Page 70 of Wind Valley

“It has a screen!” said Pinky. “To keep the squirrels out.”

“Maybe it blew off. Anyway, the lynx probably appreciated the shelter. He must have come in this morning once the fire was out. He didn’t seem burned, did he?”

“I didn’t ask and he didn’t say.” Pinky looked at his stove in outrage, as if it had betrayed him. “Me and the lynx, we’re usually good. Out on the trapline, I do everything how I was taught. An Ahtna hunter trained me, old Jim Annis, he still followed the old ways. He wouldn’t say an animal’s name while he was hunting out of respect. The animals are sensitive, he told me. If you don’t show them respect, they won’t let you catch them anymore.” He jumped to his feet, looking around the room. “Shit, where is he now?”

Maura jumped up on the couch with a squeal, as if the lynx was a mouse about to scurry across her feet. Pinky grabbed the poker and brandished it in the air with a yell. Lachlan wished he could take a photo of the chaos, but just then he felt something streak past his legs. He opened the door wider and watched the wild creature pounce into the snow and quickly disappear in a flash of spotted fur and tufted ears.

“Oh my god.” Maura collapsed onto the couch, while Pinky set down the poker and got back to work starting the fire. “I can’t believe we just had a lynx in the house. First a wolf, now a lynx, what is going on with the animals around here?”

Pinky sat back on his heels and stared at her. “Wolf?”

“Yes, I guess I haven’t had a chance to tell you. We had a strange wolf encounter.”

“What color was its coat?”

“Gray, I think.”

“And the eyes?”

“Amber,” said Lachlan, as he returned to the living room, having swept the snow back out the front door. “A deep amber.”

“There’s only one pack of wolves with that type of eye color around here. Most have yellow eyes. That wolf came from the Wind Valley pack.”

Maura exchanged a glance with Lachlan. That sure sounded like confirmation that Wind Valley was the source of the strange animal behavior.

“Do you think the lynx came from Wind Valley too?” she asked Pinky.

“I didn’t have time for chitchat,” he said as he shifted the ice pack. “The lynx go wherever they want.”

“Clearly.” Maura grabbed a whisk broom to clean up the ashes the lynx had disturbed.

“If you want to know more, oughta look at them boxes. The Nutty Professor was watching those wolves. He had cameras set up to record while he wasn’t there. He knew a lot about them.”

“I didn’t realize he studied animals,” said Lachlan.

“Oh, he didn’t. He got interested in them because it was their territory out there in Wind Valley. He’d hear wolf calls. The kiddos would get scared. I think that might be one of the reasons they left, now that I think about it.”

“Because they were afraid of the wolves?” Maura asked.

“No, the opposite. He came to love the wolves. Said he didn’t think it was fair to invade their territory. The last thing he said to me was that a wolf could be trusted more than most people. I got the feeling he was talking about someone specific, but I don’t know who or why. Maybe it’s in those boxes. Just be careful with that lamp, would you? It came from the old copper train that used to come out here.”

37

Gingerly, they dismantled the ten years’ worth of detritus that had accumulated on top of the Reed family’s boxes. Maura and Lachlan each took a box, while Pinky snoozed with his cats by the fire, recovering from his scare. It had started snowing again, so no one was going anywhere for a while.

Except that darn lynx. Maura hoped he was back in his own den by now, and really hoped that he didn’t spread the word to his lynx buddies that there was a nice warm spot to hang out at the end of that convenient snow ramp.

Maura’s box was mostly filled with children’s drawings and pen-and-ink sketches by a talented artist who she assumed was Andrea Reed. They depicted a stunning landscape of steep slopes in which the trees grew in one direction only, bent from the constant wind. On the top of one rocky outcropping, a lone spruce tree grew nearly horizontally. In the summer, tall grass rippled in the wind, and one sketch showed the sky filled with a blizzard of white cottonwood seeds.

The artwork was so vivid that she could feel the constant force of the wind against her neck, always pushing, always pressing. What must it be like to live there? She couldn’t imagine, and she couldn’t imagine why anyone would attempt to. As far as she was concerned, the wolves could have it.

Speaking of wolves, several of the sketches included one. They were always removed from the artist, sniffing the air, or posing on a high rock gazing down at the humans below. Even in the wolf sketches, the presence of the wind was visible in the ruffling of its fur, the squinting of its eyes.

“I’m not finding anything useful in here,” she told Lachlan. “Except some interesting ideas about homeschooling. I can probably use some of this stuff with my students. She had the older kids write descriptions of a plant they liked, that kind of thing. She set up scavenger hunts for them, so they had to identify specific types of geological formations in order to find the next clue. I have mad respect for Mama Reed right now.”

“Hmm. Professor Reed had other things to tend to,” said Lachlan, his nose deep in a notebook. “Everything in this box is field journals.”

“Ohh, intriguing.” She abandoned her box and went to sit next to his. Plucking out a journal, she opened it to find scribblings that might as well be in a different language. She recognized chemical formulas, but couldn’t say what they were for. “I thought he was an engineer. This looks like chemistry.”

---