Make No Bones by Aaron Elkins

Author:Aaron Elkins [Elkins, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Oregon, Oliver; Gideon (Fictitious Character)
ISBN: 9780745118130
Publisher: e-reads.com
Published: 1991-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

For the first part of the way back they followed the trail they’d come on, a broad, shaded track of loamy soil that allowed them to go two by two. Gideon rode quietly alongside Julie, relaxed and content, his stomach full, enjoying the creak of the saddle under him, the pungent, gamy smell of horseflesh, the lolling, swaying, gentle gait. They rode slowly alongside Lupine Creek, through a forest of cinnamon-barked pines varied by occasional stands of western larch and aspen, with clumps of manzanita and buckbrush at ground level. (Julie told him the names, which he appreciated learning and promptly forgot.)

He had already admitted to her that the chuck-wagon breakfast had been a wonderful break. Cooked over open fires, the eggs, bacon, burned toast (Leland claimed they burned it on purpose, for atmosphere), and gritty coffee had been served up by authentic-looking wranglers in a shaded clearing, with the morning sunlight illuminating the highest branches of the trees. Tethered horses had pawed and snuffled twenty feet away, and everybody had smelled like wood smoke. It had made Chuck Salish seem like something from an unpleasant dream.

Gideon had expected to see few of the older attendees, but almost all of them were there. Leland, he was surprised to learn, was an expert rider who had requested and gotten an English saddle instead of one of the Western ones—with their big, comforting pommels and horns—which all the others had been glad to accept. Nellie was there too (“Give me the slowest, oldest nag you’ve got. And the biggest, softest saddle”), along with Les and Miranda. Even Callie, who had arrived back at the lodge at 6:30 A.M. after a red-eye flight from Nevada, had shown up, although the less-resilient Harlow was yet to be seen.

The only problem had been a confusion over time. The head wrangler, a twenty-year-old named Tracy, with the short hair, fresh, boyish face, and narrow, athletic hips of a youngster who lived for horses, had thought they were due back at the lodge at eleven. When she was told that the sessions began at ten, she had proposed a shortcut.

After twenty minutes of easy riding they came to it. On the way out to breakfast they had turned away from the bank of the stream in a wide arc to avoid this brief stretch of poorly maintained trail that climbed and skirted the flank of a rocky grade at the edge of the water. That was for more advanced riders, Tracy had told them, but now they would save half an hour by taking it.

She called a halt before they started up the grade. “It’s not really dangerous,” she told them from horseback. “It just looks that way if you’re not used to it. Just give your horse its head. They know they’re going home, and they know how to get there. Let’s go. Oh,” she said as she started up again, “and don’t let them know you’re nervous.”

“It’s a little late for that,” Gideon said half aloud.

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