Page 12 of Cracking with the Mountain Man

He lies by the front door with his chin on his paws, staring at the wood like he can will it open and find her standing on the other side with flour on her collarbone and scraps in her hand. Every few hours he gets up, walks to the kitchen, looks at the spot where his second water bowl used to be, then goes back to the door.

I poured the bowl out and put it in the cabinet after I got back from her porch. Seemed like the right move at the time. Clean break. Remove the evidence. Go back to canned soup and silence.

The cabin is quiet. The way it was before she showed up with that pie. Before the humming in the kitchen and the sound of her laugh and the smell of ghee at six in the morning because she was testing a recipe before the sun cleared the ridge.

Saturday morning. Market day. She's down there right now, setting up her table, rolling chimney cake dough for a crowd. Sage from the coffee shop is probably helping her carry supplies. People are going to taste her food and tell her she's incredible, because she is.

And I'm up here. Eating cold soup from a can because the stove works fine but cooking for one feels pointless after a week of cooking for two.

Boone won't look at me.

"I know," I tell him.

He exhales through his nose. Loud. Pointed.

Danny's photo sits on the mantel. Has since I moved in. Him on a trail, grinning, daypack over one shoulder, Boone trotting beside him. Before the scars. Before the surgeries. His daughter Lily would be four now. Danny's wife Sarah moved to Vernon with her parents after the second surgery. She sends me a photo of Lily every Christmas. Last year, Lily was wearing a park ranger costume. Sarah wrote on the back: She wants to protect the animals. Just like her daddy did.

Three years of staring at that photo, telling myself that Danny got mauled because I was responsible and I failed, so the answer is to never be responsible for anyone again.

But Priya didn't ask me to be responsible for her. She asked me to stand next to her at a market and eat chimney cake.

And I told her showing up is how people get hurt.

Boone gets up from the door. Walks to me. Puts his chin on my knee. Those brown eyes, Danny's dog's eyes, looking up at me with something I've been avoiding for three years.

Danny walked onto that trail because the data didn't meet the closure threshold. Every ranger in the province would have made the same call. The review board said so. The investigation said so. Danny's own doctor said the grizzly was a juvenile protecting a food cache, unpredictable behavior that no activity report would have flagged.

Three years of rereading those reports looking for the pattern I missed. And the answer, the one I've been refusing to accept, is that there was no pattern. Danny got hurt in a tragedy. Blaming myself didn't undo the scars on his face. It just gave me permission to stop living.

Priya didn't ask me to save her. She asked me to be there. And I compared that to a man who kept her invisible for four years.

Boone's tail moves. Once. Testing.

"Yeah," I say. "I know."

The truck starts on the second try. Boone jumps in before I've fully opened the passenger door. His ears are up, tail going, that focused expression he gets when he's locked onto a direction. Forty minutes down the mountain on switchback gravel, past the turnoff for Priya's cabin, onto the paved road that leads to Crimson Hollow.

The market fills the town square and spills into the side streets. Vendor tents line both sides. There's a bluegrass trio playing near the gazebo, a face painting booth, someone selling honey from a truck bed. People everywhere. Families with strollers. Kids with caramel apples. Old men sitting on benches arguing about the Canucks.

Every molecule in my body wants to turn the truck around.

Boone barks. One sharp sound. Move.

The parking lot behind the general store has one spot left. My boots hit the pavement and the crowd noise rolls over me. Three years of silence, and now there's fiddle music and children screaming and someone calling out prices for organic garlic.

I walk into the market. People notice. Of course they do. The mountain hermit just came down from his rock. Betty from the general store stops restocking her booth and stares. The woman at the post office nudges the man next to her. Someone whispers mountain man and someone else says Tate and I keep walking because the only person in this crowd who matters is somewhere near a demo table with flour on her hands.

The cooking demo is at the far end of the market, near Sage's coffee booth. A small crowd has gathered around a double table where a woman is rolling dough with the precision of a surgeon, narrating as she works. Her voice carries clear over the crowd. Warm. Confident. Teaching without performing.

"The trick with chimney cake is patience. The dough has to be thin enough to wrap without tearing but thick enough to hold the sugar crust. My grandmother would say patience, beta, patience, and then she'd smack my hand if I rushed the rolling."

Laughter from the crowd. She's glowing. Dark hair pulled back, apron dusted with sugar, dimple visible from twenty feet away. In her element. Doing what she was born to do, sharing food and stories and warmth with people who can feel how much she means every word.

She hasn't seen me yet.

Sage has. She's standing behind her coffee booth with a cup frozen halfway to her mouth, watching me walk toward the demo table with an expression that suggests she might start clapping. I give her a look that says please don't. She grins and mimes zipping her lips.

The crowd shifts. A gap opens. Priya looks up from the dough.