Bj James - Journey's End

“She?”

His eyes blinked open, the telephone crackled under his grasp. “She! Tell me this is a joke, Val. I need for you to tell me this is a joke.”

The open phone line hummed hollowly in his ear.

“Val! No! Don’t you dare.”

With the sounding of a pleased and wicked chuckle, the line went dead. Valentina had seized her victory and signed off. Leaving her brother with a broken connection and a growing sense of dismay.

“A woman!” Ty muttered to the four walls, to the mountains, to the darkening Montana sky. “Merrill Santiago is a woman.” The receiver clattered into its cradle. “What the hell have you done? Why, Valentina?”

Brooding in the gathering of twilight, Tynan knew with dreadful certainty there was no help for his sister’s coup. No remedy for an O’Hara fait accompli.

“Caged with a wounded kitten for the winter. A female kitten! God help me. God help us both.” Teeth clenched, he scowled into the first fall of night. “Beginning with tomorrow.”

One

Snow!

Tynan O’Hara looked into a cloudless Montana sky and offered another silent plea. He cajoled. He implored. Before that he’d commanded, demanded. And he’d cursed.

But Mother Nature, that fickle and wily lady, hadn’t listened. No more than Valentina had listened.

“When will I learn to say no, and mean it?” he asked the wolf sitting patiently at his feet.

As it echoed through the comfortable, but spartan room, the sound of his deep voice would have been startling if there had been ears other than his own and the wolf’s to hear. He spoke softly for a man so large, his words filled with unshakable, ironic calm even in anger. Anger directed at himself, destined to be short lived as his anger always was.

Leaving the window and its ever changing view, he crossed to a woodstove. The scarred and monstrously ugly antique, more than thrice his thirty-five years, had proven more than thrice as practical for his needs than one less ugly and more modern. Lifting a battered tin pot from the iron top, he refilled a tin cup nearly as battered. Sipping the brew that would have grown hair on his chest if it weren’t there already, he returned to his study of sprawling pastures and silent mountains. The latter, riddled with deep gashes of chasms carved by the great rivers of ice called down by the unheeding Mother Nature aeons before, forever fascinating.

Ty moved with an easy grace, walked with an agile step. Attentive and poised as he was in everything.

Given his manner, his coal black hair, his chiseled cheeks and darkly weathered skin, were it not for his eyes, he might have been mistaken for a member of the nearby Indian tribe. But as there were no ears to hear the soft, deep voice, neither were there eyes to see the eyes that were as blue as a Montana lake, bluer than its sky. Irish eyes, an arresting reminder of his black Irish heritage, in a thoroughly American face.

The quietude with which he surrounded himself, with which he unfailingly reacted, told less of his share of the fabled Irish temper than of a remarkable control. Which, now, as he looked out over the rugged land, was sorely tested.

This was his home, his time. The season of the tourist, the interim when he served as guide and outfitter for the temporary guest, was over. The season purposely cut short, with most of the horses moved to more temperate pastures; the summer hands decamped, scattered, taking up their winter’s work.

And Tynan O’Hara had returned to the small cabin no tourist and few ranch hands had ever entered.

He wasn’t misanthropic. Far from it. He truly enjoyed these people he called summer folk, enchanting the ladies with his easygoing charm, engaging the gentlemen with his down-to-earth approach to life and living. And all of it easily, naturally done, with Ty hardly realizing that he had. He was always glad to see them come, the wide-eyed and eager adventurers with childhood dreams of the West tucked in their hearts and shining on their faces. He delighted in sharing with them this land, the land that had chosen him, the wilderness that fulfilled his own dream and halted his restless wandering.

Yet when summer was done, and the mildest of autumn past, he was equally as glad to see them go. As delighted to have the land he called Fini Terre to himself once again.

Now winter loomed and, with no respect for the calendar, could arrive at any minute. When it came, born on westerly winds created by the ever changing Pacific Coast weather, like all survivors of this challenging parcel of earth, he would be ready.

In a barn divided into both stable and garage, there was a truck, a snowmobile, and a snowplow. Stored in sheds set apart were gasoline and hay to fuel whatever form of transportation he wished or would need.

A plentiful supply of wood was chopped, split and stacked in a shed attached to the small cabin. An ample reserve of food and medical supplies had been laid down in the cellar, along with a selection of his favorite wines. Just in case, though he didn’t know what case, there were kegs of water, as well. In this place of clean streams, lakes, and snow, it required a stretch of the imagination to envision the lack of water becoming a problem. Within the cabin, itself, there were lamps and oil, candles, and books. Even snowshoes and skis, and every other conceivable supply, from flashlights to extra buttons.

As efficiently as the ever busy red squirrel, he had prepared. And like an old bear he looked forward to the six foot snows and was ready to hibernate. Like an old bear in a tuxedo, he admitted ruefully when he thought of the generator, waiting and ready for when the electricity would inevitably fail; the sophisticated radio he would use only in the event of an emergency; and a state-of-the-art computer residing in the small, anterior room off the gallery that he called his lair.

“What the hell happens now when the snows cover the windows and seal the doors?” he asked the wolf as he regarded a sky that showed no sign of granting the very weather of which he spoke. “What will I do when the electricity stops and the generator dies, and the lonelies creep in?”

The lonelies.

His name for a very integral part of living as he did. That endless interval when Spring is nearly a dream realized, yet Winter lingers arrogantly, behaving its worst, its mood most capricious. A condition perfect for sending one plummeting into depression and the madness of cabin fever, or for strengthening one’s resolve and renewing one’s soul as it did for Ty.

“What will it do to Simon McKinzie’s walking wounded? What miracle does he expect of me?”

The wolf grinned, thumped his tail once on the bare floor, and kept his own counsel. Tilting his head, he presented the soft, vulnerable underside of his ebony throat to be scratched.

“No answer, huh?” Without interrupting his vigil, Ty stroked the wolf. “I guess you’re thinking it’s my own fault, that we wouldn’t be in this predicament if I’d only said no to Valentina. But could you say no to your sister? Wait!” In a forestalling motion he lifted his hand from the wolfs throat. “Don’t tell me, I know. But I promise you, sport, you’d be as big a sucker as I’ve always been if your sisters were like Val. Or Patience.”

The wolf turned an uncertain look at him.

“You don’t think so, I take it?” A nearly silent rumble drew taut the furry black throat as the wolf turned to stare again out the window. “Better think again. You’d understand if you knew their history with me. No,” he corrected. “You’d understand better if you knew my slavish history with them.”

With a self mocking shake of his head, Tynan O’Hara murmured, “I keep telling myself the day will come when I won’t be such an easy mark for either of my sisters. But, in my heart, I know that will also be the proverbial cold day in Hell.”

The rumble became a soft growl, as the wolf grew uncommonly impatient with his master’s uncommon monologue.

“I know, sport,” he soothed the wolf. “I’m not completely blinded, I see it, too.”

A flash of light where there should be only grass and rolling hills had caught human as well as canine attention. Setting the cup aside, with hands shoved abruptly into the hip pockets of his jeans, his mouth drawn into a stark line and eyes narrowed against the brilliant unsullied sky, Ty waited with the wolf for a second flash.

“There,” he muttered. A sound not unlike a growl itself.

As if needing only this cue, the wolf drew himself to attention. Ears perked and acutely tuned. Eyes, no less blue than any fourth generation Irishman’s, riveted. As the ridge of fur bristled the length of his spine, he stood like a shadowy sentinel by the side of the human he’d chosen as his own.

The light flashed, then again in another place, drawing ever closer to the cabin. “And there,” Ty confirmed grimly. “Coming too fast.”

The flash, light glinting off the windshield of a vehicle approaching as if it expressed the turbulent mood of its driver, became constant. In a matter of minutes, if it made the grade that dipped, then rose to the cabin, the Land Rover would be in his yard.

The vexing winter boarder would have arrived.

“Easy, easy,” Ty said as much to himself as the wolf. A plume of dust heralded the threatened advent. Sighing, he groused again under his breath, “It looks like there will be three of us for the winter after all.”

Curious at the strange mood of his human, or perhaps in commiseration, the wolf nipped gently at the corded seam of Ty’s jeans.

“Are you wondering why I don’t stop grumbling and live up to my word?” In a stroke of his finger under the animal’s throat, Ty lifted its gaze to his. “Are you thinking a promise is a promise, especially to Valentina? Is that it? Well, you’re right. So, I suppose we’d best go make like a welcoming committee.”

With the wolf at his heels, he stepped to the door and opened it. At the edge of the porch he paused, breathing in deeply, savoring what he feared might be his last comfortable breath for a while. “Just one more question, Shadow.” He addressed the wolf by its name for the first time. “What the hell are we going to do with a woman in our all male sanctum for eight long, cold months?”

The wolf gave him another slow, considering look.

Lifting a sardonic brow, Ty laughed, “Spare me the ‘if you don’t know, Buster, I’m not going to tell you’ looks. Believe me, that’s a complication I don’t need and don’t want.”

The wolf only looked at him, silent and still, hackles at half mast.

“If we’re lucky, maybe she’ll hate us on sight. Hopefully, in time to hightail it back to the train crossing tonight and the airport tomorrow.”

Descending the steps, man and wolf crossed the small lawn. At the edge of the drive they waited. With no appreciable sign of caution, the approaching vehicle disappeared into the declension that set Tynan O’Hara’s world apart. “There’s still hope, Shadow. Until the very last, there’s hope. Who knows?” Ty shrugged heavy shoulders clad in a dark woolen shirt. “Maybe two ugly guys won’t be her idea of winter companions.”

The Land Rover topped the rise, skidded to a halt, obscuring car and driver in a cloud of dust. A shower of loose stone pelted Ty’s shins and boots. The wolf took a discreet step back as if disassociating himself from the man as much as avoiding the flying debris, Ty coughed and blinked, observing the desertion wryly.

“Okay, have it your way, traitor,” he said softly, without rancor. “One ugly guy and a conceited mutt.”

“A good-looking guy and man’s best friend,” Merrill Santiago sputtered through clenched teeth as she glared through the sifting haze her protesting tires had created.