Page 5 of Eco-Activist's Mountain Men
He’d never stop.
I’d never hear the end of it.
That settles it—I have to pull myself together. I also have to find out who she is, where she came from, and what she’s doing unconscious in our medi-bay.
Time to call on Luke again.
"Luke… we need to talk."
"Sure."
I’ve pounded back down the corridor and headed outside to the chainsaw shed. Luke hasn’t moved from his workbench. He’s finished servicing the husky (that’s what everyone calls the Husqvarna chainsaws), and he’s refitting the bar. Not the big twenty-eight-inch bar, though, just an eighteen-inch one that’s better suited for the general cleanup we’ll need tomorrow for stom clean-up duties.
"That fai—er… that woman," I correct myself. "Who the hell is she, and what’s she doing unconscious in my medi-bay?"
"I dunno, boss."
"Dunno?.. Dunno? Well… whatdoyou know, for fuck’s sake?"
I love Luke to pieces—we’ve known each other for years—and I’d rather have no one else beside me in a tough spot. But sometimes his reticence to speak drives me insane. He must know something.
He puts down the chainsaw and the adjusting wrench and looks up at me for the first time.
"Why, boss, is she important to you?" Is that a glimmer of humor in his eyes? It had better not be.
"Important? Jesus, Luke, it’s not an unreasonable question. I’m supposed to be running this place, and suddenly there’s a mysterious young woman with pink hair, fast asleep in one of the bedrooms, with Southpaw snuggled up next to her of all things, and I know nothing about her. Yes, of course it’s important." I take a deep breath to calm myself down. "Now… please… tell me what you know."
"She’s a stranger."
"She’s a stranger? A stranger? Jesus wept. I already know she’s a stranger, Luke. The point is, who is she, and how did she get here? Now are you going to give me a straight answer, for crying out loud?"
"But I don’t know who she is or why she’s here."
I open my mouth to speak, but he holds up a hand.
"No. Let me finish. Here’s what happened. I was outside lashing down the tarp over the woodpile to keep the logs from flying around in the storm. This was…" he consults his watch. "Oh, about an hour and a half ago, I guess. Anyway, there I was, wrestling with the tarp, and Southpaw came up to me."
"That's unusual." I consider back over the couple of years we've been sort of sharing the lodge with the wolf we'd rescued as a pup from one of those nasty traps that the less pleasant type of hunter sometimes sets for smaller mammals. Once his leftfront paw had healed, he'd hung around, coming and going as he pleased. "Our resident wolf doesn't tend to come up to us, except when he really needs something."
"Agreed, but he gave me that look—you know, the one that says he wants us to follow him—then he trotted off. So I did follow him. About a hundred and fifty yards down the track toward the river, I found a woman lying on the ground, unconscious."
"What the fuck? A woman? Just one woman, on her own? Out here?"
"Right, boss, just this one woman. Well, first I thought she was dead, but I checked her pulse. She was alive. I picked her up as carefully as I could and brought her back to camp."
"Okay, then what did you do?"
"Well… everyone else was busy, so I put her in the medi-bay. She was soaked through to the skin, so I had to take her clothes off, of course. But I was respectful and didn’t look at her or touch her more than I needed to get her dry and into bed."
"I believe you, Luke. You’re not the kind of man to take advantage of a vulnerable woman." Though I feel the heat rising in my own face, just thinking about her naked.
"That’s right, boss. I’m not. She slept through the whole thing, never woke once. I gave her a quick once-over, but nothing majorly wrong. One ankle’s badly swollen, and one wrist even more so—she’ll have a nasty bruise or two, and she’ll probably need a crutch to get around for a few days. But nothing worse. Then I covered her up with a blanket and left her to sleep."
"We got a crutch?"
"Nah. We did have one, but if you remember, Stevie took it when he ran over his own foot with the low-loader back in May… or was it June? He went to Portland to get it X-rayed, but he never came back, and he never sent the crutch back either."
They never do. I nod. "Did she have any ID on her? Passport, driver’s license, paperwork of any kind?"
