Free Slickrock (Gail McCarthy Mystery) by Laura Crum Page A

rock-and-pine-tree country spread out around me. In some ways, the Sierras, through dramatic and beautiful, were repetitive; how many ways can gray stone, blue sky, green pines be arranged? The tumbling streams and startling lakes and meadows were a motif constantly repeated. Although I never grew used to the flicker and dazzle of the aspen, or the human-sounding voices in the white water, or the stark moonscapes of the granite passes, they became familiar.
    We were approaching a small meadow called Saucer Meadow. Relief Creek ran along the far side of it, and the whole thing was a blaze of brilliant wildflowers. Bright red-orange, sharp yellow, deep blue-violet, brilliant magenta pink. As the trail dropped into the little basin and flowers were all around me, I could identify some.
    Lupine and paintbrush and asters in impossible profusion, wild columbines and leopard lilies, penstemons, larkspur, and monkey flower-to name only the ones I recognized. Arranging themselves in perfect harmonies and rivulets of color along the stream, colonizing a fallen log, grouped around a solitary gray granite boulder. I stopped Gunner and stared in amazement and delight.
    There were no more flowers than butterflies. Small brown ones and blue ones the color of forget-me-nots, slightly larger ones like bright orange mosaics, large black-and-yellow striped swallowtails, and lots of monarchs. In the mid-morning sunshine, the meadow was a blaze of green, slashed with colors and flashes of colors.
    Roey was delighted. Despite the five miles or so she'd covered already, she gamboled about, showing me the proper way to appreciate a meadow. Rolling in the long grass, wading in the creek, chasing and bounding after the butterflies-I laughed out loud to see her.
    Gunner gave an impatient tug on the reins. Either let me eat some grass or let's get moving, he said. I thought about it. Saucer Meadow was lovely, but we still had roughly fifteen miles to go. I had planned to stop for lunch at the aptly named Lunch Meadow, another five miles ahead. Better keep moving.
    I clucked to the horses and rode on. The breeze brushed my face gently, as I tried to take it all in. The sunny expanse of green and flowers, with the wind blowing through the willows and cottonwoods that fringed the stream banks. Such warm, open, friendly greenness, so free and full of light. It was an amazing contrast to the hard stone country all around it; it seemed almost magical.
    I looked over my shoulder as we entered the pine forest once again, saying good-bye.
    Another rocky ridge ahead. Pine trees and granite. The wind moved, that clean, lonely Sierra wind that blows in the pines. Around me the rocks seemed to tumble in a frozen cascade, a jumbled silver granite landscape ever restless in its heart. The meadows and lakes were tiny flecks of stillness in a great, rough tapestry of hurled rock.
    I rode on. Slowly the feeling of being alone in these mountains was coming back to me. Each mile that took me farther from the pack station, from civilization, from my real life, brought me closer to that old feeling, that elusive sense of place.
    I’d been here alone before; I knew these mountains. They weren't a place of close, warm, familiar beauty, they won't cuddle up to you as some gentle hills and pretty valleys will. I felt dwarfed, always, by the roughness of this place, by its indifference.
    And I felt honored to be here. To be tolerated by these bizarrely lovely mountains-this place not made for man. Only in the meadows, and in those little pockets of meadows on the shores of the lakes, did I ever feel briefly at home, as though perhaps I could really live here.
    I clucked to the horses, called to the dog. For now, I was a sojourner; for the present moment, my home was on my back. Or, more literally, on Plumber's back.
    I was getting hungry. By my reckoning, it was almost noon. Reckoning was all I had to go on; I hadn't brought a timepiece. By choice, not error. I'd learned from my