“No, probably not.” He shrugged. “I think that was like a warning to stay away from chicks, you know.”
“Not really ever been a problem for me.” The siskin took to wing, landing on the bough of a scraggly pine. “Do you want to stop hooking up then?”
“No, not really. I like what we’re doing.” He gave me an elbow in the side. “Stop frowning. It’s not just the sex I like, it’s the other shit. The books.”
“Who are you and what have you done with the real Will Abbott?” I deadpanned. He drove that elbow into my side with force. I grunted then chuckled. “I’m glad you’re enjoying the other shit and books. Someday we should go to the library together.”
“Are you asking me out on a date, Yellow Horse? Because if you are, you need to up your romance skills by like a million.”
A rosy heat crept up my neck. “No, not a date. Unless you’d like to maybe do that? Date? Kenruh said we could go salmon fishing with him.” I bit down on the inside of my cheek.
Fishing. Great choice. Nothing says romance like fish guts on your hands as your grandfather tells fart jokes. You really suck at this.
“I like fishing,” he replied in that “whatever I give no fucks” way of his.
“Cool.”
And just like that, we were dating…I think.
It wasa bittersweet moment leaving the Lone Vale cabin behind. Scary too as we were leaving the safety of anonymity behind to face…who knew what. Upset over us being…fishing buddies? Ugh. I had no fucking clue how to date. Honestly, I should stick to horses. Them I understood. Men and romance? Not a miserable clue and it showed.
The late August air rushed into our faces as we rode along the Jante on our way home. The wagon rattling loudly scared off most of the wildlife before we could get too close. We did startle a lone rooster pheasant near the chunk of BLM land. Probably a leftover that had been stocked for the hunting season. That would open sometime in October. The guest cabins would be filled with out-of-state visitors shelling out huge amounts of cash for the rentals and hunting licenses.
Will shouted something at me. I tore my sight from the cackling rooster to glance his way. He was pointing ahead. I began to reach back for the rifle assuming we’d rode up on a mama grizzly with cubs.
“Check out the tracks!” he bellowed over the rumble of two four-wheelers. I cut my engine and he did the same. We didn’t really have a lot of spare gas to burn up. Also, yelling at each other sucked. “Up there by the sharp turn in the river. The grass is flattened.”
I stood up. Yep, he was right. The tall grasses had been knocked down. I shot Will a look. “Could have been an elk herd,” I said as I slid off my ride to investigate. Will joined me. We walked ahead about a hundred feet. There was no mistaking this for something the resident herd had done. The tire tracks gouged into the soil told the story.
“Elk have knobby tires?” Will asked as he lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sun now directly overhead.
“Fuck off.” I looked out over the swaying wildflowers and spindly grasses. Whoever had ridden here had done so recently. The heavy rains from that wild storm a few nights ago had soaked the earth, so they’d trespassed within the past couple of days. They’d not been shy or sneaky either. They’d ridden right over Prairie Smoke land as well as Hollow Wind, fording the river on the upward side of the bend. They’d ripped up and rutted BLM land as well which was a no-no. “We should see where they gained entrance to our land.”
“Yeah probably. There wasn’t any chatter on the walkie-talkies…” He craned his head in the direction of the dig. “If something had happened at the excavation there would have been noise about it.” I nodded. All that was true. The long-range walkie-talkies had been silent. He turned to look at me, his nose peeling from the latest round of sunburn he’d gotten just yesterday. The man really needed to learn about sunblock. There was a sparkle in his gaze that put me on edge. “This could be how the McCrary’s have been sneaking in and out of our land.”
Oh, it was our land now? That was interesting. Kind of nice to hear to be honest. Maybe if he could think of this land as his he’d be able to start thinking of me as—he jogged back to his ATV and fired it up.
“Let’s see where this goes!” he said then grinned. It was the same sort of grin he’d worn before we’d been busted making out in a locked barn on Hollow Wind Ranch property. Warning bells in my head fired up but by the time I could protest he’d given the four-wheeler the gas and was heading right for McCrary property.
“Asshole!” I shouted at his back and ran to my ride, hurried to unhook the trailer, and speed off after the dickhead. As I crossed the river, water washing over the pegs where my boots rested, I was planning how badly I would kick Will’s ass when I caught up to him. Shep had given us a break for some unknown reason. If anyone else on this side of the Jante caught us, they’d haul us to Clay or Morgan. They’d not be so lenient.
Will was going at full throttle so there was no catching him or pulling in front of him. All I could do was hunker down, hat tucked under my leg, and keep him within sight. The swatch of flattened grass stretched on for miles and then suddenly stopped at a dead fall area. I pulled up beside Will, who had parked and left his ATV to check out the clump of trees that had been uprooted when a tornado blew through about ten years ago.
“Asshole!” I barked as I stormed over to him. He danced out of the way of a firm punch to his bicep. “What the hell?! Are you trying to get us arrested for trespassing?”
“Just relax. This is a clue. I feel it.”
“You’re going to feel cuffs around your wrists if we’re caught on this side of the river.”
He waved me off, his gaze skimming over the twisted dead trees that had been tossed around like kindling wood. “Okay, so the trail ends here. Where did they go after they parked?”
I was too busy being mad to think about that but now that he mentioned it…
“There must be a smaller foot trail or something,” I replied.
“Yeah, or something. Let’s poke around.” He scrambled up over a massive lodgepole pine, one of hundreds at the base of the mountains, which had been blown over to expose huge gnarly roots.
I followed because I was a moron. We scrabbled and climbed, slid and fell, cussed and hissed in pain as we tried to work through the blowdown. About five hundred feet in, with bloody forearms and sore ankles, Will climbed up on a scraggly fir lying on its side. He was slick with sweat, his eyes alive with the joy of adventure. He gave me a hand up. When I stood beside him, he pointed to the left.