Some deep emotion slashed across Jenner’s eyes for just a moment before it was gone and he looked stoic once again. “Very good.”
She swung herself over Gunner’s back and twisted to look at the packhorse that was tied to the saddle.
“If you need to run and drop weight quick,” Jenner explained, pointing to the rope, “you drop that.”
“What about the packhorse?”
“He’ll stand a better chance of getting away if he isn’t trailing you.”
“Right.”
“Come on,” Jenner said low, kicking his skittering horse and pulling on the rope of his own following packhorse.
Gunner pranced under her, tossing his head as he blasted a snort in the early morning air, but he followed Jenner’s packhorse without too much prompting, and the patient bay behind her didn’t need any encouragement. He followed Gunner easily.
The hours directly following sunrise and directly preceding sunset were what Lena called the magic hours. Bar cloudy days, the lighting was always best during those times, and as the sun rose, she was stunned at how beautiful the woods here were. She’d been to some of the most breathtaking places in the world on her quest for photographs for Bucks and Backwoods, but this moment right here had to be one of the most profound. Gray and yellow streaked sky, snow-capped mountains, air so crisp and fresh it nearly burned her lungs, and vegetation so lush, the vibrant green was almost hard to look at for too long. Birds called back and forth, and insects buzzed a constant song. The quiet clomping of the horses’ hooves and swishing of their tails lulled her into a comfortable calm.
And all the while, she was adjusting her aperture and shutter speed, clicking away to capture these witching hours with her camera.
Jenner had said he didn’t want her taking pictures of him, but she couldn’t help herself. He was too beautiful not to photograph. The way he sat straight in the saddle, ear toward every forest noise. The way he cast a glance behind him at his packhorse as he urged it faster. The way his eyes looked when he scanned the woods. A haunted hunter ready for anything and missing nothing.
She shouldn’t feel safe riding ever closer to the brown bears, but with Jenner, unexplainably, she did.
The trail they road thinned to nothing in the middle of a meadow, waving like an ocean current with tall wild grasses and occasional blue flowers. Here, Jenner stopped. His attention was to their left, and she could see his nostrils flare, as if he was scenting the air. Wild thing, indeed. She sniffed but didn’t smell anything other than rich earth, pine sap, and horse crap, thanks to Jenner’s upwind packhorse taking advantage of their stop to squeeze out a pile of meadow muffins.
Jenner turned in his saddle. “Are you only here to photograph brown bears?” he asked quietly.
“Brown bears top the list, but I wouldn’t mind caribou, porcupine, ptarmigan, moose, waterfowl, wolves, black bears—”
“Okay, I got it. All animals.”
She smiled brightly. “Yep.”
He shook his head as he turned back around, but not before she saw the amusement on his face. And God, his distracted smile was beautiful. She wished she could’ve gotten a picture so she could look at it later when he wasn’t around.
Jenner kicked his horse toward a grove of young trees and dismounted without a word, so she followed suit. He tied their lead horses to a low hanging branch and pulled her to him, so close she had to rest her hands on his chest to fight the urge to hug his waist. In her ear, he whispered, “Get your equipment. Long range shit if you have it.”
“Okay,” she said on a breath. His smooth jaw brushed her cheek as he pulled away. And while she clicked her long-range lens to her camera and pulled out a tripod, Jenner busied himself with loading a rifle. Bears? Her hands started shaking. This was it. She would finally see an Alaskan brown bear. Her middle became a warzone of excitement and terror while adrenaline dumped into her veins, making it feel like she was floating as she hiked after Jenner through the thick brush.
When the sound of splashing touched her ears, Jenner crouched and eventually lay down on the pine needle-blanketed ground. Slowly, quietly, they moved forward toward a tall wall of marsh grass, and when he carefully pulled the barrier aside, she had to swallow a gasp of excitement before she scared the animals off. It was a moose, standing belly-high in a pond, and behind her was a newborn baby, still wobbly but splashing with one hoof in the shallows.