Third-Time Lucky (9 page)

“Yeah!” Matt contradicted in a louder, firmer voice. “Enough. We’re doing plenty here. You gotta believe that!”

“What exactly?” She stared back at him, startled into paying more attention.

Matt frowned. “Zak Stone was your idea, remember.”

“Yeah, but what exactly are we letting Lucky in for when we get there?” Here, under the vast canopy of stars, with woodsmoke and sparks drifting skyward, she felt at a loss. What had seemed like a good idea when Lisa framed it had lost its focus. “What do we know about him?”

“Zak Stone?” Matt shrugged.

“Or about this medicine stuff he does?”

“It’s Native American; we know that.” Matt gathered together what little information they had. “OK, so that’s gotta be about spirits and visions, stuff like that. Maybe herbs to help healing.”

Spirits? Visions? Kirstie gazed up at the dancing red sparks. Her eyes were stinging from the smoke and from the tears that would keep on springing up. “Do you mean this is about ghosts?”

“Well, it sure ain’t about antibiotics and endoscopes!” Matt told her. He stood up suddenly. “If you change your mind, we can turn the trailer around and head for home first thing tomorrow.”

“I didn’t change my mind!” Jolted by his quick turnaround, she, too, stood up. “Did you?”

They were face to face, doubt written over their features: Matt’s dark and angular, Kirstie’s fair and softer.

“We don’t know enough to make a good decision,” Matt pointed out. “We don’t know what kind of healing is involved, except we can be pretty sure it’s like nothing I ever learned in vet school. But, hey, we don’t even know if this guy is gonna be there!”

Slowly she nodded. “We tried everything you and Glen knew before we set off, didn’t we?”

“Everything.”

“So it’s more to do with how we feel.” Like she’d said to him before, when they’d both taken this Zak Stone stuff on board: “What’s logic got to do with it?”

“I guess.”

“So, how do you feel?”

Matt’s doubts intensified. He shook his head hard. “I think …”

“Not think, feel?”

“I feel scared,” he admitted. “Like everything I learned about being a good vet might turn out to be garbage. How about you?”

“Scared, too,” she whispered. “That Zak Stone will take one look at Lucky and say there’s nothing he can do.”

There was a million miles of space out there, planets so many light years away you couldn’t begin to understand. A sprinkling of ancient light.

“So?” Kirstie asked Matt.

He looked up at the sky, then turned back to her. “We go onto Rainbow Mountain,” he said.

On Wednesday morning they crossed the Great Divide, the jagged backbone of mountains that split the United States from north to south. West of the Rockies into Wyoming, the map gave Kirstie gentler names for the endless expanses of high, flat land: Sweetwater, Sandy River, and Pinedale.

“Keep going on Interstate 80 through Cheyenne and Laramie,” Bill Englemann had instructed them. “Take a right at Rock Springs for Jackson and Teton National Park. You can’t miss it.”

“We’re aiming for Montana,” Matt had told the kind and courteous forest guard. “Rainbow Mountain, Wentworth County. Do you know it?”

“Sure.” Bill had stabbed Kirstie’s map with a stumpy forefinger. “Through Yellowstone, across the state border, still on the 80. You’re pretty close to Bighorn Canyon where Custer made his Last Stand. There are a couple of reservations up that way, too: Cheyenne and Crow Indians.”

“How long is the drive?” Matt had checked his watch at 7 a.m.

“Three hundred and fifty, four hundred miles, straight through the Cowboy State into the Big Sky!”

“Sounds good to me!” Kirstie had said as they set off.

By midmorning, they’d traveled a hundred and fifty of the four hundred miles and stopped twice to water Lucky. They’d seen road signs warning them of the presence in the area of elk, moose, and grizzlies and others inviting them to stop off and soak in half a dozen natural hot springs.

“Happy now?” Matt asked Kirstie. The flat plains stretched on forever, the white road straight as a die.

“I will be when we cross into Montana.” Dipping her hand into the bag of provisions made up by their mom, she drew out a couple of apples and threw one to him. The radio played a cheerful, jog-along tune about cowboys rounding up cattle and singing around the campfire.

The sun rose in a clear sky; the land was empty and windswept. At midday Matt stopped for gas while Kirstie went to check on Lucky. She made him drink and eat a little alfalfa, promised him that by the following day they would have reached their journey’s end. “Rainbow Mountain!” she whispered in his ear. “Sounds kinda nice, doesn’t it?”

A listless Lucky nuzzled her hand, his lank mane brushing against her cheek.

“It will be,” she said, resting her hand on his trembling neck. “And there’s a guy up there who everybody talks about as the best horse doctor around. OK, so he’s not your ordinary vet, with drugs and needles and stuff. He may be a little weird with his herbs and visions; who knows?”

Coming back from the gas station shop with ice cream and candy bars, Matt raised his eyebrows at her, kidding her as usual. “Talk about weird!”

“We’ll ignore that!” Kirstie told Lucky. She checked his leg bandages, his head collar, his hay net. “All we need to think about is Rainbow Mountain and persuading Zak Stone to make you better, OK?”

In Montana you could see forever. Matt and Kirstie drove Lucky over the border early on Thursday morning. Hawks wheeled in the vast expanse of blue sky. The land to either side of the dirt road was dry, the grass brittle and dotted here and there with old red barns.

They’d broken camp at dawn, kicked earth over their still smoldering campfire, and washed in the cold clear water of a nearby stream. Kirstie had groomed Lucky, trying not to notice the dull, lifeless condition of his once beautiful golden coat. She’d forced a little more feed on him, knowing how difficult it must be for him to chew and swallow when she heard the choked struggling intake of air into his lungs and the noisy, coughing exhalation. “Soon!” she’d whispered as she’d bolted the ramp into position, ready for the final leg of the journey. “Trust me!”

She spent the morning in the passenger seat, tracing their way through the backcountry of southern Montana, shoulders hunched over the creased map. By eleven o’clock they’d passed through a couple of ghost towns—empty wooden houses with boarded-up windows, defunct fuel pumps by the roadside, a rusting, overgrown railway line that stopped in the middle of nowhere. Still the birds circled overhead, while watery clouds were dragged across the blue sky by a wind from the east. By midday, the rain set in.

“Wentworth County.” Matt read the sign by the side of the road.

Kirstie looked up from the map, through the greasy, insect-stained windshield. The wipers weren’t doing a good job on the drizzle, but she could still make out hills like soft green pincushions in the distance, a change from the unbroken plains they’d been traveling through all morning. “The next place should be Bear Claw Creek, I guess.”

Matt worked his stiff shoulders up and down. “I reckon that’s where we stop to ask a few questions.”

If the map was right, Bear Claw Creek was the last town before Rainbow Mountain and the only place where Kirstie and Matt would be likely to get information on Zak Stone. Suddenly, after the long, semi-dazed hours in the truck, Kirstie found herself sitting forward on the edge of her seat.

She noticed a covered wooden bridge over a creek to their left, two haystacks perched on the low horizon. Beyond them there was a farm with white specks moving about in the yard, geese perhaps. Then, on the dirt road ahead, were two cowboys on horseback, well used ropes looped around their saddle horns, weathered chaps flapping wetly against their horses’ flanks.

As Matt passed the two riders, he leaned out of his window. “Bear Claw Creek?” he asked.

“Right up ahead,” came the low, slow reply. “’Bout a mile. You can’t hardly miss it!”

“… Yeah, there!” After a minute or two, Kirstie was able to point to two rows of houses lining the road. They looked dark and dismal through the misty rain, an impression made worse by a couple of old trucks without wheels dumped at the fringe of the town and a steel grain silo towering behind. The buildings dribbled on for a few hundred yards until Matt drove into the town center, a crossroads with telegraph wires looped overhead, a general store, a gas station, and an old cinema.

As he pulled over to the right and coasted into the gas station, Kirstie bit back her disappointment. This was nothing like the place she’d pictured. For miles of blue sky, read gray rain clouds. For pretty farms on green hillsides, read a run-down hick town in the middle of nowhere.

“Hey.” Matt greeted the young woman who came out to serve gas.

Dark-haired, heavily built, and scowling, she nodded back.

“Which way to Rainbow Mountain?”

The woman jerked her thumb toward the range of pincushion hills.

“Can you tell us where Zak Stone hangs out?”

“Who wants to know?”

Matt introduced himself and Kirstie and explained their business.

“Sure, I know where he hangs out.” The woman’s brows practically knitted together with suspicion. “His place is Thunder Lodge. But no way will he see you.”

Matt dipped his head to one side. “How come?”

“He don’t see no one. He gave up horse doctoring way back.”

“Yeah?” Matt was in no hurry to move on, despite a dig in his ribs from Kirstie. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Zak had a problem with the state authorities. They said he earned good money giving advice, mixing herbs, healing and all that stuff. Wanted to tax him plenty. Zak said he ain’t never earned a cent from working with folks’ horses. It was one big mess, I can tell you.” The woman was more forthcoming than perhaps she’d intended. She clammed up again now.

“Real sorry.” Matt jumped down from the cab and asked for a full tank of fuel. When he climbed back in, he said the woman had given him detailed directions to Thunder Lodge.

“How did you do that?” Kirstie demanded. She was taking deep breaths, wanting to reach their journey’s end, yet half-dreading it, staring at the low mountains as if they held a fascinating yet deadly secret.

“Let’s say it was my natural charm!” For a few seconds Matt concentrated on getting them back on the road.

The dusty trailer rattled over the rough ground, then settled into the muddy groove worn by other tires. He smiled tensely at Kirstie and flicked on the wipers. “Zak Stone’s place is two miles east, then take a left at a haystack, a right where the sign says Thunder Rock, then another left down a narrow culvert. Like the two cowboys and the lovely young lady at the gas station said, ‘You can’t hardly miss it!’”

The road ran out in a dead end. There was a thicket of willows and young aspens, a tall sluice box spilling water into a clear pool. The hills rose steeply to either side, cutting out the view of blue, distant mountains.

“This is the culvert, I guess.” Matt climbed down from the cab to take a look around. They’d traveled ten miles on from Bear Claw Creek, following directions yet fearing more and more that the gas station woman had sent them on a wild goose chase. Then they’d spotted the old wooden sign to Thunder Rock and realized they were on the right track after all.

Kirstie followed Matt past the pond, pushing willow branches aside, looking in vain for a cabin or any sign at all that this was the place where Zak Stone lived. “What happened to the road?” she asked.

Matt shrugged. “What happened to electricity?” The overhead cables had run out long before the road, as had any other suggestion of civilization. “And the whole of the twentieth century! Man, I sure wouldn’t want to live here!”

They listened to the wind in the aspen trees, went on searching for a track, a fence, a gate—anything that might lead to a house.

“Hear that!” Kirstie held up a warning hand. There was movement up the hillside, beyond the trees. It could be deer or something heavier; maybe elk. Or maybe only her imagination. As she listened again, the woods fell silent.

“C’mon.” Matt suggested a retreat to the trailer. “Maybe we can get back to the last cabin on the road and ask more questions.” He was already back tracking past the sluice box, stepping carefully around the muddy border of the pond.

But Kirstie stayed behind, gazing into the dripping trees. The aspen leaves were like a green mosaic, shot through with splashes of yellow as the sun broke through the clouds. A white, warm mist covered the rocky ground, and then, as if by magic, the far-off mountain lived up to its name. “Rainbow!” she whispered.

An arc of pure colors rose above the watery landscape, red shading to yellow, green to indigo and violet. It began behind the mountain and ended far off in the west, fading into bruised, blue clouds and more rain.

Kirstie’s silence drew the animals from their rocky heights into the stand of aspens, their feet snapping brittle branches, their bodies brushing against wet leaves. Big creatures, their brown, black, and white bodies appearing and disappearing, their snorting breath and heavy, hollow tread familiar to her. There was a glimpse of black-and-white flank, of white mane and a dark, gleaming eye. Then the first horse came into full view.