Breaking Wild Page 5

  AMY RAYE

  No more than a half mile in, her headlamp burned out. She dislodged her pack and rummaged through its contents, only to find she’d left the extra batteries at camp. Memory would have to carry her until the sun rose. She stepped lightly, her body cutting through the blackness of the early morning and blending into the moist reed grass and saltbush. The air felt dense in her lungs, cold and wet. She was climbing in elevation with another mile to go to the tree stand, a platform barely two feet square, with a seat less than half that size, anchored fifteen feet from the ground in the boughs of a sprawling pinyon.

  She’d placed a couple of reflector tags on trees the day before, but without her light, there was no way to identify them. The air grated in her lungs. Her saliva tasted metallic. She stopped a few times to slow her breathing and to avoid a sweat. She wondered if she might be lost, and for a moment she thought of Kenny. He knew this country better than she, had hunted it before, having grown up nearby. It might not have been a bad idea to have him along.

  Kenny and she had not made love on this trip, though she was certain he’d thought they would. Things had changed between them, had changed for her. Kenny had it all wrong. Of course she still loved her husband. She always had.

  These were her thoughts as the incline began to level off and feel familiar, with less deadfall and vegetation. Yes, she was sure of it. She found the tree. She tied her bow to the thin nylon rope that hung from the stand, then climbed to the platform, stepping and pulling her way up by the metal pegs set into the trunk, careful not to catch her pack on branches. When she reached the top, she secured extra webbing around the trunk of the tree and hooked it into the carabiner on the back of her harness. She hung her pack on a peg, then hoisted her bow. She checked her watch. Not yet six o’clock. The sky was still black, blotted by a plush layer of clouds. She felt a sense of invisibility in the tree, in the outline of its mass, as she waited for daylight, as a muscle across her shoulder relaxed and she thought of other places she had been, the tree stands and blinds she’d set over the years, the mornings like this one.

  She was seventeen the first time she’d hunted alone. She’d headed out from her grandfather’s farm to a blind he’d built especially for her. She’d spotted a small buck, held him in her cross hair, before passing up the shot. But now, what she remembered most was the time she spent blending into the trees and foliage, and the calm that came over her. She’d been shy as a child. When she was alone in the woods, she felt safe. Even after hunting season was over and the guns were cleaned and put away, she would walk to the blind and sit for hours. No one would come looking for her. And after a while, she’d walk back to the house in time to help her grandmother with supper. Her grandfather would be sitting in his recliner reading the newspaper. He’d lower the paper just enough to see Amy Raye, and she’d know he was smiling, could see it in the way the skin around his eyes creased slightly upward. He wouldn’t say anything. He would just look at her, and then raise the paper and resume reading, and she’d know that he understood where she’d been, as if he recognized the light on her face, could smell the air on her skin.

  Before she left Tennessee for the last time, she drove by her grandparents’ farm. Their truck was gone, so she assumed they weren’t home. She hiked through the meadow and into the woods. It was a spring day, and the hawthorns and wild chokecherries were in bloom. She decided to check on the pond. She’d helped her grandfather stock the pond just the month before. She walked quietly, her boots landing as gently as moccasins, and all around her were the trills of the Tennessee warbler, the high whistles of the tree frogs, and the calling of the cricket frogs, like two small pebbles being tapped together.

  A little deeper into the woods she saw him sitting in an ordinary lawn chair. Her grandfather’s hands, like two enormous bear paws, cupped his knees. His feet were planted out in front of him. His head was tilted back and his eyes were closed. She placed her palm flat against the rough bark of an oak tree, stood still, and watched him. She wondered what it was that, like her, called him to this place. And after a while, as quietly as she’d approached, she left the woods that day. She walked past the fields and the pasture, and back down to the barn where she had parked her truck. She climbed in and drove away.

  PRU

  By the time I made it down the mountain to the command station, the sky had turned a deep navy. Searching in the dark wasn’t new to me, or to any of the search team members, for that matter. Rescue missions could operate all through the night if the weather cooperated. But the winds and the weather in these parts could turn as quickly as a car on slick pavement. Colm would be keeping a direct channel open with Weather Control out of both the Rangely airport and Grand Junction Regional Airport, the larger commercial airport in Grand Junction. If he got word that the wind or snow would be picking up, he’d radio in his teams and call it a night. Colm’s first priority always was to protect his crew.

  As I pulled up to the metal building, I counted three deputy vehicles and recognized the other four trucks as belonging to longtime search-and-rescue volunteers. Across the road from the warehouse was the helipad, a flat clearing with a radius of about forty feet.

  I left Kona in the Tahoe and entered the command station.

  “I told you he wouldn’t be happy,” Dean said when he saw me.

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “How did Kona make out?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Jeff approached me. “Good to see you, Pru.”

  “Not the best of circumstances,” I said.

  Jeff’s head tilted forward in an affirming nod. He wore a cowboy hat. He’d worn a cowboy hat on the last search, and I wondered why his ears never got too cold.

  Two thirds of the space inside the command station was devoted to search equipment including the dispatcher radio, maps, a couple of computers, and a large GPS unit—all of which were lined up on three long folding tables. Colm was standing behind one of the tables, his hands on its edge, his body leaning over a large map. “We’re going to work a two-mile radius tonight,” he was telling one of the teams. “We’ll be lucky if we can even cover that much in this vertical country. We’ve got six hours at best before another storm is supposed to blow in.”

  I walked over to the table where Colm was giving a briefing to the volunteers. He’d divided the search area into quadrants that branched out from the site of the black Ford, determined as the point last seen. When Colm saw me, he pointed on the map to the quadrant in the northeast corner. “You and Jeff will cover this area,” he said. “Go in as deep as you can, but be careful. And listen closely to your radio. The weather might turn. How did your Tahoe make it back in there?” Colm asked.

  “No trouble,” I said. My vehicle had been adjusted with a four-inch suspension lift, allowing me to get around as well as any of the pickup trucks, and sometimes better with the extra weight.

  “The other teams are taking ATVs in. Dean’s going to load you up with the stretcher and first-aid gear. Go ahead and drive your Tahoe in, but if the trails start freezing over, use your judgment.”

  “How many other teams are you sending out tonight?”

  “I’ve got three out already. The chopper should be here soon. Dean and one of the volunteers will be heading out with the pilot, a guy by the name of Franklin. The other volunteers will be maintaining the containment search.”

  A containment search consisted of sirens and flashing lights from trucks driven up and down the pipeline roads, hoping to attract the subject’s attention.

  “It may be against protocol, but I wish we’d started searching last night,” I said.

  “Looks like her friends already did.” Colm inclined his head toward the other end of the building, where a group of men were standing around a wood stove. “Course without their truck they couldn’t get very far. They’ve been up all night. We’re lucky we’re not searching for them as w
ell.”

  I gauged fairly quickly which of the men were from the hunting party and which were the volunteers. The two men from Evergreen were camp-dirty, wearing damp coveralls splattered with mud and something darker—most likely blood from one or both of their kills. Their faces were unshaven. Their shoulders slouched beneath their Carhartt coats. One of the men looked like he was in his thirties. Waves of thick red hair bunched up between the edge of his cap and the collar of his coat. The other man might have been a good fifteen years older. He was heavyset, several inches shorter than the first man, and had a black beard, streaked with gray.

  “Go easy if you talk to them,” Colm said. “They’ve already beat the shit out of themselves.”

  “What about the family?” I asked.

  “The husband’s on his way. Should be here in a couple of hours.”

  I asked Colm about the compass pouch and the notes I’d found.

  “Could be hers. I’ll check with her friends.”

  I looked at Jeff. “You ready?”

  He blinked slowly and ever so subtly tipped his head.

  There was something about a search that was compelling and heady. The urgency, the meticulous use of the senses, and the desperate need to replace what was missing, to smooth out what had become so devastatingly out of sorts. Perhaps Jeff felt all of these things as well. In the quiet of his deliberate movements, I liked to think that he did.

  While climbing in the Tahoe to leave, I saw the helicopter approach. It floated toward the rough patch of gravel and snow. Despite the helicopter’s loud percussion, I was able to make out Colm’s voice over the radio as he gave the pilot a summary of the search mission’s operations, the hunter’s point last seen, and GPS coordinates. Dean and one of the volunteers walked out of the headquarters and rounded the building, making their way across the road toward the helicopter, their bodies withdrawing into their parkas and hoods as they braced themselves against the cold air and biting wind.

  I backed my Tahoe away from the command station and began my climb up the narrow road toward the ridge. Jeff and I spoke little on the way up. I filled him in on my earlier search, on the broken scent trails and dead ends. The rest of our conversation was small talk.

  “How’s your family?’ I asked.

  “Family’s good,” Jeff said.

  And later, “Everything okay on the ranch?”

  “Can’t complain. What about you?” he asked. “How’s that boy of yours?”

  “He’s good,” I said. “Home game this weekend. Rio Mesa versus Hayden. Last game of the season.”

  “Those are good times,” Jeff said.

  “Yes, they are.”

  I wanted to hold on to every one of those good times, as if at any moment they might be taken away. I was forty-two with no plans of having another child. I hadn’t planned on Joseph either, and every day I counted my blessings that he was in my life. And sometimes I wondered if Joseph was the child Brody and I would have had, if in some strange way Brody had played a hand in it all.

  —

  I didn’t always live in Rio Mesa. I’d grown up in a suburb just west of Liberty, Missouri, where until a year after high school, I’d lived my whole life. Brody had lived his whole life there as well. My father owned a feed barn, Mercantile Co-Op. We lived in a farmhouse, owned chickens. My upstairs bedroom overlooked hayfields, several hundred acres that would later be sold and subdivided. But I didn’t realize that at the time. I was young, and I had the fields to explore.

  Brody’s family grew corn and sorghum. The Lidells lived a couple of miles from me in a brick ranch they had built before Brody was born. The original homestead was situated about two hundred yards away from their house. The family rented the homestead to groups of out-of-state pheasant hunters from November through January.

  Brody and I were both sixteen. His hair was golden brown and his eyes were sky blue. He looked like he could be president one day, like he would grow up and do something important like John F. Kennedy, wear a coat and tie, talk to important people. We didn’t know sex yet. We were good kids, the kind who would do what was right for the rest of their lives. He was already six foot three, and would probably grow another inch or two before we were finished with high school.

  It was fall of our sophomore year. I’d been a runner for what felt like my whole life. I ran through the fields behind the house, ran after the chickens, ran the two miles to Brody’s house, ran on the cross-country team at school. Classes had ended for the day. Brody had gone home, was working on the farm, driving the combine. I had dressed for practice and had met my teammates outside. We were going to run trails that day. I could smell the soil and leaves. We hit the pavement first, down a street, across another. I watched the guys take off. The girls were farther behind. I ran with a girl named Julie. There was an opening in some trees between the two houses. We left the pavement. My legs felt lithe and strong. We could no longer hear the boys. And the other girls, about five of them, had dropped far behind. We were now running downhill. I decided to sprint. My left ankle turned out. My leg buckled beneath me.

  Julie came up from behind. “I’ll get help,” she said. She ran ahead. I lay back on the ground, pulled my left knee to my chest.

  I heard the other girls approaching. “Julie’s gone to get help,” I told them. They moved on.

  Time passed. I heard Julie’s voice. I heard Brody’s. He knelt next to me, scooped me up, his T-shirt damp with sweat. How did she find him, I wanted to know.

  “I can walk,” I said.

  “I’ll carry you,” he said.

  —

  I wanted to make it back for Joseph’s game, but I knew that would be unlikely if the search was still going on. That morning, before Joseph had left for school, I’d told him about the missing hunter. Told him I’d probably be called on the search. I’d asked him if he could spend the night at Corey’s if I wasn’t back. “I hope she’s okay,” Joseph had said. He’d understand if I couldn’t make the game.

  Climbing the final stretch to where Amy Raye Latour had left the truck was tricky in the dark, and the surface of snow and rock was freezing together into a precarious conglomerate, causing the Tahoe’s wheels to slide just enough for me to grip the wheel tightly and straighten them out.

  I parked the Tahoe in the same area as the other teams’ ATVs and the black Ford. One of the deputies would be driving the Ford back to the sheriff’s station that night and canvassing it for evidence before releasing it to its owner. I wondered how long the other hunters would stay on, and hoped to God they wouldn’t be making the four-hour drive back to Evergreen without their friend.

  I opened up the back of the Tahoe, letting Kona out. This time I left the tracking harness in the truck. He already knew he was there to work.

  Jeff and I secured our headlamps and turned them onto high beam. We each carried a large flashlight and backpacks with basic first-aid gear, water, food, extra batteries for our radios, and pouches of air-activated warmers for our hands and feet. I opened up the plastic bag with the hunter’s mittens and held it to Kona’s nose. His tail wagged as eagerly as before. He yipped a couple of times. “Let’s go find,” I said. He took off through the woods that lined the elliptical edge of the draw, this time heading north along the ridge of the bluffs. I wondered how he had missed this scent earlier in the day, but then realized the wind had changed directions, and though we were heading north, we were now moving downwind. Jeff and I followed Kona’s lead.

  Even with our flashlights it was slow going in the dark. Deadfall and rocks lined our pathway, not to mention the slick snow covering. About eighty yards into the woods, we came upon a wall of boulders, steep yet passable. “Climb,” I said to Kona. He jumped and made switchbacks, and jumped again until he was at the top. Jeff and I looked for handholds—roots of juniper, tightly wedged rock points, or cracks, in which case we removed our gloves and dug our
fingers into the tight crevices for support. Most of the climbing was legwork. Once at the top, we spotted the helicopter and another team’s set of lights.

  “If she were conscious, she’d hear the chopper,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Jeff said. “Sounds can fool a person out here. Especially if you’re in one of the canyons or ravines.”

  Something moved about fifty feet to our left. I turned. The light from my headlamp caught the glowing eyes and white horns of a buck. Then the small male, with no more than two points on each side of his rack, turned and ran in the opposite direction, his feet tapping against the frozen ground, his body sweeping through the branches and oak brush. Jeff and I moved on.

  Our night continued much the same, with occasional crackles over the radio and voices from other team members checking in with Colm.

  “Search Two, Command,” came a voice from one of the volunteers.