Free Whispers on the Wind by Judy Griffith Gill Page B

its tail hung fear. She squared her shoulders, trying to calm her whirling thoughts. She did not believe in telepathy any more than she believed in ghosts. Every pore of her being rejected the notion. It just wasn’t possible!
    Dammit, who was he? she asked herself. Where had he come from? Why was he there? Even more to the point, how, exactly, had he gotten there?
    The thoughts whirled through her mind, answers, each more bizarre, tumbling in after them. Trying to keep them at bay, she went back outside to gather firewood, knowing she had to get more heat into the cave before she left him and hiked out for assistance.
    What if he was a skydiver whose chute hadn’t opened fully, letting him fall to the ground through the trees? she speculated as she broke brittle, dead limbs off tree-trunks. His clothing could have been destroyed in the fall, couldn’t it? He could, she supposed, have crawled into the cave.
    With a compound fracture in his leg? Up those high, stacked slabs of rock that formed the three irregular stairs? No. Not a chance. Besides, assuming he had fallen through the trees, they wouldn’t have totally destroyed even the cheapest jumpsuit on the market. There would have been tatters on him. If nothing else, today’s fabrics—even so-called disposables—were tough, which was why environmentalists hated them. They didn’t degrade for decades.
    With a large armload of firewood gleaned from the forest, she made her way back. Maybe there was a secret nudist colony somewhere in the mountains and he’d wandered away, fallen, hurt himself and...right, crawled into the cave trailing his broken leg all the way up those slabs of rock. Sure he had.
    She crouched beside the spot she and Caroline had discovered, on subsequent visits to the cave, made the best place for a campfire, and set down her bundle of sticks.
    There had to be a better explanation for his naked presence. Hadn’t she read somewhere recently about a photographer who inveigled his friends into stripping off their clothing, donning climbing gear and striking poses on sheer rock faces? The photographs were then turned into postcards, which reportedly sold faster than they could be printed. Tourists, it seemed, loved them for reasons perhaps best understood by a mind on vacation.
    Was Jon one of those weird exhibitionists who volunteered to strip down and climb rocks, she wondered, glancing at his sleeping bag–shrouded form. She broke tiny twigs into little bits, laid them on top of a pad of dried moss and grass, and struck a sparker. If so, where was the photographer? And where was Jon’s climbing gear? The article she’d read had carried pictures of groups of men and women incongruously looped with ropes around their bare middles, coils dangling from their naked shoulders, some with rope slings bisecting their buttocks like hefty G-strings.
    She blew gently on the tiny flame as it licked up through the tufts of brown grass, catching in the twiglets, snapping and crackling. Carefully, she set larger branches around the small fire, watching them catch, grimacing at the rapidity with which they were consumed. She’d soon have to go out for more wood. She thought longingly of the poplar she’d split and left in an untidy heap by the chopping block. What she wouldn’t do to have a big pile of that right next to the ledge. It would warm the cave nicely and burning it would be a lot more fun than stacking it when she got home again.
    She glanced at the man on the ledge. If he’d fallen and hurt himself and they’d put him there while they went for help, surely they’d have dressed him first, or at the very least, covered him! And they would have, if they’d had any sense at all, done just what she’d done, collected wood and tinder and started a fire to keep him warm.
    Even assuming he’d had friends to do just that, the only trace of a fire was what she and Caroline had left.
    The vent at the back of the cave sucked air in from the front,