“You Cook and Stay Out of My Way,” the Mountain Trapper Said — Until Her Hidden Scars Changed Eve…

Chapter 6

The mountain lion had been circling the property for a week.

Gideon knew it from the tracks. A big tom, a hundred and forty pounds if it was an ounce, working its way down from the high timber to follow the deer into the lower valleys. It had come close enough twice to leave its sign at the edge of the clearing — broad, deliberate paw prints in the snow, laid down with the unhurried confidence of something that knew it was the deadliest thing on the mountain.

He told Nora not to go past the paddock fence alone.

She had not argued, which surprised him. She was not a woman who followed orders without thinking them through first, and he had come to expect her to weigh every instruction he gave her against her own judgment before she answered. But on this she had just nodded once, quiet, and gone back to her work.

He was two miles up the north draw, checking his lines, when the cat came to the cabin.

Nora heard it first. Rusty went rigid under the table — not the slow rumble of a warning growl, but the silence before one, the long, low sound building in his chest that was not quite a growl yet and was somehow worse than one. The hair stood up along his spine.

She looked out the small east window and saw it on the woodpile, eight feet off the ground, tail working in slow sweeps.

It was watching the paddock, where the two mules stood with their ears flat and their eyes showing white.

Nora moved carefully. She did not run, did not rush, did not make any sound that would draw its attention. She crossed the main room to the rack beside the door and took down Gideon’s spare rifle. A Henry repeater, older than she was, heavier than anything she had lifted in months. She worked the lever with her left hand, checked the load. It was full.

Her father had been a man who believed a woman should be able to defend what was hers. He had taken her out behind the barn when she was twelve and taught her to shoot with a patient, endless repetition that she had hated at the time and would have given anything to have back now. Martin had found this embarrassing. He had told her to forget all that nonsense, that a respectable woman had no use for firearms, that the very idea made her look common.

She had never forgotten it. She had only hidden it, the way she had hidden everything else.

She eased the door open six inches. The cold hit her face. The cat was still on the woodpile, tail working, watching the horses with the flat patience of a thing that had all the time in the world.

She did not aim at the cat.

She aimed above it, and to the left, into the woodpile itself — and fired.

The crack of the shot slammed off the ridge and came back doubled. The bullet tore into the split wood six inches from the cat’s face, sending a burst of flying splinters and a spray of snow directly into its line of sight. The tom came off that woodpile like it had been scalded, all four feet leaving the ground at once, and it was into the pines before the echo had died.

The horses screamed and kicked at the paddock fence. Rusty was on his feet at the door, barking.

Nora stood on the porch in the cold with the rifle still at her shoulder, watching the tree line where the cat had vanished. She held her breath and counted. The pines went still. Nothing moved.

She went inside. She reloaded the rifle, slow and careful, working the lever left-handed, and hung it back on the rack. Then she put a pot of coffee on and stood at the stove with her back to the door, and she did not let her hands shake until the coffee was made.

When Gideon came home two hours later, he read the tracks in the snow around the woodpile without speaking. He walked the whole circuit of the clearing, crouched once by the cat’s prints, stood and looked at the pines for a long moment. He came inside and looked at the rifle on the rack, and then at her, standing at the counter cutting dried apples.

“Tom lion,” she said without turning around. “Went north.”

Gideon took off his coat. He hung it properly on the peg. He sat down at the table.

After a while he said, “You’re a decent shot.”

“My father taught me.” She kept cutting. “He said the land didn’t much care whether you were a woman when something came for you in the dark.”

Gideon poured himself coffee without being invited, and sat with it at the table, and watched her work for a while.

“Smart man, your father,” he said.

It was not much. From most men it would have been nothing. But Nora Hale had been living with Gideon Vane for two months, and she had learned that from him, it was considerable — that he did not spend words he did not mean, that everything he gave was weighed and measured and true.

She did not turn around. She kept cutting apples, because if she turned around he would see her face, and her face was doing something she did not have a name for.

“Thank you,” she said to the counter.

The stove popped and breathed its warm light across the kitchen, and outside the mountain settled back into its silence, and for a while neither of them said anything, and it was the most comfortable silence she had sat in since she could remember.