Part of the charm, she supposed, was that everything in the larger world seemed so far away. As if it were all the stuff of dreams, and the only reality surrounded her right now. Her thirsty soul reached for the beauty and soaked it up until she felt filled with it.
Hypnotized by the rushing water, she lost track of time. She didn’t even notice that the light seemed to be lessening, deepening the secrets of the ravine and woods until that snaking, icy, breath-freezing sense of being watched crept up her spine to the base of her skull.
Damn, she was getting sick of that. It destroyed her mood as surely as if someone had fired a gun, and it made her mad. But mad at what? An owl? A raccoon? A mountain lion?
She muttered a cuss word under her breath, not that anything could have heard it over the crashing, rushing water. Hell, she couldn’t even hear it herself.
But long training and honed instincts wouldn’t let her ignore it. Grabbing her camera, she rose and started climbing out of the gorge. She half hoped she’d meet some idiot human so she would have someone to yell at.
But of course she didn’t. Even if there was a person out here, there were too many places to provide concealment, even unintentional concealment. She’d forgotten her most basic training about keeping open sight lines, and she didn’t care.
She was just mad, and dang it, she would come back here tomorrow to paint.
Near the top of the gorge wall, she caught a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. At once she froze and slowly turned her head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe a leaf had fluttered.
Except that the movement had left her with an impression of something considerably bigger. She resumed climbing again, but her senses were on heightened alert now. Anger had been forgotten in the possibility that whatever was watching her didn’t want to be seen. There were predators out here, not all of them human, although she feared the human ones the most.
She needed her hands to climb this wall, and right now she didn’t like not having them free. She quickened her pace to the top, and finally reached a point where she could stand without hanging on to rocks. Turning, she looked back.
The trees seemed to have closed in over the gorge, hiding it from sight once more. She could tell it was there only by the muffled sound of the racing, tumbling water. It was as if an invisible door had sealed behind her.
But standing there and looking back at the canopy of trees gave her the opportunity to look around. Nothing moved except gently swaying tree branches as the afternoon cooled and the evening breeze began to pick up.
But she was still in the woods, though they weren’t as thick here, above the life-giving water. She began to trudge back to where she had left her painting supplies, sweeping the ground with her eyes, seeking any obvious disturbance among the carpet of pine needles and leaves. Nothing.
Maybe she was beginning to lose her mind in a whole new way.
Twenty minutes later she emerged onto the sunny hilltop where she usually painted in time to see the sun sink below the western peaks. Still so early, but she loved the way this premature twilight settled in. It would last a long time, but from her artist’s perspective the light had lost its magic, growing flat, diminishing perspective.
She reached her supplies, which she hadn’t fully unpacked yet since she had decided to hunt up a new place to paint, and bent to start picking them up.
She froze again. She knew how she’d laid things out. It was darn near an unbreakable habit to put everything in exactly the same place so she wouldn’t have to hunt for things when she was working.
But something had moved. All of it had moved, she thought, but there was one thing she was absolutely certain had. She would have bet every last dime in her bank account that she hadn’t left her palette on top of her paint box. The first place she always put that was right in front of her portable easel.
She had caught her hair up in a bun for walking through the woods. A few hairs at the nape had escaped, and now the breeze blew them about. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed, but right now they felt like the caress of icy fingers.