Eli Turner had learned to read mountains the way some people read faces—tilt of a ridge, fine lines of shale, the way a slope kept secrets in its folds. On Saturday afternoons he drove his dented Subaru up Highway 12, past the Spanish Peaks standing like old guardians, and parked where the ponderosas thinned.
A wind moved over Raspberry Mountain like breath through a flute. He set his hand to the outhouse door. Sap and earth, the faint bite of granite dust. Somewhere uphill a woodpecker hammered, counting seconds until the world changed.
Inside, the air was cool with timber spice. Light slipped through cracks in thin bright blades. The door swung with a tired click. The floor sighed and shifted. He’d expected creaks, not drama. The sensible part of his brain suggested getting out, but curiosity was already winning.
The hum of the highway fell away. The air thickened with pitch and damp soil. When Eli opened the door, the present had loosened its grip.
Daddy James Lea (1929)
A sky the color of polished tin. The wind carried musk like wet coins. Eli found himself near a craggy outcrop he recognized from maps. It was the Devil’s Staircase with dark ledges climbing into broken light. In a meadow below, a man crouched by a horseshoe firepit, pouring coffee from a blackened pot. A Winchester leaned against a fallen log; a string of traps winked on a sapling.
The man stood lean and sun-carved. “You ain’t from the parts” he said easily.
“Not exactly.” Eli.
“James Lea.” The name rang like a struck anvil. It was Daddy Lea, the bear hunter of local legend. “Coffee?” Eli hesitated, doing a quick mental check for time-travel etiquette. Accepting coffee seemed safer than explaining that he was a freak from the future.
The enamel mug was chipped and clean. The coffee tasted of smoke and lightning. Lea’s eyes kept angling toward the forest, not restless, just married to its movements.
Eli looked toward the Staircase. He wanted to name the ancient rock in geological terms, but the words felt out of place. So, he asked, “You know this bear’s pattern?”
Lea’s mouth crooked. “Bears got patterns like men got habits. Comes down evenings when the hill throws long shade. Keeps to alder. Steps heavy on his right. Leaves a drag.”
The two men moved uphill, boot silent. Lea’s world organized itself in sign: a tuft of hair on bark, a claw-mark in rot, a fence splintered by a battering-ram shoulder. When Lea lifted a hand, the forest paused with him. Low in the alder, a dark river of motion gathered itself into breath and muscle.
“Evening, old sinner,” Lea said softly.
The black bear eased out, massive, head swinging like a bell on a rope. Lea didn’t raise the rifle yet. He watched the boar as you’d watch a man in a doorway waiting for his weight to commit.
When it came, it was almost gentle: the bear turned toward the open and Lea brought the Winchester to his cheek, breath gone to thread. The shot cracked; the mountains threw it back. The bear shuddered, surged, then fell. Lea stepped forward, murmuring under his breath. Maybe a prayer or memory.
Silence folded over them. The smell of iron mingled with crushed mint. Lea’s eyes were not triumphant, only old. “He won’t take any more,” he said. “A bad habit broken.”
The animal’s front pad was scarred where the clubbed foot had taught him a cruel gait. Lea touched his hat. “You carry a story look,” he said to Eli. “Take care how you carry it. Paper adds weight to truth.”
A wind slid down the Staircase, cool and metallic, lifting raspberry leaves until they flashed white as fish bellies. The outhouse door creaked in Eli’s memory. When he blinked, the campfire smoke had thinned to shafts of dusty light through plank seams.
Young Loyd Powell (1916)
The outhouse breathed cold. When Eli stepped out, the light had gone to honey. Meadowlarks stitched the air. A boy in wool trousers stood with what looked like a Winchester lever-action rifle on his thigh, cheeks red as rosehips. A father Eli guessed by the way the boy orbited him and watched from a few paces back, hands in pockets, smile private.
“You see him?” the boy whispered, pointing toward alder fringe. “He’s there. I think he’s laughing at me.”
The bear was small, a young black weaving through leaves. The smell was sap and mud and late berries. The boy’s breath hitched as if courage was negotiating with fear.
The first shot jumped wide; birds lifted. Loyd jerked the bolt, breath ragged. Charles said nothing. No scold, no advice, just let silence settle. The second shot cracked clean. Leaves thrashed, then stilled.
A cry rose, not triumph but release. The bear lay in shadow, terrible and beautiful. Loyd’s hands shook not from fear now, but from permission. Charles laid a hand on his shoulder. “Tomorrow,” he said, “check the north draw. If you don’t want”
“I want,” the boy said, the word driving into the earth like a stake.
They hauled together, father, son, and the stranger who knew the weight of a story. Later tales would make a badge of young Loyd downing another bear the next day. For them it was not sport. Here it was simpler: food, safety, and apprenticeship.
At dusk, the Cuchara talked louder. Aspen leaves flipped like mirrors catching last light. On the walk back, Loyd asked, “You live around here?”
“I visit,” Eli said.
“That counts,” the boy answered, and somehow it did. He felt like he’d wandered into someone’s family photograph and didn’t quite belong in the frame.
After the work was done, Eli said his goodbyes and went to find the outhouse again. He needed to find his way back through.
The creek breathed mica and stone. Shadows lengthened. When Eli touched the outhouse doorframe, the grain felt full of river talk.
Martha “Agnes” Mack, Seventeen (1903)
Morning met him raw and thin. Frost stitched the grass. Eli stood on a ridge north of Raspberry Mountain where sage met fir. A girl moved through the pale light like a rumor expecting to be true.
She wore a man’s coat belted tight, hem damp with dew. Her hair was braided back. The rifle fit her shoulder as if they’d grown up together.
“You hunting or just walking?” she asked.
“Mostly listening.”
She smiled faintly. “Then you’ll do.”
They traveled the contour, the wind’s hand on their faces. Agnes—he knew her name now—moved with an economy that refused self-praise. Her sheep had been taken; somebody had to answer.
The black bear showed itself first as silence. Then shade moved within shade. “He’s bold,” she whispered, “or hungry.”
She waited. The bear nosed into an opening. She raised the rifle. One shot, hard and clean. The bear lurched into view. A second shot. Stillness. The echo went skipping valley to valley.
When it was done, her face softened, not with sorrow or triumph, but the gravity of someone who did what had to be done.
“Seventeen,” Eli said.
“Old enough to keep what’s ours.” She tied a strip of cloth to a branch, a wise signal for help with the heavy part. “You look like somebody who collects stories. Write it plain. A girl did what needed doing.”
They stood quiet, frost lifting into breath. A dog barked somewhere below, then forgot why.
The breeze returned older. The outhouse smell of pitch and timber gathered. When Eli set his hand against nothing, the door was there.
Return to Pinehaven
Darkness inside the outhouse settled back into its seams. Through the cracks, daylight was modern again. Outside, a chainsaw coughed, and a hummingbird darted through the raspberries, furious with delight.
Eli stepped into the present as into a boot that still fit. Pinehaven breathed the scent of sunlit pine, the warmth of stone, chipmunks negotiating in the brush. From somewhere down the slope came a child’s laugh, collapsing a century into a single note.
Under his boots, the mountain remembered Ute hunters shadowing elk, explorers naming things already named, ranch hands mending fences after bears had shouldered through. The layers didn’t cancel; they harmonized, sometimes badly, sometimes beautifully.
The mountain wasn’t nostalgic. It remembered through scar and seed. Bears still came when the raspberries said feast. They are caught now by trail cams instead of traps. Kids learned courage differently, but the apprenticeship to place remained.
Eli placed a hand on the outhouse door, the wood warm from the sun. “Thank you,” he said to the planks, to whatever hinge had let him through. He half expected the door to answer back or at least demand a tip for the tour.
As the wind moved the raspberry canes; their leaves flashed white, then green, Eli started toward his car, gravel popping under his boots. Highway 12 waited, winding down to the valley where the Cuchara knit silver through willow. He would stop for coffee, hear people talk about weather and roofs, and listen differently, knowing how long the conversation had been going on.
He looked once more toward Raspberry Mountain and wrote:
The mountain holds quietly, sternly, and the people learn to hold each other.
And in that learning, Pinehaven remains what it has always been at its best: not escape but belonging with a view.
END
* Authors Note: Time-slip fiction, as used in the Cabin in the Pines blog, is a form of historical storytelling in which a modern character, Eli Turner, travels between eras through an old mountain outhouse that serves as a portal in time. Each journey uncovers the people, geology, and folklore that have shaped the Cuchara Valley across the centuries.
These stories are distinct from the blog’s fact-based historical pieces by their titles, which begin with the words “The Outhouse at the …” Though fictional in form, each tale is rooted in authentic history blending real people, places, and events with creative imagination to bring the valley’s past vividly to life.
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