A Soldier's Pledge

“Your sister’s worried you might be suicidal.”

“If I was going to commit suicide, would I torture myself first by trying to walk down this river?”

“How should I know? I’ve never been able to figure out why men do the things they do,” Cameron said, adjusting the netting over the brim of her hat. “My ex-husband was a complete mystery to me.”

He paused and half turned toward her. “I came out here to find out what happened to my dog. That’s all.”

“What if you don’t find him?”

“Her. I plan to keep looking until I do. She’s out here somewhere. She wasn’t killed by that bear. Hurt, maybe, but not killed. She was wild when I found her in Afghanistan, and she knows how to survive. She’s a fighter. She’s smart and she’s tough. I came out here to find her and bring her home, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

He resumed walking with his stiff, awkward limp. She matched his pace, keeping three steps behind. “Where’s home?”

“Northern Montana. A place near Bear Butte, on the Flathead Reservation.”

“Aha! No wonder you’re so tough. You’re not only the Lone Ranger, you’re Tonto.”

“Just because you live on the rez doesn’t make you an Indian. Whites can own land there. The Allotment Act of 1904 gave every Flathead Indian a certain amount of land on the reservation. The rest of the reservation land was sold off to whites in a typical government scam, half a million acres. One of the settlers who bought a holding was my great-grandfather. He married a Kootenai girl and had a bunch of kids. My mother has the place now, but it’s falling down around her. She should just give it back to the Indians. It rightfully belongs to them.”

“But you’re part Kootenai, so that makes it your home, too.”

“I only call it home because I was born and raised there.”

“You said when you find your dog you’re going to bring her back there, so it’s more than just the place you were born. You must want to go back.”

He kept walking and didn’t respond.

“What about your army career?” Cameron asked after a respectful interlude of silence. “Don’t you have to go back and finish that up first? How many years have you been a ranger in the army?”

“How many years were you married?” came his curt reply.

“Too many,” Cameron said, ignoring the jab. “Getting married to Roy was a big mistake. He liked women. All women. He said he liked me best, but I got sick of sharing him with all the others about a year after saying ‘I do.’ I didn’t know what I was agreeing to when I said my vows. How could I cherish and honor someone who was screwing around with every willing female north of 60?”

Each step was a study of caution, navigating the tangle of underbrush, fallen branches and mossy logs.

“Anyhow,” she continued, “Roy was a real sweet talker. He could charm the pelt off an ermine. My father raised me while working in a string of backcountry sporting camps, so I was brought up among men, but those men were all too respectful to be anything but polite to me.

“Then along came Roy. He was hired by the same big outfitter me and my daddy were working for at the time, so that’s how I met him. He was flying trophy hunters and fishermen into the bush, same as we were. Roy was dashing and handsome, and he was the first man who made me feel pretty. He told me I had a smile that could light up New York City. I think I fell in love with Roy on our very first date. He took me to the village dump so we could watch the bears pawing through garbage, but that was just an excuse to get me alone in his pickup truck. He was the first man who ever kissed me, and holy boys, could Roy ever kiss.”

“How would you know?”

“How would I know what?”

“How would you know Roy could really kiss if he was the first man who ever kissed you?”

Cameron laughed at the silly question. “Either a man can kiss or he can’t, and any female worth her salt can tell the difference between a good kisser and a bad one right off the bat. She doesn’t have to kiss a thousand men to know something as simple as that. Anyhow, I finally figured out how Roy got so good at kissing, and when he wouldn’t give up his philandering ways after we got married, I divorced him. I suppose we’ll run into each other from time to time, we’re both still bush pilots flying in the north country, but I won’t be kissing him, that’s for sure. I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Where’s your father now?”

Cameron focused hard on the ground at her feet. “Oh, Daddy flew his plane into a mountainside about a month after I got married. He was a real good pilot, careful. It was an unexpected turn of real bad weather, rotten luck and mechanical failure that killed him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” she said. It still twisted her up inside to talk about it. She guessed it always would. “Were you ever married?”

“Nope.”

“Smart.”

He was having more and more trouble getting his leg over obstacles. Finally he stopped. “You go on ahead. I’m just slowing you down.”

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go start the cook fire. You can’t miss the camp. Just follow the river. It’s not much farther. We’re almost there.”

Cameron took it as a very good sign that he didn’t put up any argument about sharing her camp. It had been a hard slog, and he was ready for a break. They both were.

This was only day two, and things were working out just the way she’d planned.

* * *

BY THE TIME he reached the camp, the sun was angling into the west. Cameron had started the campfire and opened the bottle of wine. The steaks were nicely marinated, the potatoes were all dressed and wrapped in aluminum foil jackets, ready to be nestled into the coals, and she’d made a salad, courtesy of the well-stocked cooler. Best of all, the breeze was still stiff enough to keep the bugs down. She had removed her mosquito netting, changed into dry clothes and touched up her makeup. The stage was set.

He didn’t say anything when he arrived at the camp site, just looked around, laid his rifle case down, shrugged out of his pack and dropped into one of the folding camp chairs. He pushed the mosquito netting back over the top of his hat and sat there, looking completely wrung out. Cameron poured a glass of the bordeaux into one of the fancy polycarbonate nesting wineglasses that were a wedding gift she’d never used, and handed it to him, then poured a second glass for herself and sat in the other chair.

They gazed at each other across the small cook fire, which was already settling into a nice bed of coals. She took a small sip of wine, wondering what she should say. His pant legs were soaked from walking through the wet brush, and she wondered if he had a dry pair in his pack. She wondered if she should suggest that he change into dry clothing because the evening was shaping up to be a chilly one.

She pondered why she was wondering if she should say these things when normally she would just say them. She’d never been bashful when it came to speaking her mind, and Walt had told her more than once that she was downright bossy, yet all she could do was sit with her wineglass clasped in both hands and watch him and wonder what to say.

“I have a plan,” she blurted out, startling herself because she hadn’t thought to speak aloud, not while he was looking at her that way. He raised his wineglass and took a taste, still watching her over the small campfire.

“You give me the clothes you’re wearing,” Cameron continued, “I put them in my laundry sack, and tomorrow morning first thing I take them down to the trapper’s cabin. I’ll leave them there, hanging all around the outside of the cabin. Then I come back up here, pick you up and we leapfrog our way back to the cabin. You can walk a bit, or I can drag something of yours and do all the walking while you take the canoe. We’ll cover a lot more ground and lay a good scent trail that way. If your dog survived that run-in with the bear, chances are she stayed in the area. That cabin is the only human structure along this whole river. She’ll pick up your scent and home in on it.”

He took another swallow of wine. His eyes never left her face.

“My daddy had a couple hunting dogs when I was little,” she said. “Bang and Vixen. Every once in a while they’d run off on a hot trail, and when they hadn’t come back by dark he’d leave his wool jacket there on the ground. Sure enough when he went back the next day those beagles were right there by his jacket, waiting for him.”

She set her wineglass on a flat stone, put another chunk of driftwood on the fire, raked out a bed of coals, nestled the potatoes on it and covered them with more coals. “I hope you like steak and potatoes,” she said. “That’s tonight’s special.” She used a piece of driftwood to nudge the live fire to one side of the fire ring, then laid the grill over the narrower end and the exposed bed of coals. “I won’t do a dirty steak, don’t like the grit. I prefer throwing steaks on a hot grill.” She rose to her feet, fetched the bottle of wine and topped off his glass. “There’s an old saying, ‘Wine gives strength to weary men,’” she said. “Sometimes when I’m really tired, the only thing that gives me the strength to cook and eat my evening meal is sipping a glass of wine first. That’s good wine, isn’t it?”

She sat back down in her chair, cradling her own glass. “Bet I could catch us a char for breakfast right off this point when the sun sets.” She gazed out at the river. “See that riffle halfway across? Right below it. Bet there’s a beauty or two just laying there in that back eddy. Do you like trout? Rolled in cornmeal and fried in bacon fat, it’s the best breakfast ever.” She took a taste of the wine and congratulated herself for choosing so well.

“Roy didn’t like fish,” she continued. “He liked to catch them, but he wouldn’t eat them. How can anyone trust a man who won’t eat a wild caught trout?” She stretched her legs toward the fire, flexed her ankles and admired her L.L.Bean hunting boots. “These Bean boots are good boots for this kind of travel,” she said. “They sure are good for tramping in the woods and canoeing. If I’m lucky, I can get four months out of a pair.”

She cast a covert glance from beneath her eyelashes. Was he falling asleep on her? She pushed out of her chair, retrieved the steaks from the cooler and laid them on the hot grill. The steaks hissed. Fragrant smoke curled up from the bed of coals. “Maybe you could tell me a little something about your dog,” she said. “Like how you found her in Afghanistan.”

He shifted in his chair, pulled off his hat and laid it on his knee. “I didn’t find her,” he said. “She found me.”

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_c5abe09e-4b26-54fa-b53c-8195c347a76b)

SHE FOUND HIM in the Hindu Kush, in the rugged mountains along the Pakistan border. He was on advance patrol, the only American in the group of four. They were scouting for a possible Taliban training camp in some of the roughest, wildest mountains they’d been in north of Hatchet. For over a week they’d had little contact with the outposts to the south, and they’d been unable to find the rumored camp. He kept to himself when they bivouacked that night, preferring to keep his own company. Ever since the outpost attack at Bari Alai, he hadn’t really trusted Afghan soldiers.