Maureen O'Leary was on Frederik's mind when he awoke in the loft above the one room of Uncle Joe's log house. The March morning was still dark, but even earlier he'd heard Uncle Joe leave to go into the mountains to check his traplines, a two-day job that he did three times a week.

Now, with all the morning's chores to do alone, Frederik quickly arose and hurried to work. He chopped through creek ice to get water for the livestock. He tossed hay into feeders and fed grain to shoving, pregnant ewes. He split firewood, filled kerosene lamps, and shoveled the lane where new snowdrifts had blocked it.

He had to rush to be done in time to saddle Patch by six-thirty. Maureen would be coming by soon on her way into Missoula, and Frederik wanted to ride in with her.

In the half year since Frederik had come to Montana, he hadn't enrolled in high school. Snow and distance made a daily round-trip impossible, and Uncle Joe had looked relieved when Frederik said he guessed he'd be better helping here than spending five days a week in town.

Lately, though, he'd been riding in with Maureen on Sunday mornings and also returning to town some Friday afternoons to ride back with her. During the school week she stayed with an aunt.

Frederik had met the aunt. She was a cold-seeming woman who bossed Maureen around while saying she was only teaching what her sister—Maureen's mother—should have. She made attending Sunday Mass a condition of Maureen's staying with her.

Frederik cinched in his horse's belly strap. "Behave yourself Patch," he said. "Holding your breath won't make me put this saddle away." He tightened the strap another notch. "And you know you like going out."

The brown-and-white paint horse just snorted.

ONCE ON THE ROAD, Frederik didn't have to wait long for Maureen. She brought her horse up next to his, and after exchanging greetings they rode quietly side by side.

Not that Frederik didn't have things he wanted to say. He just didn't know quite how.

Uncle Joe, when he'd realized how regularly Frederik was making these rides, had teased, "Nephew, fifteen's too young to be falling in love."

"I'm not," Frederik had answered, his face growing hot. "Keeping Maureen company is just something to do."

But now, as daylight came and they stopped to watch their warm breath turn into a vapor gauze over ice-crystaled pine boughs, Frederik thought how beautiful she made the winter mornings.

When Maureen showed him the branches of red twigs outlined by the blinding brightness of a climbing sun, Frederik noticed how the sunlight made a golden glow along the edge of her cheek.

"You're not listening to a word I'm saying," she accused.

"I am too."

And he was, if not to her words about what a pretty pattern the branches made, then to her voice, with all its lilting shades. Like a violin, he thought. Like music.

Now how he wished he could play the violin the way his father had, because he'd like to play it for Maureen. He'd like to make it say what he didn't have words for on this still winter morning.

Then the stillness was disturbed by snow shaking from treetops across the creek. There was a shouted order and the sound of movement in the forest.

Maureen's face turned anxious. "Let's hurry," she said. "That's probably Pa and Augie bringing down a sled of wood, and there's no point in them seeing you riding with me."

"Would they mind?" Frederik asked.

"They mind everything."