By dawn she had decided: she would go back and look harder.
On the second morning, she climbed into the gap alone while Maisie made breakfast and Thomas argued with the creek.
Inside, the air was cooler than outside but still held that faint warmth that didn’t match the mountain morning. Petra walked toward the soot mark, squinting up, then traced the rock face with her eyes the way she traced a blueprint.
The soot wasn’t the answer.
It was the arrow.
Behind a small granite overhang, at about eight feet high, protected from weathering, she found marks in pigment that had faded to almost the same color as stone. Horizontal lines. Seven of them, grouped. A circle with a smaller circle inside. Something that might have been a hand, pressed flat long ago, now ghosted into the rock.
Petra stared until her throat tightened.
She wasn’t a scholar. She didn’t know the languages of the people who had moved through this range long before any U.S. surveyor drew lines on a map. But she knew enough to understand this: the gap had a history that didn’t include her permission.
She pressed her hand to the stone beside the marks. It was smoother than the exposed surface, worn by repeated touch. Hands. Bodies resting. Women waiting out storms. Children sleeping.
The feeling that rose in her was not fear.
