High Impact by Kim Baldwin

Author:Kim Baldwin [Baldwin, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781602826168
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Thoughts of Pasha absorbed Emery so fully she nearly collided with Mandy Fillmore, who stopped abruptly and pointed to the right. The dense spruce forest made it difficult to see what had captured her attention.

“What is that? The big thing up there in the tree? See it?” Mandy, a fifty-something redhead, had surgically enhanced double Ds.

Her husband Joe, a balding corporate type, peered through his binoculars. “Hawk of some kind, maybe.”

“A northern hawk owl, I believe.” Toni Whitaker spoke from behind her own binoculars. Chaz, no longer in sight, apparently hadn’t heard them.

“Are you a birdwatcher?” Mandy asked as the four of them started off again.

“No. I just read a lot,” Toni replied. “I borrowed a lot of books from the library about Alaska.”

“Good memory, then,” Joe said.

Chaz, Ruth, and Alyson had waited for them a short distance farther on.

“We’re cutting through a mountain pass,” Chaz told them. “Pretty soon we cross over a shallow creek and climb a hill. Over the rise you’ll have a great view and a chance to see some wildlife.”

As promised, they emerged from the trees a half hour later and found themselves on a high plateau, looking down at an expanse of open tundra cut in half by a wide river and framed by mountains. Everyone quickly brought their camera up. Below them they saw at least a couple of hundred caribou, the massive bulls with their still-velvet-covered antlers and the females and their frisky young. The herd seemed to move as one, grazing slowly, pawing the landscape with broad, flat hooves and stripping the tundra of every lichen, wildflower, tuft of moss, or shoot of cotton grass. Ahead, the vast plain glowed with color, but the route they’d traveled looked like a newly plowed field of brown.

Emery and the others stood mesmerized, awed, the only sound the clicking of shutters.

They stayed there more than an hour, watching and snapping photos, speaking in church-like whispers. Appropriate, Emery thought. This, too, was a sacred experience.

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