He hadn’t been trying to stay quiet, not while carrying a deer on his back, but she hadn’t heard him coming, which made him wonder just what she was writing.
He took a few steps nearer, only to find that she wasn’t writing at all, she was sketching the view of the creek with a towering Sitka spruce on the opposite side of the bank and a pile of rocks at the base of its trunk.
“It’s lovely.”
She jolted, then turned, her hand pressed to her chest. “Mr. Amos, you scared me.”
“Mikhail. We’re trapped together in the woods, and it’s going to take us at least two weeks to get back to Sitka. I’d say those are grounds for using first names.”
“Very well. You can call me Bryony.” She winced. “But my father and Dr. Ottingford prefer to be addressed by their titles.”
“I’ve never met a scientist who doesn’t want to be called doctor so-and-so.” He slid the deer off his shoulders, then sat on the log beside Bryony and gestured toward the paragraphs she’d written on the page opposite her sketch. “What does it say?”
Redness rose in her cheeks. “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course.”
“You best read it for yourself then.” She slid the journal onto his lap.
He stared down at the words, but the letters swam before his eyes. He willed them to settle into something recognizable, something he could make sense of. But the longer he stared at the page, the worse it became.
Some letters seemed to flip upside down; others swapped places with their neighbors. Even simple shapes he should know by heart scrambled themselves into a mess of symbols he had no hope of deciphering.Word blindness, his sister Kate had called it. She was the only one in his family who knew, mainly because she was the one who had written down every word he’d dictated for his newspaper articles.
Occasionally people asked why he hadn’t written more articles. The truth was, he couldn’t write at all.
“Well?” Bryony’s voice pulled his eyes away from the page. “Do you like it?”
“I... uh...” He swallowed, forcing the tension from his throat, and flipped the page as casually as he could, pretending that he was still reading. “It’s good.”
A smile spread across Bryony’s face. “That means so much coming from you. I know I told you that I read your articles, but I did more than just read them. I studied them thoroughly. You have such a way of bringing Alaska to life with your words.”
A hard ball lodged in his stomach, but rather than answer, he flipped back to the page with her sketch of the tree. “Your drawing is lovely too. It’s my favorite part.”
She brightened even more. “I’ve always liked sketching and writing. My mother would scold me when I was younger, saying I needed to focus on more womanly pursuits. But after she died and I ended up accompanying my father on expeditions, the skills turned quite useful. I always try to capture what I see as accurately as possible, even if it’s not necessarily pretty. Richard says I should make my sketches prettier, though, make the landscape seem like it’s always perfect. But I like including the flaws, like the bark that’s been scratched off the tree there, see?” She tapped the end of her pencil against the tree she’d drawn.
“Or the broken strands of grass on this page.” She flipped backward a few pages, but instead of there being a sketch or writing, there was a rather detailed map of the valley and the canyon they’d traversed to get off the mountain.
She tried to turn past it, but Mikhail reached out and planted his hand on the journal. “Was that a map? Can you go back?”
“To the map?” She flipped back a page. “I suppose. Richard says it isn’t accurate, though.”
Mikhail studied the rendering for a moment. He’d never claimed to be a cartographer, though he’d drawn his share of maps over the years, just to have some type of record of the uncharted lands he’d explored.
None had ever been as detailed or accurate as the one he was staring at now.
He pulled up an image of the valley and canyon in his mind, trying to compare the details he remembered to the map in front of him.
Every part of her rendering seemed perfect, even down to the dimensions of the canyon and the precise spot of the waterfall inside it. “This looks accurate to me. In fact, if I were viewing just the map itself without knowing who’d made it, I would have assumed the maker used cartography tools.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He didn’t know what had persuaded her to want to become a teacher when she had such clear talents for cartography and botany.
“I had more maps, but Richard took them all when he went to find help.”
He scratched the side of his head. “I thought he told you the maps weren’t accurate?”
Her shoulders sagged. “He did, but he said having them was better than having nothing at all, and he might be able to use them to make improvements.”
