This is fatigue. The child moves regularly. She takes that as reassurance. On the fourth morning, crouching beside a felled log with a chalk line, she becomes aware that someone is watching. She has not heard a horse approach.
The creek noise covered it. When she looks up, there is a man sitting on a gray rone at the edge of the clearing, 40 ft away, not moving. He is somewhere in his mid-40s, built heavy across the shoulders with a mountain man's particular stillness, wearing working clothes rather than anything decorative, with the kind of face that has spent years outdoors making decisions and not explaining them. He is not threatening. He is simply looking at her the way a man looks at something that does not match what he expected to find.
She looks at him, goes back to her chalk line. Morning, he says. Morning, she says. You're on the Whitmore claim. I am Clara Whitmore, she says without looking up.
This is my land. A long silence. I'm Amos Caldwell, he says. My spread runs along your northern boundary. She glances up briefly.
He has not moved. His expression is not hostile. It is something more complicated. Surprised, she thinks, but not at her presence. At something more specific, the work maybe the precision of the chalk line.
Or perhaps simply at her, a woman of her size, this pregnant, this far into something this hard and not stopping. Mr. Caldwell, she says, you're building a cabin. He says, yes, alone so far. He looks at the felled timber, the chalk lines, the sight she has chosen on the rise.
That's a good spot, he says. High ground, morning sun. I know, she says. He turns the horse and rides north along the creek and is gone. She thinks about him that evening, trying to decide what his arrival means.
In her experience, men who own land adjacent to yours come in two varieties. The kind who want something from you and the kind who want you gone. Amos Caldwell has not given her enough information. She decides to watch and make no assumptions. Channel subscription call to action embedded here in the narrator's voice.