Page 9 of Echoes of Twilight (Dawn of Alaska #4)
9
Stikine River Wilderness
A blacktail deer crossed Mikhail’s path before he found a rabbit, so he shot it, field-dressed it, and was hauling it back toward camp in less than an hour. He didn’t grumble about the weight of the deer over his shoulders as he carried it up a ravine either. If anything, he wished the deer was heavier, or that he’d brought his pack with rocks in it, or that he had three miles to walk back to the camp instead of a quarter mile. Anything to work off some of the anger stirring inside him.
Richard Caldwell as secretary of the interior. The very notion nearly made his stomach heave. His oldest brother, Alexei, disagreed with Preston Caldwell on everything from the treatment of the different Indian tribes in Alaska to the management of the seal population to the best way to educate Alaska’s native children. But all of that would be trivial compared to the problems that would arise if Richard Caldwell became secretary of the interior.
He didn’t know whether Richard and Heath had found gold on their expedition. If they had, they weren’t prancing around with excitement and broadcasting it, but that wouldn’t stop a mining company from digging up trees from their roots and clear-cutting a mountainside. It wouldn’t stop them from using dynamite to rip a hole in the mountain’s slope to access the gold and divert streams and rivers to refine it. They’d set up a stamp mill and a chlorination plant and transform the beautiful, untouched wilderness he was looking at into a place filled with grime, reeking of chlorine, and pulsing with the sound of dozens of stamps crushing rock day and night.
He wasn’t exaggerating about what a gold mine would do to the environment. This very thing had already happened across the channel from Juneau, on Douglas Island, where the Treadwell Mine had opened eight years ago, and there was nothing anyone could do to preserve the natural beauty there anymore.
But the Stikine and Iskut Rivers and their surrounding mountains and glaciers were pristine, untouched by the dirtiness of industrialization.
So he prayed Heath and Richard hadn’t found so much as a fleck of gold. That no one in Alaska would ever find another ounce.
And he was going to start praying that Richard Caldwell wouldn’t become the next secretary of the interior. Just like he was going to pray that the horrid man wouldn’t marry Miss Wetherby.
If Miss Wetherby knew the full truth about Richard and what happened all those years ago with the Athabaskans, she certainly wouldn’t agree to marry him, and her father and brother wouldn’t be in favor of the wedding either.
But was it his place to tell them? Three strangers he’d known only for a day?
What if he said something and Richard denied it? Mikhail couldn’t exactly prove anything without Sadzi or her grandfather to back him up.
For now, Miss Wetherby seemed insistent on not marrying Richard, so maybe he wouldn’t need to say anything at all. Or at the very least, he could wait until they returned to Sitka to tell her. Hopefully that would ensure a bit of peace on the trip home. He remembered all too well the fighting that had occurred on his first expedition, the one Livy had been on, and he couldn’t afford to repeat that here.
He trudged down a gully to where a pebbled creek meandered its way through the mountains and was preparing to trek up the other side when something near the creek caught his eye. Miss Wetherby. She was sitting on a log with a leather-bound book open on her lap.
He hadn’t been trying to stay quiet, not while carrying a deer on his back, but she hadn’t heard him coming, which made him wonder just what she was writing.
He took a few steps nearer, only to find that she wasn’t writing at all, she was sketching the view of the creek with a towering Sitka spruce on the opposite side of the bank and a pile of rocks at the base of its trunk.
“It’s lovely.”
She jolted, then turned, her hand pressed to her chest. “Mr. Amos, you scared me.”
“Mikhail. We’re trapped together in the woods, and it’s going to take us at least two weeks to get back to Sitka. I’d say those are grounds for using first names.”
“Very well. You can call me Bryony.” She winced. “But my father and Dr. Ottingford prefer to be addressed by their titles.”
“I’ve never met a scientist who doesn’t want to be called doctor so-and-so.” He slid the deer off his shoulders, then sat on the log beside Bryony and gestured toward the paragraphs she’d written on the page opposite her sketch. “What does it say?”
Redness rose in her cheeks. “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course.”
“You best read it for yourself then.” She slid the journal onto his lap.
He stared down at the words, but the letters swam before his eyes. He willed them to settle into something recognizable, something he could make sense of. But the longer he stared at the page, the worse it became.
Some letters seemed to flip upside down; others swapped places with their neighbors. Even simple shapes he should know by heart scrambled themselves into a mess of symbols he had no hope of deciphering. Word blindness , his sister Kate had called it. She was the only one in his family who knew, mainly because she was the one who had written down every word he’d dictated for his newspaper articles.
Occasionally people asked why he hadn’t written more articles. The truth was, he couldn’t write at all.
“Well?” Bryony’s voice pulled his eyes away from the page. “Do you like it?”
“I... uh...” He swallowed, forcing the tension from his throat, and flipped the page as casually as he could, pretending that he was still reading. “It’s good.”
A smile spread across Bryony’s face. “That means so much coming from you. I know I told you that I read your articles, but I did more than just read them. I studied them thoroughly. You have such a way of bringing Alaska to life with your words.”
A hard ball lodged in his stomach, but rather than answer, he flipped back to the page with her sketch of the tree. “Your drawing is lovely too. It’s my favorite part.”
She brightened even more. “I’ve always liked sketching and writing. My mother would scold me when I was younger, saying I needed to focus on more womanly pursuits. But after she died and I ended up accompanying my father on expeditions, the skills turned quite useful. I always try to capture what I see as accurately as possible, even if it’s not necessarily pretty. Richard says I should make my sketches prettier, though, make the landscape seem like it’s always perfect. But I like including the flaws, like the bark that’s been scratched off the tree there, see?” She tapped the end of her pencil against the tree she’d drawn.
“Or the broken strands of grass on this page.” She flipped backward a few pages, but instead of there being a sketch or writing, there was a rather detailed map of the valley and the canyon they’d traversed to get off the mountain.
She tried to turn past it, but Mikhail reached out and planted his hand on the journal. “Was that a map? Can you go back?”
“To the map?” She flipped back a page. “I suppose. Richard says it isn’t accurate, though.”
Mikhail studied the rendering for a moment. He’d never claimed to be a cartographer, though he’d drawn his share of maps over the years, just to have some type of record of the uncharted lands he’d explored.
None had ever been as detailed or accurate as the one he was staring at now.
He pulled up an image of the valley and canyon in his mind, trying to compare the details he remembered to the map in front of him.
Every part of her rendering seemed perfect, even down to the dimensions of the canyon and the precise spot of the waterfall inside it. “This looks accurate to me. In fact, if I were viewing just the map itself without knowing who’d made it, I would have assumed the maker used cartography tools.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He didn’t know what had persuaded her to want to become a teacher when she had such clear talents for cartography and botany.
“I had more maps, but Richard took them all when he went to find help.”
He scratched the side of his head. “I thought he told you the maps weren’t accurate?”
Her shoulders sagged. “He did, but he said having them was better than having nothing at all, and he might be able to use them to make improvements.”
He didn’t understand why Richard thought her maps were inaccurate, but little about what that man did made sense.
“Can I show you my other sketch now?” She started flipping pages again, and he scanned the pages closely, noting she passed over several more maps before stopping at a page with another sketch. The drawing revealed a beach that held several broken strands of grass along with straight ones that stretched toward the sky.
He ran his eyes over the drawing. “I agree with you. I like the more realistic drawings. And words can often be tricky to get right, so I like that you illustrate them too. That way, people who can’t read still understand your meaning.”
Her brow furrowed, and she tilted her head to the side. “People who can’t read? I never thought of that. I can’t imagine people buying field guides just for the illustrations, but maybe they do.”
Somehow they’d moved from discussing her words to discussing her maps and sketches without her learning that he couldn’t read, and he hadn’t even realized it. But he didn’t exactly feel like revisiting the topic either, so he stood, probably a bit more abruptly than the situation called for. “I’ve got to get the deer back to camp.”
“Oh, I best come too.” She closed the journal. “I said I’d make biscuits.”
Part of him wanted to tell her not to bother, wanted to say that she should stay exactly where she was, sketching and writing and staying far away from Richard Caldwell.
But he couldn’t tell her to do that without explaining why she shouldn’t marry him.
So he waited for her to gather her things, then followed her across the shallow creek and back to camp, thinking all the while that she was probably safer at the creek by herself than anywhere near Richard.