Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,32

sun came out, and she had to turn it all off and unzip for a while to let the fresh mountain air blow through.

The Salmon River started as a tiny, chuckling creek. Kelsa wouldn't have noticed it if not for the sign on a bridge where the road crossed over. But as the sun sank and the road swerved gently down, more creeks and streams flowed in.

By dusk the Salmon was a rushing cataract, huge by Utah standards, and the road ran right beside it down the valley it had carved.

Kelsa found a fishermen's campground that didn't charge too much for a night's camping, and she pitched her tent there, falling asleep with the roar of the river in her ears.

She was so tired of peanut butter that she splurged on breakfast in a small cafe near the campground - cheaper, when she wasn't feeding Raven. Whatever he really was, he ate like a teenage boy.

She made up bits of river incantations as she rode down out of the mountains.

Rolling water, carrying life with you. Carver of mountains.

It was still fairly early when Kelsa reached the flatland and joined state road 93. The rocky, wooded slopes of the mountains gave way to volcanic soil, whose colors reminded her of the red-rock deserts of southern Utah, though these crumbling slopes were completely different geologically. It was still before lunchtime when the road emerged from the technicolor buttes, and the broad valley that held the town of Salmon opened up before her.

In town, she discovered she'd come far enough north to catch up with spring. Lilacs and fruit trees that had stopped blooming weeks ago in Provo were in full blossom here.

If she reached Alaska, when she reached Alaska, would she catch up with winter again? The prospect was both enchanting and scary.

Kelsa stopped at a small grocery store and bought a stock of energy bars, protein sticks, and heat-in-can soup - though she knew from experience that she'd get tired of these foods even more quickly than she tired of peanut butter.

The storage space on her bike was limited, but she added a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches for future meals and a premade salad for today's lunch. She was beginning to hunger for fresh food, and the lettuce in these grocery-store salads was less dubious than the ones they sold in flash centers.

She got back onto 93 and went north toward the lake, with the Salmon River racing beside the road. Kelsa had ridden for half an hour and passed through the small town of North Fork, when she realized that the river looked much smaller.

Were they pulling out water for the farms? But the Salmon now appeared to be running in the other direction, back toward town.

You can follow the river all the way to Flathead Lake.

Frowning uneasily, Kelsa turned her bike and rode back to North Fork.

It was hard to follow a river through a town, even a river the size of the Salmon in a town that was relatively small. The streets followed their own straight grid, and the river kept swerving away from them.

But soon she found the place where the main branch of the Salmon flowed out of town ... to the east, followed by a small county road.

Did it curve through the hills and valleys and rejoin the main road later?

Kelsa pulled off the road into a shaded glade, took out her com pod, and pulled up a map. The long straight rift that held the road leading to Flathead Lake certainly looked as if the Salmon flowed along it. There was even a note in very fine print that said the river she'd followed to the north was the Salmon. What was going on here?

She closed the road map and went into the net. It took some wading through the data pools, but she finally came up with a river runner's map of Idaho and Montana. The river that ran along 93 north of town was the North Fork of the Salmon River. After this it continued flowing east, and then south through an area where there were no roads at all, and eventually it emptied into the Snake River near the Oregon border. It never even came close to Flathead Lake.

Raven had lied to her. Lied about the river's course, at the very least. But something had happened at Craters of the Moon. Something that was neither a lie nor a crazed hallucination on her part. According to the news-net, that earthquake had