Chapter 6: The Tracker

Wanda Starkey said no before I finished the sentence.

She was sitting up in Thunder's stall with her hip on two pillows and a cigarette she wasn't allowed to have.

"No," she said again. "Get out of my horse."

"You're the last guide alive who knows the founders' line. Granger told me."

"Granger talks too much for a man who never talks."

"Twelve miles, the river and the ridge. I don't even know where the trail goes after the creek."

"Good. Then you can't get lost on it."

"Wanda."

"I said no." She stabbed the cigarette out on the stall door. "I've taken a girl up that mountain once. I'm not doing it twice."

She wouldn't say any more about it.

I changed her dressing. I checked her hip. I took away her cigarettes.

She called me something that made the one-eyed warrior choke on his coffee.

I was at the barn door when she spoke again.

"Four miles."

I turned around.

"Four miles at dawn," she said. "The logging road loop, up past the cattle guard and back. No stopping. You stop once, I'm done with you."

"And if I make it?"

"Then I'll think about it."

"That's not a deal."

"It's the only one on the table, sweetheart."

At five the next morning, it was thirty-eight degrees and still dark.

Wanda rode down from her cabin on a rusted green four-wheeler with a quilt over her knees and her cane strapped across the handlebars.

"Doctor's orders," she said, before I could open my mouth. "Mine."

Granger watched from the porch with a coffee cup, wrapped in a blanket.

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