Page 19 of The Mountain Man's Virgin
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“You ready?” I asked my hand on the doorknob.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she smiled.
I cracked the door and then it flung wide open, I gripped the handle tightly as the wind gusted and threatened to blow it off its hinges. It was a stupid idea, but I couldn’t trust myself to stay cooped up in the cabin with Lucy.
We trudged through the snow-crested paths to my storage shed where I outfitted her with a pair of snowshoes. I would typically access the ridge on my snowmobile via the open bowls, but today they were far too exposed, and the avalanche risk was at extreme. We would have to pick our terrain carefully and stay in the trees. The ridge was a short hike in the summer, but today it was going to take a few hours.
“How do I use these?” she asked, holding out the snowshoes, her arms rigid like a doll.
“Buckle them onto your boots and just walk normally. Try not to pick your feet up too high, that’s the mistake that most people make. You can do it that way, but it’s best to conserve your energy.”
She buckled up the snowshoes and tried a few steps in slow motion, then appeared to gain her confidence. I couldn’t help but laugh at her as she waddled away from me.
“What?” she turned around and asked.
“Oh,” I said through my laughter. “You’re walking like a kid who has taken a huge dump in his diaper.”
She blushed. I shouldn’t have embarrassed her like that.
“They’re just so awkward,” she said.
“Here.” I reached out my hand to hold hers. “Pick up your foot and take a step.”
She did it. It was a little awkward, but it would do.
“Now, pick up your left foot and take another step.”
She picked her foot up and drew the big snowshoe to knee height and then in a wide berth around the other one.
“Stop. You don’t have to go around, go over – like this.” I let go of her hand and took a couple of steps forward.
“Ohh,” she said and mimicked me. She did it perfectly.
“There you go, beautiful.”
Oh, no. I don’t know why I said beautiful, but I think… well, I hope, that she was too engrossed in practicing her snowshoeing to notice.
Chapter 15 – Lucy
He was right. I was waddling around like a tubby penguin. A cuter analogy than his diaper one, although the full diaper description probably fit my snowshoeing style the best.
Once I realized that I could walk fairly normally, a little less like pants full of shit, snowshoeing came easily to me.
“Why do you use these old things?” I asked as we trudged through the snow toward the wall of trees at the back of his cabin.
“They make it easy to walk through the snow, darling,” he said and turned back to face me with a smirk.
“I mean. Why do you use these old-fashioned ones?” Did he think that I was a total idiot? “I’m not that much of a city girl,” I said and returned my focus to matching my footsteps stride for stride with Mick’s.
“These just work better. Technology doesn’t always improve things – it just makes them more expensive,” he said, trudging onward without missing a beat.
“I’ve heard that there are snowshoe races. You definitely couldn’t enter one with these massive things on your feet.”
“Oh, you can run in these, just fine,” Mick said. As if to illustrate his point, he took off running, the dry powder flinging up in the air behind him like dust behind a pickup on a back road.
The track athlete in me wouldn’t let someone beat me in a race. I picked up my stride, pumped my arms, and was able to get the cumbersome snowshoes flying down Mick’s trail. As I gained on him, I reached out and slapped him on the back, “Gotcha.”
