waved at the ATV parked in front of the house. Every one of the ranchers in the area seemed to have the all-terrain vehicles, and old-timer Rusty Zidek, who was well into his nineties, sometimes used one to get around town even now. Except for the color, this one reminded Robin of Rusty’s. Bright yellow and designed for two people to ride side by side with a flatbed behind, it resembled a small, stripped-down version of an early Jeep. A tiny wagon had been attached for good measure.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to go with you?” Olivia asked. “This is a big place, you could get lost out here.”
“It’s all planned out, hon,” Jack assured her. “Ethan and I have gone over it in detail. He’s got GPS, an aerial map in case of weak signal and detailed instructions. They’ll be fine. Besides, they’re just going up as far as Gazebo, where they’ll eat lunch, and then on to Whistler. They should be back here by two.” He looked to Ethan then and said, “If you’re not here by half past, I come looking for you.”
Ethan nodded and answered, “Understood.”
Olivia, meanwhile, was smiling at Robin. “Gazebo,” she said, as if that had some special meaning. “I see. Well, then, don’t let us keep you.”
Ethan started transferring their gear, which included an odd sort of cooler, to the flatbed of the ATV. They climbed in, buckled up and were off. The thing proved to be a surprisingly loud form of transportation. Robin was thankful that Mamie had insisted she take a knit headband to wear under the hood of her coat, and not just because the cold wind would have sliced off her ears. And to think that it was only the sixth day of December.
Winters in Albuquerque and Santa Fe could be cold, but the lows there approximated the averages here, and with three hundred–plus days of sunshine and low humidity year-round, Robin had barely noticed the change of seasons back in New Mexico. Here the seasons were distinct, the precipitation and humidity overwhelming for a desert rat such as herself and winter seemed to be gray more often than not. And the storms! Last month’s freak winter storm and the resulting power outage had frightened Robin. If not for Mamie and her backup generator, Robin wasn’t sure what she’d have done. Even then, warm bathwater had been scarce.
Now here she was setting off into what amounted to wilderness with none other than the pastor at her side, and unless she was mistaken, he didn’t have any more experience at this kind of thing than she did. They were well out of sight of the house when he stopped the ATV at a splintered wood post and consulted both the GPS and the aerial map that he took out of his coat pocket and unfolded across the interior of the small vehicle. It felt amazingly warm once they stopped moving. He showed her exactly where they were on the map, and she felt better, knowing that he was on top of things.
“What’s the deal about Gazebo?” she asked as he refolded the map.
“I don’t think it’s a real gazebo,” Ethan said, “just a kind of shelter that Jack’s parents put up to protect a picnic table in a spot where they could look down on the valley and their home. Jack suggested it as a good place for us to have lunch.”
“I see. I didn’t think about lunch.”
“I did,” Ethan told her with a subtle smile.
Did he ever. Another fifteen minutes took them up the mountain on the west side of the valley high enough for them to find the kind of evergreen growth they needed. Robin had brought photos with her, so they were able to identify the cedar, pine and fir they wanted. Much of it they were able to cut with simple pruning shears, but the larger boughs required the saws.
They needed the snowshoes only once, when they went after a particular pine. Most of the trees were too tall for them to reach the branches, but the trees were smaller at the higher elevations, where the snow tended to pile up and stay around. It was up near Gazebo where they spotted the accessible pine, and they had to hike up to get it. They practically denuded the poor thing, taking two trips to get the fragrant boughs down.
“Why don’t I go up with the net and bring down the last load alone while you set the table for lunch,” he proposed.
“Great,” she agreed. “I know I pigged out at breakfast, but I’m so hungry now I think I could eat a bear.”
He laughed, and no wonder, for that was just about what he’d packed. She peeked into the strange, foil-lined “cooler” and found containers of hot vegetable soup, toasty melted-cheese sandwiches, warm ham-and-pea salad, fat rolls stuffed with sausages, a hash-brown potato casserole and thick slabs of brownie cake covered with melted chocolate and broken walnuts. She left it all in the steamy warmer and instead raided the box he’d brought along for a flannel-lined vinyl tablecloth, matching checked cloth napkins, dinnerware, flatware and cups for the coffee he’d included. She warmed herself with that until he returned, gazing at the valley below and the homey two-story ranch house in the distance where Mick McGuire and his new family lived.
Sheltered by the trees and the roof, the gazebo felt, if not warm, at least survivable, especially with the warm coffee inside her and the bounty of Ethan’s picnic at her elbow. Ethan arrived a few moments later, tugged off his gloves and straddled the wood bench beside her.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“So different from Los Angeles.”
“And New Mexico.”
“God must take real pleasure in His creation, just the variety and bounty of it,” Ethan said. “No place I’ve ever been makes me want to worship more than Montana, though.”
“That’s a lovely way of putting it.”
“It’s a lovely feeling.” He looked her straight in the eye when he said that.
All the world seemed to pause in that moment. She felt his words to her bones. She let them settle into her. She thought of all the sermons she’d every heard, all the words of wisdom she’d ever read, but none of them had ever moved her or touched her as deeply as Ethan’s simple declaration.
He loved it here. He had been called here to this place, to serve his Lord and these people. She envied him that calling, that belonging. She admired him for it.
He turned his bare hands palms up and asked, “Will you pray with me before we eat?”
She set aside her mug, tugged off her gloves and placed her hands in his, her head bowed and her heart aquiver.
* * *
They enjoyed a sumptuous meal.
“As sumptuous as Great Gulch Grub can make it,” Ethan told Robin with a chuckle.
“It was good of you to think of lunch.”
“Men always think of their stomachs,” he said with a wink. He had to stop that. For some reason he felt compelled to flirt with her. It was immature and foolish and had to stop.
She looked down shyly, scraping a fingertip across the checked vinyl of the tablecloth. “I’m surprised they put in a real tablecloth and napkins.”
“Oh, no, that was me,” he said without thinking, and her blue eyes zipped up in surprise. “Uh, Jack mentioned that the tabletop was rough planking, and I didn’t want to take a chance on paper napkins blowing away,” he finished lamely, letting the words dwindle into silence, only to have her beam at him.
“That was very sweet of you.”
“It’s just a tablecloth and napkins,” he said, ridiculously pleased.
They packed up and set off to Whistler, a notch in the rock where the wind was said to make high-pitched noises from time to time, in search of holly. Sure enough, just as Jack had said, they found several basketball-size clumps growing out of crevices in the sheer rock face. All were too far up to easily reach, however. Ethan thought a moment and came up with a plan.
“You could sit on my shoulder,” he proposed, “and use those long-handled pruning shears to cut the holly