Page 13 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

We’d been there an hour, and I’d eaten a hot dog and lost a game of cornhole to a ten-year-old, when headlights swung across the field.

I knew that truck. My heart knew it before I was sure.

He pulled onto the grass at the edge of the light and got out, and half the people around the fire turned to look. He dropped the tailgate and started pulling out straw bales.

“Walt had extra,” he said to nobody in particular, and he carried two of them toward the fire.

Nobody believed him. I could tell by the way everybody smiled and pretended to.

He set the bales down in a row near the fire for seating. Then he sat on the end of one, pulled a pocketknife and a small block of wood out of his jacket, and started to whittle like he’d come for no other reason.

I made myself stay in my chair. I lasted almost four minutes.

By the time I wandered over with a cup of cider for him, a little girl in a pink hat was standing at his knee, watching the shavings fall. He’d turned the block into the start of an animal with a pointed face and a long tail.

“Is it a fox?” she whispered.

“Could be.”

“Can I have it?”

“When it’s done.”

She sat down on the grass right in front of him to wait. Five minutes later, there were four more kids sitting beside her.

I gave him the cider. He took it with a quiet “thanks,” and when I sat down on the bale next to him, he didn’t tell me to go away.

I looked at the wood in his hands, and my breath caught. There was a corner of masking tape stuck to the bottom of the block, with a tiny sketch of walnut grain on it in my handwriting. He’d taken it from my bins.

He finished the fox and handed it to the girl in the pink hat. She held it up like it was made of gold. Then the boy beside her asked for a fox too, and Shepherd pulled another block from his pocket and started again without a word.

I watched him for an hour. He made four foxes, a bear, and a very lopsided owl that a little boy said was perfect. That same boy fell asleep against Shepherd’s arm halfway through a rabbit, and Shepherd shifted so the boy wouldn’t slide off the bale and kept carving with the child’s head on his elbow.

Something in my chest went soft and warm and wouldn’t settle. He was attractive, and we had chemistry. And when he caught me the other day, I wanted nothing more than to find out what it was like to kiss Shepherd Tate. But watching him with these kids, I realized that this was about more than attraction.

Dot came by with a paper plate and set it on his knee. “Apple pie. I saved you a slice, since you never stay for dessert.”

“Thank you, Dot.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.” She winked at me on her way past.

A big man with a Search and Rescue patch on his jacket stopped in front of us a few minutes later. “Well, look who came down the mountain.”

“Boone,” Shepherd said.

“Good to see you, man. Really.” Boone looked at the sleeping boy and the row of kids and grinned. “Don’t let them talk you into a dragon. Last time somebody tried a dragon, it took all night.”

Shepherd grunted. Boone laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and moved on.

Later, when Shepherd thought nobody was looking, I watched him fold a handful of bills and slide them into the donation jar. It was a lot more than anybody else had put in.

The boy’s mother came for him a little after nine. He was still asleep, and she looked around for something to wrap him in.

“There’s a blanket in the truck,” Shepherd said.

“I’ll get it.” I was already on my feet.

The field lights didn’t reach that far. His truck sat in the dark at the edge of the grass, and the noise of the fire got smaller behind me with every step. I found the blanket folded behind the seat. When I turned around with it, he was standing right there.