Stony River Read Online Free

atop the heap—a good three inches above the pan.
    Sevana found an unmatched assortment of tinware and utensils on a plank shelf above the counter, and set two places on the warped tabletop. Finished with her task and not knowing what else she could do for him, she backed away from the intense heat and escaped out the open door.
    Out on the front path she stopped and faced the valley, gratefully breathing in the fresh evening air as she surveyed the immense ridge that stole so much of the sky. A velvety mantle of trees covered it uniformly, except for a few chutes where snow slides had scoured away the trees and only brush remained—the lighter-green scars scratched down its flanks like claw marks. It commanded her attention by its sheer mass as it rolled across the horizon in a complexity of form, its creases sunk in shadow and its surfaces bathed in golden light. It boxed her in, so that she wished for the open spaces of Toronto.
    But Toronto was behind her now, and truthfully, she wasn’t sorry. She had things to do with her life. Her father had asked her to stay the summer here, so she would; but then she would be on her own, taking art lessons in Lethbridge and beginning her quest to become a classical artist whose work would leave a significant and lasting mark on the world.
    Not a tree on that great mountain stirred, and yet far distant came a low rushing sound that only added to the wide stillness lying over the whole land. It seemed she had fallen through the cracks of the normal world into some alter-dimension set away from the rest of life—untouched by it, indifferent to it. There was nothing but silence here, and so great a silence! It touched everything, pervaded everything. It touched her, and she regarded it curiously. It was a new thing to her, this absence of manmade activity, this knowledge that she could stand there as long as she chose and still hear nothing but the wind.
    Fenn came out on the porch with a bottle of beer and sat on the bench by the door, opening his book. Sevana’s face lit at the sight of him, and she hurried up the path calling in amazement: “Oh Fenn, such a place this is—the mountains, and the song of the wind!”
    “That’s not the wind, that’s the river you hear,” he said, and began to read as if she wasn’t there.
    She slipped away quietly to explore the homestead by herself. The clearing was circled by thick, luxuriant evergreen trees, providing a dark background for two statuesque birch trees with lime-green leaves and white-skinned trunks up the hill. Under the closest birch resided a miniature log building—which Sevana, looking in, saw was the bathhouse. Further upslope near the other birch, she found a metal spring pipe in the hillside gushing full-force into a wooden reservoir, where Fenn had stashed a generous supply of bottled beer to keep cold. The sight of the splashing water made her so thirsty that she stooped and managed to get a chilly, refreshing drink right from the pipe before she wandered on.
    In the upper back corner of the clearing, a chestnut horse was grazing the high grass by the barn. Sevana liked horses. Approaching him slowly, she addressed him kindly and reached up to stroke his black mane. But when he only shook his head and continued to clip off bites of grass, ignoring her, she left him alone and took a little path down to the house, where a dwindling supply of firewood was stacked on the back porch.
    A fir tree stood next to the house, so close that some of its moss-draped branches touched the extended roof of the porch. The trees were gigantic here, she realized—twice the size of any she’d seen before. Experimentally she stretched her arms around its thickset trunk, and only reached halfway.
    When she went through the back door, she found Fenn in the kitchen, dishing a mound of hash onto each plate. “Dinner’s on,” he said briefly. “Milk’s in the icebox if you want it.”
    Sevana opened the refrigerator. It was dark