Breaking Wild Read online

  An icy breeze ribboned through the air. I slid my bare toes underneath Kona’s belly and drank the rest of the coffee, the liquid having turned lukewarm. A dog barked in the distance. Kona raised his head, his ears alert. Then the crunching of large tires against loose stone. The truck’s beams soon rounded the house and lit up a pathway across the tall grass toward the riverbank.

  I knew it was Colm. Knew the sound of his vehicle and the way he slammed his door.

  “Morning,” I yelled through the screen.

  Colm climbed the porch steps and lifted the screen door slightly to open it. The door needed new hinges, another item on my to-do list that I kept promising myself I’d get to.

  Kona settled back down when he saw it was the sheriff.

  “You’re up awfully early,” I said.

  “No different than you.”

  “Want some coffee?” I started to get up.

  “Stay put. I know my way to the kitchen.”

  I’ve known Colm since before my son was born. Colm would read the gas meter each month at a small rental house where I used to live. Like me, Colm isn’t from Rio Mesa. He moved here as a young man, somewhere in his early twenties, taking on a job with White River Natural Gas. Then when the only television tower was shut off, when residents in the county who wished to watch TV were forced to buy into satellite, Colm began installing dishes and network boxes. His work brought him into people’s homes, where he was offered coffee and beer and neighborly conversation, the kind of conversation that led to ideas. Colm became someone people got to know and like. He listened and had a way of letting people know he’d heard what they’d said, heard it and thought about it and thought about it some more. Maybe it was the way his green eyes would fasten intently on the eyes of another, or the way he’d nod contemplatively, or the way he’d wait calmly, his whole body still, for a person to finish speaking before he’d respond. I’m not sure who first introduced the notion that Colm should run for sheriff. But once the idea got around, it spread like a rumor in a small town, the kind of rumor people get accustomed to real quickly until it is simply the way things are, or in Colm’s case, the way things would be.

  Colm appeared with a mug in his hand. “How was your weekend?” he asked.

  “Not bad. Yours?”

  “Can’t complain.” Colm sat in the cedar-backed chair beside me, his big knees squared out in front of him. “I saw Joseph the other day. Over by the school. He seems to be getting along all right.”

  “Sometimes I worry about him,” I said.

  Colm blew on the coffee before he took a loud swallow. “Course you do. You’re his mother.”

  I smiled a little. And then that part of me that had curled itself deep down in my chest started to stir. That part of me that wanted to say, He’s all I have, but instead I said, “It’s five o’clock in the morning. My coffee isn’t that good to bring you out here.”

  Colm took another swallow, pulled back his lips, and exhaled slowly. “A call came in last night. Missing hunter.”

  “Where?”

  “East Douglas. She came out here with a couple of guys from Evergreen. Took the truck out by herself sometime yesterday morning. The guys she’d traveled with called a little while ago. She still hasn’t shown.”

  “Did she have her cell with her?”

  “If she did, she’s not answering. Or can’t get a signal.”

  “Where’s the camp?” I asked.

  “A pull-off in Pintada Draw. One of her friends thought she might have headed east toward Big Ridge. Said he thought he heard a gun go off later that morning, but he wasn’t sure. Except she was hunting with a bow,” Colm said. “Her friends filled their tags with rifles a couple of days ago.”

  “Anyone out there yet?” I asked.

  “Deputy in Rangely is on his way now. See if he spots the vehicle, a black Ford 350. I’m going to try to get a helicopter out there this afternoon.”

  Colm ran his fingers through his straight black hair flecked with gray. He paused just a second over the nape of his neck. “She probably huddled up somewhere for the night. Once it starts getting light she’ll find her way back.”

  “Did she have any food or water with her?”

  “Her friends thought so, but they weren’t sure.”

  Colm was now looking at me dead on. I knew he was concerned. He wouldn’t have shown up at my house at five in the morning if he hadn’t been. He was following protocol. Wait till first light. Sheriffs mounted anywhere from fifty-five to a hundred full-fledged searches in Colorado each year, and most of them were successful and short-lived. Only a handful of times would the search turn into the kind of harrowing saga every sheriff feared. Yet with each missing person, the potential presented itself.

  “We’re going to have to get a ground team on location,” Colm said. “If Dean finds the vehicle and no hunter, be a good idea for you and Kona to team up with him before the place starts getting mixed up with too much scent.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Amy Raye Latour. Thirty-two. Husband and two kids back home.”

  It had been cold during the night. So cold that I’d gotten up a little after two to add more logs to the stove. “East Douglas is a big area. May take Dean hours before he finds the vehicle.”

  “Where you planning to be today?”

  “Piceance Creek. Wanted to check out a few camps that are clearing out.”

  Colm’s head lulled into an easy nod. His eyes stared off through the porch screen. He had a big heart. He would worry about this woman until he found her, and yet it wasn’t just the weight of the missing hunter that was pulling him down. Colm’s divorce had been final for six months. I knew he still didn’t sleep much. I could hear it in that deep throaty voice of his, see it in the folds over his eyes and the way his broad shoulders hung forward.

  “You holding up okay?” I asked.

  He shot me a quick glance. “Yeah.” Then his gaze roamed off again. “I know I look like shit, but it’s actually better having her gone. I just have to get used to it all.”

  I waited for him to say something else. When he didn’t, I reached for his mug. “Want a warm-up?”

  “No, I should get going.”

  I started to stand. Colm was still sitting in the chair.

  “She never loved me. It’s hard to admit, but it’s true. Figure that. Fourteen years and she never loved me.”

  Though we’d talked about some of the details of his divorce, his emotions weren’t something we’d touched upon. Still, his vulnerability didn’t surprise me. It’s one of those things a woman picks up on. “Colm, you don’t really believe that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why’d she marry you, then?”

  “She liked my dog.” Colm laughed and shook his head. “Goddamn woman marries me for my dog.”

  Colm wasn’t trying to be funny. He’d had a Labrador named Ruger, black and overweight with a sloppy mouth.

  “That’s not why she married you,” I said. “People change.”

  “Maybe.” Colm was now leaning forward with his arms on his knees. His jacket, a dark brown leather, was stretched snug across his shoulders.

  Colm had lost his dog a year back to cancer, and now he’d lost his wife. He didn’t have any kids. Maggie had never wanted any. Perhaps she knew all along she would leave, even if she’d waited fourteen years to do it.

  I dug my toes deeper beneath Kona’s fur. “Ever thought about getting another dog?” I said.

  “Thought about it.”

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  Colm reached over and gave Kona a pat. “You’re a good boy. You keep Pru company, you hear?” Then Colm stood to take his mug to the kitchen.

  “Leave it.” I climbed out of the lounge.

  It was somewhere in the twenties, and with
the windchill factor, more like the teens, especially in the mountains.

  “It’s cold out there,” I said.

  Colm knew what I was saying. “I’ll call you.”

  He lifted the screen door about a half inch off the planked flooring, pulled it toward him, stepped down, and shut the door behind him.

  I carried the two empty coffee cups into the kitchen and set them in the sink. I would take a shower, eat a quick breakfast, get Joseph up for school. Colm might be calling soon. If Amy Raye Latour was still missing, I’d want to start searching while the hunter’s tracks were fresh.

  I walked down the short hallway to the bathroom, turned on the water, and held my fingers underneath the tap while I waited for the water to become warm. Kona lay on the floor beside the tub. Together we had established a routine that I’d come to depend on. I knew Colm would have to do the same, create new patterns of behavior to close the god-awful spaces of loneliness from losing someone he’d loved.

  AMY RAYE

  Amy Raye drove several miles from the campsite, winding her way up steep pitches until she found a level clearing where she could park the truck. She got out and opened the door of the extra cab. It was then that she noticed the small cooler, the one Aaron and Kenny brought along in the truck each day they headed out. They’d pack it with sandwiches and bars so they’d have something to eat as soon as they returned to the vehicle. The cooler had been on the table by the cookstove the night before. Amy Raye had watched Aaron clean out the wrappers and wipe out the crumbs.

  Inside were a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a plastic bag filled with beef jerky, a yogurt, and a candy bar. Kenny must have packed the cooler for her after she’d turned in. She ate one of the sandwiches and some of the jerky. She put the other sandwich and the rest of the jerky in her pack. Then she took a couple of bites of the candy bar, left the rest of it, and closed the cooler. As she stood beside the truck, the coldness and dampness of the early morning began to cut through her layers of clothing. She was ready to start hiking. She picked up her orange hat off the seat, but thought better of it. The three of them hadn’t come across any other hunters that week or rangers who would be checking for orange. Getting a shot at an elk with a bow meant getting within close range of the animal; it meant not being seen.

  She checked the broadheads on her arrows, made sure they were tight, and secured three arrows into her quiver, the one with the best flight into the first slot. Then she fastened the quiver around her waist and right leg, a certain rhythm to her actions. She secured her pack onto her back. She’d return for the packing frame should she get a shot. She hung her elk bugle and the cow call around her neck. With the headlamp switched to low beam and her bow in her left hand, she headed northward along the ridge about a hundred yards to the place she would veer off, marked by two pinyons that grew like Siamese twins.

  As she walked, her thoughts spread toward home and the children and to an afternoon not so far back when reluctantly she had agreed to hike with her husband up Ypsilon Mountain in the Mummy Range of Rocky Mountain National Park. Reluctantly because of the distance that had spread between them, a space as thick as a room full of grief.

  But that weekend the children were going to be spending time with Farrell’s sister, and Farrell, an amateur photographer, wanted to capture some still shots in the mountains, wanted his wife to join him. “Come on, the time will be good for us,” he’d said.

  The weather had started out pleasant that day, in the midfifties, with a dull sun that made the air feel warmer. Amy Raye had walked behind Farrell, though the trail was wide enough in most places for them to walk side by side.

  “Are you hungry? Do you want to stop for lunch?” he’d asked.

  “Let’s go a little farther,” she said.

  She had fallen in love with Farrell for his kindness, the same kind of nurturing she’d received from her mother. And she fell in love with him because when she first saw him, he was playing the guitar and singing Harry Chapin’s “Mr. Tanner,” and Amy Raye knew all the words, and she sang along, and when she sang, she felt like a young girl all over again.

  They’d met in Idaho Springs, a small town just off Interstate 70. She’d given up on college by then. She’d given up on a lot of things, yet somehow she’d managed to get by, and when they’d met, she was getting by all right. She was selling advertisements for the county’s newspaper, the Clear Creek Courant, and working evening shifts at Night Owl, a liquor store run out of a trailer between a Jiffy Mart and a United Methodist Church. She was still young, and street-smart, just twenty-three years old.

  It had been almost nighttime, two weeks into January. She’d come close to selling a full-page ad to a chiropractor who had wanted to buy her dinner. Amy Raye didn’t want dinner, or him, and so she’d walked home through the snowfall, and as the moisture turned to slush in her hair, a red heeler with a slight limp to his left back leg trotted up behind her and wagged his tail.

  She was renting the upstairs of a three-unit apartment house four blocks behind the Methodist church. The house, painted purple and mauve and light green, was one of the fifty or so Victorians in the neighborhood. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, wooden steps that ran up the backside of the house. At the landing, she looked over her shoulder. The dog sat at the foot of the stairs, his eyes fastened to her like Velcro on flannel, his tail pushing the sloppy mess on the asphalt into inconsistent mounds. She nodded, slush slipping from her hair and falling onto her cowboy boots with the thick rubber soles. Then she turned to unlock the door, and when she opened it, he had climbed the stairs, and he followed her inside. She bathed him that night, untangled his mats with her hairbrush, called him Saddle because she loved horses and because his coat was the color of chestnut leather. They ate chicken broth and French bread, and after she had read ten pages of Love, Groucho: Letters from Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam and reached over to the lamp and turned it off, the dog jumped onto the bed and lay next to her, leaning his warm back against her side. She fell asleep right away but an hour later awoke, and he was still there.

  Wearing sweatpants, a thermal nightshirt, and thick wool socks, she rose from bed and asked him if he needed to go out. She slipped on a down parka, pulled a fleece hat over her ears, and stepped into a pair of tall rubber boots that she usually saved for mud season in spring. Saddle followed her out the door and down the stairs. The snow had stopped falling. They’d walked two blocks heading east when they’d come to a house with lamps glowing from inside, and silhouettes of people in the windows, and the sounds of an acoustic guitar and singing. They stood there, the two of them, facing the house. She didn’t flinch when a bearded man opened the front door, and with a Southern accent, asked her if she’d like to come in. And the dog, too, she thought he’d said. She went inside the house, slipped off her boots, and walked soft-footed into the room from where the music came. Someone offered her a chair, and so she sat and listened to another man, who looked like a boy, smile and sing and play the guitar, and nod when others sang, too.

  She didn’t know then how short the man who looked like a boy was, just over five foot seven, with strong legs the same length as his torso, or that he would always wear soft clothes, corduroy and aged flannel and cotton as smooth as a lamb’s ear. She didn’t know that when they made love his skin would smell of sage and milk thistle, and his hair, damp with sweat, would smell like moist bark deep in the woods. Or that she would marry him, and by the time she was thirty-two, bear a son with him and be the stepmother to his daughter.

  That day on Ypsilon Mountain, the distance between Amy Raye and Farrell began to change, the kind of change that begins like a warm current in a cold stream. And the sky began to turn. Amy Raye hadn’t noticed the sky at first. She’d first noticed the ground, shadows from the clouds. Then drops of rain as they made small depressions in the sandy earth, and her husband’s footprints before her, the treads of his hiking boo
ts forming perfectly shaped ridges in the moist soil.

  “The weather has turned,” he’d said.

  “Do you want to head back?” she asked.

  “Let’s hike a little farther and see if it passes,” he said.

  But the storm didn’t pass. And then, as though there had been a great rip in the sky, the clouds seemed to burst. The rain poured down in steady, biting streams, and the soil quickly turned into puddles of sloppy mud.

  “There’s a shelter up ahead. Let’s make a run for it,” Farrell said.

  Amy Raye wondered how he had known about the shelter. She would ask him later. He must have hiked this trail before.

  The shelter was a small cabin with a lean-to porch. The front door was unlocked. Amy Raye and Farrell shook the rain from their clothes and smoothed back their wet hair before they entered. Inside the cabin was a cot, a small table with two chairs, and a wood stove. Beside the stove was dry wood, about a tenth of a cord’s worth stacked neatly against one of the walls, and on top of the wood was kindling.

  Farrell set his pack on the table. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “I could eat,” Amy Raye said.

  He unzipped his pack and took out a thermos, a plastic container with meat and cheese, another container with dried fruit, a package of crackers. He brought out two metal cups as well.

  “I’ll make a fire,” Amy Raye said.

  “Let me do it,” Farrell said.

  But Amy Raye reached for his arm to stop him. “No. You get the food.”

  “Do you have a lighter?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s in my pack.”

  And so Amy Raye filled the stove with kindling and wood and lit the fire. She knelt in front of the stove, watching as the small flames caught. She added more kindling, closed the door to the stove, rubbed her hands together until they warmed, and then joined her husband.