“Where’s Ash?” She asked this before she was fully upright. There was a low campfire between Beth and the stranger, who answered her question by nodding toward the stainless trailer set up behind them. Ash had courteously offered it to her the night before; she had opted to stay under the stars. Irrationally, she thought the wide-open space would be the wiser choice, because out here there was nothing to separate her from Mercy, though she hadn’t seen the wolf since yesterday’s cougar incident.
The sun had yet to rise above the surrounding ranges. Herriot stood on alert, ears and tail erect, beside Beth. But the dog was looking toward the nearby thicket of spindly gambel oaks and didn’t seem at all bothered by their unknown company. Maybe man and dog had met while she slept.
Satisfied that the slender trees hid no threat, Herriot settled down beside her owner again.
“Sorry to startle you,” the man said.
“You didn’t.”
He smiled at her the way her father used to do, wise to her false claim but willing to let her keep her pride. Her heart connected the men so immediately that a knot formed in her throat, but their similarity was intangible. She tried to put her finger on it. This man didn’t look anything like her father. The stranger was slim and clean-shaven, brown-skinned, and his every limb was long. His fingers seemed almost skeletal, and his legs accounted for nearly two-thirds of his height. At odds with his lanky body, his face was almost perfectly round, as if boasting of his Native American ancestry. If he was from around here, it was the Southern Utes who populated most of this territory. His glistening black hair was pressed down close against his head, the effects of a hat plus days without a shampoo. A peace pipe hung from a leather strap around his neck.
The cows were active already in the dark, making their peaceful sounds of meandering, chewing, snorting, calling. Occasionally a calf lowed, looking for its mother, and got a swift response. When Beth was a girl, she had been in the habit of opening her bedroom window during the spring months between calving season and the drive to the mountains, just to hear these comforting noises.
The man dropped a small pine log on the fire. It sizzled with morning dew.
“I thought Ash was alone,” she said.
“He needs his sleep. Name’s Wally.”
This Wally looked no more like her forgetful friend at the Blazing B than he looked like her father. It was tempting to read something into the coincidence, but what was so special about sharing a name with another man? She could only speculate how many women around the world were named Beth.
“I’m Beth. You come up to spell Ash now and then?”
Wally poured coffee from a pot into a tin cup, then stood and leaned over the warm flames, stretching out to hand it to her. She accepted this gesture as an affirmative answer to her question, then wondered why she had.
“I expected that to burn out,” she said of the fire, testing the rim of the cup with her lips. The metal had, within seconds, become too hot to sip. She set it beside her to cool, and Herriot sniffed it.
“It did. But here we are.”
“Well, thanks for jump-starting it.”
“Your wolf was here.”
A dozen questions rushed Beth’s mind, but she asked this one first: “My wolf ?”
“The one you call Mercy.”
He was smiling at her again, that disconcerting, paternal, all-knowing, and gentle grin. Now it spooked her a little. She picked up the coffee, burning her knuckles as they came against the tin, and drank the scalding brew, though sealing her lips would have been a more effective way to conceal her surprise. The coffee transformed her tongue into sandpaper and then she dropped the cup because it was too hot to hold.
She exclaimed when the coffee splashed her left thigh, then madly blotted her soaked jeans with her shirt. That liquid would leave a burn, maybe even a blister that would make riding Hastings a misery.
“Wolves haven’t been in these mountains in a long, long time,” she said, focusing on her fiery skin.
“More accurately, you’d have to say wolves haven’t been seen in these mountains that long. I suspect you could find someone who’s seen them here and there, if you asked the right questions of the right people.”