Free Leaving Blythe River: A Novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page A

no one out behind the house. Ever. Unless you think it’s important to maintain your privacy from coyotes, elk, and the occasional black bear or grizzly.
    A fresh fall of light, powdery snow had fallen in the night. Yes, still. In early June. Where Ethan came from, such a thing would not happen. Where he found himself now, it did. Snow still clung to the rocky towers of the mountain range outside his window. It was beautiful, Ethan thought, but in the abstract. Really no different from a painting on the wall.
    So he had actually elevated his opinion of the mountains in the time he’d lived here. But they still didn’t mean much.
    Rufus was up on the bed with him, thumping his tail on the quilt.
    Ethan scratched behind the dog’s droopy ears.
    “Let’s see if there’s time to catch him. Talk him into taking you with him on his run.”
    He threw the covers back and stepped out of the bedroom, Rufus bounding ahead into the A-frame’s more or less one big room. No Dad. He looked to his father’s bedroom. Its door stood wide open, making it clear that the bedroom was empty. The house was empty.
    “Damn it,” Ethan said. “He ditched you again.”
    Meanwhile he was half aware of the message machine beeping. Someone must have called without waking him up.
    He stumbled to the machine and hit “Play.”
    “Dude.”
    Glen.
    “Wish I’d gotten to talk to you before I go. Let’s trade places. I’ll sit in that tiny house with your dad all summer, and you go out and probably drown on a sailboat with my dad for three weeks.”
    A pause.
    “Oh, well. Wish me luck.”
    Ethan felt a pang of regret at having missed the call.
    He stumbled into the kitchen area, divided from the rest of the house only by a tile counter, and looked, blinking, into the cupboards. Maybe for cereal. Maybe for kibble. He wasn’t even sure which.
    “It’s such a dirty trick,” he told Rufus. “Who likes to go running more than a dog?”
    Then again, Ethan thought, not all dogs are suited to a run over twenty miles long, which was a possibility on any given day.
    Giving up on looking for anything, and half asleep, Ethan sat down at the table with a surprising thump.
    “I’ll have to take you out,” he said.
    Without that holster of bear spray it was not a happy thought. Except to Rufus, who swung his tail with renewed vigor.
    “No. I can’t take you till he gets back. He has the bear spray. Unless I can find the spare can. He keeps saying there’s a spare can. But I haven’t seen it.”
    He stared at the mountains for a moment in an unfocused way. His eyes were focused, but his brain was not. So when the thought came into his head, it surprised him. He hadn’t seen any thoughts coming.
    “What the hell am I supposed to do all summer?” he asked the dog. “I mean, if I’m here all summer?”
    It seemed to disturb Rufus to be asked a question. He seemed to feel he should attempt to answer, or otherwise help, but ended up just wiggling uncomfortably.
    “At least at school I dared to go outside. At least I was in town. But out here in the middle of nothing and nowhere? With the wolves and the bears?”
    He realized he’d been so focused on getting away from the young cowboys and cowgirls who found him so funny that he hadn’t really thought about the downside. All that time to kill. Right in the foothills of the wilderness.
    He looked around the one big room they now called home.
    “We should get this over with.”
    He began to rummage around the house for the spare can of bear spray. He found it fairly quickly in the kitchen pantry. Because his father had the holster, Ethan would just have to carry it in his hand. That was okay. That was not the problem. The problem was, when he checked the expiration date on the bottom as he’d been taught to do, it had passed.
    “It’s expired,” he told the dog.
    For a moment Ethan wondered how a product that’s made to last for a year and a half had expired in less than three months. It must