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Lighthouse Writers
LitFest
Thursday, June 20
2:30 p.m.
With Warren Hammond & Cyndi Meyers
Denver, CO
Brown Bag Lunch
Friday, Sept. 6
Alliance Public Library
1750 Sweetwater
Alliance, NE
Lakewood Library Book Club
Thursday, Oct. 3
6:00 p.m.
10200 W. 20th Ave.
Lakewood, CO
ReadCON
Nov. 1 and Nov. 2
High Plains Library District
Centennial Park Library
2227 23rd Ave, Greeley
Reading one of these mysteries in your book club? Schedule an author visit by clicking "Contact."
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Monday Evening
Allison Coil tugged the reins on Sunny Boy and the horse came to a stop with a labored sigh. His clock was punched. Allison stood in the stirrups and squeezed her shoulders back, the bones of her torso snapping and popping with exquisite release. Her day was done too.
"Do you want to go another half-mile and join the camp or make do in that stand of blue spruce over there?" Sunny Boy didn't respond or even look around. "Huh?" Allison said. "What do you think?"
Sunny Boy shook his mane, rattling his bit. Allison patted his neck and reached into a pannier for binoculars. She knew the hunting camp wouldn't be visible, a quarter-mile across Oyster Lake, but she might be able to see if anyone was out. She scanned the lake shore and everything she could view beyond. Nothing, nobody. She repeated the search, overlapping her fields of vision, probing for any movement. Zip. She was a few minutes from camp but she preferred to keep the night to herself. The men could drink their Wild Turkey and stumble around and tell their jokes without her company.
She would have all this ridiculous serenity to herself.
Allison smiled.
Make this my addiction, she thought.
Put this moment in a needle or a shot glass. Bake my brain with this intense calm, pack it with serenity. Fill me with this sensation of nature, of horse and lakes and woods. Of fire, smoke and stars. Somebody once said the average person has 60,000 thoughts a day—individual phrases that attempt to gel and form the substance of the story you are telling yourself about yourself. And of all that gibberish, 99 percent are repeats. Maybe that was city life, the world of commutes and deadlines and e-mail. Up here, Allison Coil calculated she must be down to two thousand thoughts a day—max.
Good thoughts.
Grounded thoughts.
"We're staying here," she told Sunny Boy. "I've got a bag of oats with your name on it. Tomorrow for breakfast, some hay over at the camp, okay? Special bacon-flavored hay, what do you say?"
A stand of Ponderosa pine beckoned like a sepia-toned picture-postcard. The trees stood a few hundred yards off the main trail at the base of a thousand-foot cliff that climbed to the high plateau. Allison pointed Sunny Boy off the trail and they picked their way across a scrubby meadow—bunchgrass and clumps of bitterbrush scattered by nature's definition of random.
The trees were tightly clustered. Allison found a flat spot for her pup tent. She hitched Sunny Boy to a tree and hung a bag of oats around his neck.
"Dig in," she whispered in his ear. "Well deserved."
Allison walked a few loops in concentric circles searching for tracks. There was no point in sleeping on a bear highway if she could avoid it. She would just be a snack. She had added a few pounds to her normal 110, but was probably just thickening for winter. Her stand of trees was nestled against the base of a cliff. From the top of the small rise to the south, the terrain rolled away into the misted distance. She spotted a darker strip of vegetation at the bottom of the next draw which should mean running water. She found old raccoon scat, but no tracks from bear or mountain lion. Finding an opening on top of the ridge, she spotted Sunny Boy in the stand below and studied the sheer beauty and forbidding toughness of the landscape.
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