«Wolfe?»
«Stay with me, Jessi Lonetree,» he whispered. «Share the wild land with me. Love me as much as I love you.»
Epilogue
In the following months, Wolfe showed Jessica his favorite places in the western land. Together they smelted the rain winds sweeping across the desert, wearing robes of lightning and bringing the miracle of water to a dry land. Together they stood among stone buttes anchored like great ships in a boundless sea of sand.
Together they saw a canyon so vast it could be crossed only by the sun, and at its bottom a river coiled like a silver medicine snake, untouched, untouchable. Together they stood in the sun-washed silence of cities built by men long dead. Ancient, enigmatic, set into sheer rock cliffs, nothing inhabited the stone cities but the wind. No paths led to the buildings and no paths came away, yet the cities remained, filled with mysteries and spirits of a time long past, unknown, unknowable.
Together they followed streams that had no name up the slopes of mountains that were also unnamed, climbing so high that angels sang in the ringing silence just before moonrise. Together they drank from lakes as blue as Wolfe’s eyes and fell asleep in each other’s arms, waking to find the aspens ablaze with winter’s first kiss.
Finally they followed the sunrise back to the SanJuans. An hour’s lazy ride from Willow and Caleb’s home, Wolfe and Jessica built their own home along the Columbine’s clear waters. There Wolfe talked to mustangs and Jessica stalked living rainbows through deep river pools. There beneath a sky as deep and wild as their love, they created new life where none had been before, boys with Wolfe’s fluid strength and girls with Jessica’s laughter and fire.
And through all the peace and storms of all their years, Jessica was the sun in Wolfe’s sky, bringing light and life to Tree That Stands Alone.