Free Arena by Karen Hancock Page B

gripping the shoulder pads of her pack. “I guess they don’t take prisoners, then?”
    He stood. “Better to be eaten.”
    His gaze fixed on the light-washed hollow ahead and went briefly blank. Then he said, “They probably rejoined the main group before daybreak. Come on.”
    As they gained elevation the juniper and sage gave way to oak and pine. Patches of knee-high grass waved in every clearing, hiding a multitude of sand mites. Repeatedly they had to stop and pick the creatures off their legs, yet Pierce continued to refrain from shooting them—to save E-cubes, he said—stomping them to death instead.
    Midmorning Pierce found a scuff in the dirt he called a footprint. He pointed out another scuff soon after, then a crumpled weed and a black mark on the shoulder of a rock. But it was the clear, ridged sole print at the base of a young oak that finally convinced Callie. Their pace slowed now, and she welcomed the opportunities to rest. Her feet were killing her, and the harry bite in her side ached. Her thumb, swollen and purple, still throbbed, to say nothing of her stiff shoulders, her tender collarbone, her overworked back, and her head, which was pounding dully.
    Gradually, tall straight-trunked evergreens replaced the oaks. The ground grew softer, dustier, matted with pine needles, the air redolent with warm sap. Pierce talked of meeting his friends before nightfall.
    They stopped for lunch on a rock overlooking a dry stream bed. Rough-barked pines marched up the opposing slope, and a particularly massive specimen curved out of the rocky bank below them and to the right. A stand of oak blocked Callie’s downstream view, but she wasn’t about to get closer to the drop-off than the ten feet she already was. Pierce, nearer the edge, could keep watch.
    “At least one of them’s hurt,” he said, portioning out the last of his jerky and hardtack. “That’s why we’re gaining on them.”
    Callie glanced at him sidelong. “Your friends?”
    He nodded, studying the ravine.
    “You’re pretty good at this stuff, aren’t you?”
    “I grew up tracking deer and cattle in country not much different from this.”
    “You lived on a ranch?”
    “Just outside Durango.”
    Somehow she hadn’t taken him for a cowboy. She supposed it fit, though—the tracking, the familiarity with weapons, the ease with outdoor life. “So how’d you end up here?”
    His sky-colored eyes glanced at her and quickly shifted away. He bit off a piece of hardtack. “I was riding fence line. Came upon this white panel truck parked in the middle of nowhere. The guys with it said they were doing a survey, and I figured they were Division of Wildlife. They asked for my help.” He crunched down the last of his hardtack. “Next thing I knew I was here.”
    He didn’t ask how she’d gotten hooked, so they sat in silence, listening to the birds calling from the trees. A bee droned toward them, inspected a crumb on the rock, and floated off. With a sigh, Pierce stretched out on his back, cradled his head in his hands, and closed his eyes.
    Callie watched him surreptitiously, taking in the lean form, the broad shoulders and narrow hips, the corded, muscular forearms. He was a far cry from Lisa’s lawyers and MBAs. More like one of the heroes in the cherished Zane Grey novels of her adolescence.
    A cowboy.
    His breathing deepened. He shifted against the rock’s gritty surface and turned his face toward her. Asleep, he looked almost boyish. Perversely her mind snapped back to this morning when she’d awakened in his embrace.
    Hers was not a touching family. Expressions of affection were not explicitly discouraged, they just never occurred. She couldn’t recall more than a handful of times when her mother had hugged her, and she had no recollection of any such demonstrations from her father. Lisa, the consummate psychologist, had initiated more physical contact in recent years, but it was an uphill battle. And as hard as it was to touch each