The Walkabout

THE WALKABOUT
A Where the Pines Still Stand Novella

Buck spent thirty years alone in the mountains, and it suited him fine. He didn't need people. He'd proven that.

Then he met the Callahans - and an old man named Zeke, grieving a wife he couldn't stop missing - and somewhere in the keeping of that friendship, Buck found his way back to the world he'd walked away from.

Now there's a young man at the Lodge who carries the same quiet Buck used to. The kind that isn't peace. The kind that comes from letting other people decide what's right so you never have to. Buck knows that silence from the inside. He knows where it ends.

So when winter closes in, the two of them head into the high country together - one last hard walk before spring, before the wedding, before the world starts asking things of them again.

They don't make it far before it goes wrong.

An injury Buck can't push through. Strangers on their trail who mean them harm. And a hundred miles of frozen ground between them and home, with the older man suddenly the one who has to lean, and the younger one facing the thing he's spent his whole life avoiding:

Out here, no one is coming to tell you what's right. You stop. You think. You choose. And you live with it.

The Walkabout is a standalone novella set in the Where the Pines Still Stand universe - a quiet, hard-weather story about competence, second chances, and the family you choose when the world you knew is gone.