But the light and warmth didn’t lure her back. Tonight she preferred the chill and the crashing power that was barreling through the mountains.

If the storm kept up much longer, it would be weeks before the north pass through the mountains was negotiable. It didn’t matter, she thought as another spear of lightning split the sky. She had weeks. In fact, she thought with a grin, hugging herself against the brisk wind, she had all the time in the world.

The best decision she’d ever made had been to pack up and dig in at her family’s hideaway cabin. She’d always had an affection for mountains. The Klamaths of southwestern Oregon had everything she wanted. A spectacular view, high, rugged peaks, pure air and solitude. If it took six months to write her dissertation on the effects of modernizing influences on the Kolbari Islanders, then so be it. She’d spent five years studying cultural anthropology, three of them in extensive field work. She hadn’t let up on herself since her eighteenth birthday, and she certainly hadn’t given herself any time alone, away from family, studies and other scientists. The dissertation was important to her—too important, she could sometimes admit. Coming here to work alone, giving herself a little time for self-study, was an excellent compromise.

She’d been born in the squat two-story cabin behind her, and she’d spent the first five years of her life here in these mountains, living as free and unfettered as a deer.

It made her smile to remember how she and her younger sister had run barefoot, how they had believed the world began and ended with them and their counterculture parents.

She could still picture her mother weaving mats and rugs and her father digging happily in his garden. At night there had been music and long, fascinating stories. The four of them had been happily self-sufficient, seeing other people only on their monthly trips to Brookings for supplies.

They might have continued just that way, but the sixties had become the seventies. An art dealer had discovered one of Libby’s mother’s wall hangings. Almost simultaneously her father had found that a certain mixture of his homegrown herbs brewed into a soothing and delicious tea. Before Libby’s eighth birthday her mother had become a respected artist and her father a successful young entrepreneur. The cabin had become a vacation hideaway when the family had moved into the Portland mainstream.

Perhaps it was Libby’s own culture shock that had steered her toward anthropology. Her fascination with it, with society’s structures and the effects of outside influences, had often dominated her life. Sometimes she nearly forgot the times she was living in with her avid quest for answers. Whenever that happened she came back here or took a few days to visit her family. That was all it took to ground her in the present.

Starting tomorrow, she decided, if the storm was over, she would turn her computer on and get to work. But only for four hours a day. For the past eighteen months she had too often worked triple that.