flight at the moment. She didn’t like running, no matter what specious reason she might be able to come up with.
So she headed back to the cabin, hoping that Craig wouldn’t suddenly decide to take it into his head to sleep under the stars. Considering he had said how much he enjoyed that, she was surprised he’d been joining her at the cabin every night. Summer, and the opportunity to sleep under the stars, wouldn’t last forever.
* * *
Craig didn’t like what he was finding as he poked around the streams in the vicinity of Buddy’s property. Nothing was blocked by so much as a beaver dam, but that wasn’t what got his attention.
No, it was the damn trip wires. They ringed Buddy’s property, but at no time did he have an excuse to get close enough to find out what they were connected to. He was going to have to come over here after dark.
It was late afternoon, and he meandered along the valley stream, still wondering why it was so low. He’d expected to find a fallen boulder here and there, blocking one of the bigger streams, or even several blocking smaller streams, although as a rule the water soon overtopped such hindrances and found its way down.
He began to think somebody had dammed some rivers that he couldn’t get to, and there was only one place around here that could happen: on Buddy’s property.
Water was scarce enough around here. Water rights could be fiercely fought over, sometimes reaching a level a person might almost call a war. But Buddy didn’t have anybody downstream of him to get riled, which left the forest service.
Damned if he could prove the diminished flow in the valley arose from a dam or anything except maybe, just possibly, part of the mountains hadn’t had their usual snowfall. He took a few flow measurements to compare to the past few years, but they wouldn’t prove anything either.
If Buddy had dammed a stream, he had violated his agreement with the service. He was damaging the ecology. Proving it, and figuring out how much right he had to intervene anyway, wasn’t going to be easy.
Troubling him equally was that Buddy had never done such a thing in the past. Assuming he felt he needed to hang on to more water for the late summer and early fall when it would get really dry, what had changed from past years? The addition of Cap and his friends? Some so-called strategic thinking? Was he anticipating imminent apocalypse? If so, why?
Feeling frustrated and more than a little annoyed, Craig turned Dusty and headed back up the valley, intending to go to the cabin to meet Sky. Amazing how fast she had captivated him. He couldn’t imagine not spending the evenings with her, and wondered if he was going to be able to go back to his solitary existence without pining for her company.
She was great company. Quiet, funny when she wanted to be and just plain comfortable to be with. The only time he got edgy around her was when he noticed she was an attractive woman. He’d been working on not noticing—unsuccessfully. It was sort of like telling himself not to think about the elephant in the room.
A quiet chuckle escaped him. He turned Dusty up the hillside, an unmistakable anticipation growing in him as he drew nearer to the cabin.
A movement to the side caught his eye, and he turned to look. He immediately recognized one of his fellow rangers, Don Capehart, riding toward him on Dusty’s twin. He waved and waited for Don to reach him.
Don drew up alongside him, a blond man of about thirty whose skin didn’t take kindly to the high-altitude summer sun. He was looking a little red and probably wouldn’t tan, but he didn’t seem to care. “Big doings?” Don said as they shook hands. “Lucy kind of filled me in.”
“There’s not a whole lot to fill in yet. Let’s keep riding. There’s a definite sense lately that everything we do around here is being watched.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“I don’t think it is. Buddy Jackson has trip wires around his entire property, and I can’t get close enough to tell what they’re hooked up to. If it’s not just some kind of alert, getting close could be dangerous anyway.”
“So you’re thinking about looking after dark?”
Craig looked at him again. “You know me too well.”