill of discovery herself, running to catch up while a hum of anticipation buzzed in her ears. For years after, whenever she bent over tedious map exercises and compass work at monthly search meetings, Meg would wonder whether her love of map reading as a tool for rescue and recovery had been born in this moment.
The mine shaft Silas found had been dug into a low embankment at the end of a small meadow. The entrance looked imposingly narrow, the crossbeams at the entrance bowed and splintered, and when she approached Meg could see they were going to clear her head by only a few inches. Sierra mines traveled laterally rather than vertically,burrowing deep into the sides of mountains instead of straight down, but still, peering in from the outside, Meg could only see the distance of a few feet before the way plunged in darkness. Silas took a step inside, then another, his eyes darting from the rocky ceiling of the tunnel to Meg, standing in the sunlight.
“C’mon,” he encouraged, flicking his flashlight on.
When Silas reached a hand out to her she took it, even suspecting that she was going to feel this touch all the way into the marrow of her bones, given how this day was going. She didn’t much like the idea of being left outhere,either, to stand and wait and wonder if he’d been sucked under the surface of a mountain.
She wasn’t wrong; his grip on her palm burned in sharp contrast to the sudden, all-encompassing chill of the mine shaft. The cold hit Meg’s heated skin and sweat-stained shirt like a leap into the Feather River: goose bumps broke out instantly along her arms and the back of her neck. The relief from the heat distracted her for the first few feet, and then she began to register the low ceiling of the tunnel—already Meg had to duck—and the damp walls on either side of her, slick with condensation and moss. About five feet in, water began to pool in places along the floor of the shaft, and she swatted away the mosquitoes that rose up to swarm around her in the damp darkness.
Still they pressed on, both of them crouched low to avoid hitting their heads on the jagged ceiling of the tunnel. “Good?” Silas asked, turning to check on her. She nodded. Despite his manic energy, when she was in Silas’s world, Meg felt strangely calm. Danny called it the eye of the hurricane, but to Meg, the physicality of it all lent a sort of clarity.
After perhaps ten feet, the shaft began to veer to the right, and Meg hesitated, eyeing the gloom in front of them, illuminated only in random spots as Silas’s flashlight beam bounced from one side of the tunnel to the other. He was only a few paces ahead of her, and his voice echoed loudly off the walls as he urged her forward. Mine shafts often curvedin a haphazard route under the ground, he explained, twisting this way and that as the miners chased the snaking veins of gold at whim.
Meg thought of these long-ago fortune hunters in here for hours at a time, and she shuddered. She was afraid to so much as touch the crumbling walls of this tunnel, let alone actively chip away at them with thousands of pounds of granite directly above her head. When she saw Silas ease down to hands and knees, she hit her limit.
“Can we turn back?” she called.
She expected pushback, but when he craned his head over his shoulder, she caught his sheepish smile in the glow of the flashlight. “I thought you’d never ask.”
They allowed their feet to slosh through the muck on their return, and, concentrating as hard as she was onnotthinking about what might be living in the water, Meg emerged back into the daylight well ahead of Silas. She turned in a circle, momentarily disoriented, but even after she’d gotten her bearings, she had an odd sense she was being watched. She squinted into the sunshine, but her eyes hadn’t adjusted yet, and by the time Silas emerged from the shaft, she had chalked the sensation up to the eerie vibe of the mine following her outside.
They climbed the slope to a low ridge, still swatting at mosquitoes. The heat of the sun now welcome, they settled on a long slab of warm granite, peeling off their wet socks while comparing bug bites. And when they’d exhausted that subject, Meg lay back and closed her eyes against the bright-blue sky. She wasn’t ready to hike back yet, the heat on the rocks, even the position of the sun, reminding her again of the limited time left to them before summer ended. Left toallof them, she amended quickly, with Danny starting fire-science training in September. She shouldn’t have left him out.
Silas’s voice floated over her. “What are you thinking about?”
She leaned up on one elbow and tried for humor. “I guess I was just thinking it’s a lot quieter without the Silas-Danny dynamic today.You guys would probably be in a rock-throwing contest or something right about now.”
Silas offered a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes like it usually did. “Do you want me to find you a rock to throw?”
No, she found she wanted something else. A little clarity. “Why didn’t it work out,” she heard herself ask, “between you and Jessica?” He’d never really said, and suddenly it felt imperative to know.
Silas looked away from her, studying the minute specks of iron in the granite beneath his hands. “She just wasn’t right for me,” he said at length.
There was a sadness in his tone that pained Meg in return, an echo, she told herself, of the regret she felt whenever she thought about how quick she’d been to judge Jessica last fall. “I hope it wasn’t because of me,” she said, “not being super inviting at first.” Because she hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone, least of all Silas.
He sat up and looked at her, his head blocking out the sun. Finding herself abruptly in shadow, Meg blinked, but she kept on talking, even as a shiver of entrapment ran down her spine. “Because we all got used to her hanging around. It only got weird after you guys broke up.”
Something shifted in Silas’s eyes, like remembered pain. His shoulders straightened in a familiar posture. Danny called it his Man of Conviction mode, because Silas’s air of certainty was unmistakable. “No,” he corrected her unequivocally, “it got weird after our Jeep ride in the mud.”
He said this slowly, like he wanted it to sink in, and it did, just like the Jeep tires had into the mire. Meg replayed that afternoon in her mind, remembering not only the way Silas had tried to comfort her and support her goals but also the way he had looked at her as he’d done so. Because it was the same way he’d looked at her when he’d called her Cassiopeia for the first time, in the vestibule of the lodge. And again on the shore of Long Lake just today. It was the way he looked at her now.
