Solomon's Decision by Judith B. Glad Read Free Book Online

bear and bobcat lived in uneasy
proximity. Erik knew that if he were on the ground he would see signs of human
disturbance, but from up here, the forest looked as it must have for ten thousand years.
    They swooped over another ridge, into a valley where a dirt road pointed to clean
white buildings on a knoll. The bottomland was green, spotted with red cows and their
gamboling calves. He caught the glint of a meandering stream as they turned to follow the
road.
    "...cousin Jon...Double J...borrow a horse...." The noise from the rotor, carried
inside through the open window, stole Madeline's words.
    "I can't hear you," he shouted as she looked back, obviously expecting an
answer.
    "Never mind," she said, but he read the words on her lips rather than hearing them.
Her smile twisted his heart, it was so incredibly sweet.
    They were in the air for almost an hour. After the ranch with the white
buildings--the Double J, he figured--they went over another ridge, followed another stream up a
narrow canyon, and then hovered above a hillside where the stream entered the canyon.
Madeline pointed and Erik looked as the helicopter slowly rotated counter-clockwise so
that the view was directly outside his window.
    He looked. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. "Oh. My. God!"
    There weren't any places like this left on Earth. Somehow they'd crossed a
dimensional barrier and come out in another time, on another planet.
    "Wounded Bear Meadow." Madeline's words came clearly to him, despite the
rotor noise and the wind.
    Erik knew that nine hundred acres was close to one-and-a-half square miles. He
knew that Wounded Bear Meadow was primarily a palustrine wetland comprising several
types: forested, shrub/scrub, emergent, and submergent. He'd seen from the map that
Wounded Bear Creek meandered through the valley containing the meadow, here dammed
by beaver, there running free over its rocky bed. And he'd read in Madeline's letter that the
meadow had never been plowed.
    Nothing he'd heard or read or known had prepared him for what he was
seeing.
    A touch on his shoulder broke his enchantment. With raised eyebrows, Madeline
gestured at the ground. He read her lips: "Do you want to land?"
    Erik nodded vigorously.
    As they descended, he wondered if the fizzing excitement in his blood was
because of Madeline's light touch, or because he was going home, to a place he'd never
been.
    She was slipping into her daypack when he slid from the helicopter's door. "The
pilot has got another job that'll take him about three hours. I brought lunch, so if it's all
right with you, we'll look around until we get hungry."
    "Sounds good to me," he agreed. He couldn't wait to explore Wounded Bear
Meadow, to see if it was as pristine as it appeared.
    * * * *
    "I still don't believe there can be a place like this in cattle country," Erik said as
they stuffed the remains of lunch back into her daypack. "In a few minutes, I'm going to
wake up and start living today all over again."
    "Jethro's gotten a lot of ribbing about it. This is some of the finest bottomland
pasture on the Z-Bar-Z and he's always kept it fenced off. He always says that what was
good enough for his grandpappy is good enough for him." Madeline zipped the pack and
slid her arms through the straps. "Actually I think it was his great grandfather who first
decided it was too beautiful a place to spoil. Back in the 1870s, if I remember rightly." For
a moment she felt a twinge of regret that there would never be another Zenger to preserve
Wounded Bear Meadow because it was, in Jethro's words, "the prettiest place this side of
heaven."
    She stood, waiting for him to finish marking the plastic sleeve of an aerial photo.
"Now you see why I called for help. I just couldn't let it become part of a planned
community, with jogging paths all around the edge and boardwalks out to the beaver
dams."
    "That's better than being drained. Twenty years ago, that would have been the first
thing they did, right before they