Breaking Wild Page 7

  “Jeff and I can do that,” I said.

  “If there’s anything up there, it’s going to be hidden in some pretty steep terrain.”

  I moved over to the foot of the bed and sat down, with Kona stretched out between Colm and me. “I’m not one of the volunteers. This is what I do. And Jeff knows this country and has hunted lion on his ranch for years. He’s better than any of the deputies you have.”

  Colm’s heavy hand braced my knee for just a second. “I want you to be careful,” he said. “And I want you both to have guns with you. If there’s a fresh cache up there, that cougar’s not going to like you coming around.”

  I kept a .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol in my glove compartment. I also had a Ruger Mini-14 patrol rifle and a 12-gauge Remington shotgun in the backseat of my vehicle, and I knew Jeff had a rifle in his truck.

  “We’ll bring our guns,” I said.

  AMY RAYE

  Twenty long minutes passed. Daylight could seem like an eternity away, especially in the cold. Amy Raye’s body began to stiffen. She had to go to the bathroom. She shouldn’t have drunk so much coffee. The morning would probably be long, another four hours in the tree stand if she didn’t get a shot. This was the part she hated. Men had it easy. She slung her bow over a branch, took an empty water bottle with a wide opening from her pack, and lowered her pants to her knees. Supported by the harness, she leaned away from the trunk. She’d done this enough times, and for the most part was good at it, catching the urine in the bottle so as not to mark her spot. She shivered from the cold against her bare skin and the dampness of her clothes. The warm liquid ran onto her hand. She stopped midstream, not wanting to drip onto the stand, all the while cursing her mishap, mouthing the words silently. She screwed the lid onto the bottle, buried it in her pack, and sopped and lathered her hands in elk estrus, the pungent, sweet scent burning her nostrils and lingering in her throat like the residue of a bad taste.

  She strapped her release onto her right hand and settled into her seat. With her bow on her lap, she fitted her best arrow into the nock point, wrapped her left index finger over the arrow shaft to steady it on the rest, and waited.

  Hunting with a bow during rifle season was a mix of science and fate. It would be difficult to bugle an elk in close enough for a shot. They weren’t as trusting once rifle season had started. For the most part, she would have to stalk the elk, knowing his feeding patterns, where he bedded down for the night. Do her homework. The day before when she’d first come upon the stand, she’d seen the signs of elk: the warm hollows in the timber where they’d slept, the rubbings on the juniper and pinyon, the pools of water saturated with prints and smudges from where they had wallowed, the scat, the urine. She’d been careful to remain upwind of the area. Yes, she was in a good spot.

  Light rose from behind her like a blood-orange tide, slowly spilling its color through the clouds and between the branches of the timber. She circumnavigated the area with her eyes, identifying various landmarks for points of yardage. Running parallel about fifteen yards in front of her was a wall of four mature pinyon, the first two locking their branches together in an arc, creating an oblong ellipse through which Amy Raye could view the grassy clearing beyond.

  With the light of dawn, the woods were no longer silent, a good sign. Amy Raye’s presence had gone unnoticed. Camp robbers flushed through trees, the swish of air against their wings like the heavy breathing and snorting of a bull elk. Squirrels ran up trunks, leapt from one branch to another, simulating the hooves of an elk breaking ground, snapping twigs and deadfall in its path. Amy Raye’s nerves felt like live wire conducting each sound. Keeping her head and body still, she swept her eyes back and forth over her surroundings.

  Then a sudden slap in her lungs, that shortening of breath as she spotted him through the opening in the trees in front of her. Quickly, she did a range check, pinned her eyes on a landmark thirty yards to her left, and drew an imaginary border around the area’s circumference as if she were the compass point. The elk was directly in line, standing broadside, an exact thirty yards, she was sure. She gauged his brow tine at roughly ten to twelve inches and counted four points from each side of his rack. With the forty-five pounds she was pulling, he was within reach of a clean shot. She raised her bow. The thirty-yard pin on her scope locked on the branches in front of her. She calculated the arc of the arrow. It should rise the fifteen yards and clear the opening. She drew her bow, steadied her left arm. She wondered if her breath would skew her aim. She held the air tight in her lungs. The elk turned his head, his eyes frozen at a direct point with her own. Seconds moved between them like rainwater through mud. She flexed her shoulders, creating enough back tension to discharge the release. The arrow sailed, cleared the trees, and made contact with the animal, its impact like a sharp clap against plywood. The elk pivoted and sprang in one broad leap back into the wall of timber from which he had emerged, his body crashing through the woods, snapping and breaking limbs.

  The noise pulled away from her, the distance and trees and soil absorbing it like a vacuum. Eventually, all that remained was time and silence. The rule was to wait it out a half hour at least before tracking an animal. An hour was better. To move too quickly, to track him now, would kick in the fight-and-flight. When an elk knew he was being chased, his adrenaline would push him farther than he would go on his own, and the stress before his death could have a negative impact on the meat.

  Amy Raye looked for landmarks, anything to pinpoint where the elk had stood. She knew it would look different once she was on the ground, and to track him successfully would mean knowing at exactly which place to begin the search. She spotted a large rock and made a mental note of it, as well as the profile of trees into which the elk had disappeared. So she would wait. And she would pray, because that was what she had always done when she’d taken down an elk or a deer. She would say the Lord’s Prayer. “Say it like you mean it,” her grandfather had taught her. “Then when it’s time, climb down from your perch and find the damn thing.”

  And so she began to pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. . . .” She prayed for the animal. She prayed for her children—Julia, whom she loved as her own, and Trevor. And she prayed for Farrell. “Bless him, Lord. Push his day along with a happy grace. Keep him safe.”

  Farrell, as kind as anyone had ever been to her. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to be wrapped in his arms and against his warm skin. She missed him with a terrible ache. Wished she could take him to all the places she had known, take him back in time to something pure, to summer and horses, and the farm she used to love. To the sheep and meadows and milk thistle, and her grandfather reading war novels to her when she couldn’t sleep.

  “Dear Lord, I don’t deserve him. Look after him, I pray.”

  PRU

  I followed Colm to the command post. Jeff was standing outside when we got there.

  “Mornin’,” he said, with a slight tip of the head.

  “Morning,” I said. “Sleep all right?”

  “Not too bad. You?”

  “I managed a few hours.”

  “I don’t think the husband did.”

  “Is he here?” I asked.

  “Pretty sure he never left.”

  Inside the metal housing, I saw Farrell sitting in a chair by the stove talking on a cell phone. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before.

  About six of the team volunteers had already arrived and were waiting to get started. Colm motioned them to the command table where he would be making his assignments. I went over to check on the husband. He was now holding his phone down to his side.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked.

  “No, I’m fine.” He glanced my way briefly before looking once again through a frost-covered window. His eyes were a soft blue like his daughter’s.

  “I was thinking about this story Am
y Raye would tell the kids, about a young Cherokee woman. She escaped from the Trail of Tears. Instead of moving to Oklahoma, she made her way across the Tennessee plateau and into the mountains. Amy Raye would tell the children stories of the woman living off the woods, making traps with her bare hands. She said Amadahy means Forest Water. That was the woman’s name. ‘Tell us another Forest Water story,’ Julia would say. And so Amy Raye would make up another adventure.”

  Farrell was silent for a solid minute, and then he said, “Amadahy walked clear to the other side of the mountains, so the legend goes. She settled in North Carolina.”

  I reached out and squeezed Farrell’s arm gently. “We’re not giving up,” I told him.

  —

  At the briefing, Colm assigned each team extended rays of operation from the truck’s location, or the subject’s point last seen. The members were to mark their tracks and radio back at measured points. Three volunteers would be arriving shortly from Mesa County with the electronic detection device. Colm had prepared area maps indicating snowdrift and high accumulation sites.

  One of the reporters from the Sentinel stopped me on my way out. She asked me about Kona, how long had he been a search dog, was he avalanche certified as well. She wanted to know what my thoughts were on why we weren’t finding any more marking tape, and did I think the woman had gotten lost early in her hunt.

  “The snow was coming down heavily,” I reminded her. “You get out in that kind of weather, you can’t see three feet in front of you. There was a lot of wind up here yesterday. Maybe she tied more markers and we’re just not seeing them,” I said.

  By daybreak the snow had come to a stop and the winds had settled down to twenty miles per hour. If the visibility and change in wind speed continued to improve, Colm would be able to get a helicopter back on search. No one was prepared to scale back. If anything, we would push harder, prepared for twenty-hour shifts if the storm held back. This was all we had. Third day. Chances of Amy Raye’s survival were running out, as was Kona’s ability to pick up a trail. No one wanted to think of another day without any leads. The search team’s demeanor was all business.

  I parked the truck at the base of the hill climb. Jeff loaded his .30-06 automatic. I strapped on my holster with my handgun and loaded my target rifle.

  With the break in the storm, I’d told Colm I wanted to spend the first morning light glassing in a grid, the same strategy I’d used with Glade when canvassing an area for cultural sites. Had we missed any marking tape or some sort of flag of clothing? I might also be able to catch sight of the lion. It would be a long day, with us covering as much as seven miles by nightfall. We needed to make every step count.

  I unlocked a box in the back of the Tahoe where I kept a high-powered spotting scope, two tripods, and oversized binoculars, 15×60mm. The higher-power lens would increase the magnification by fifteen times, and the sixty-millimeter lens diameter would adjust for the lower field of view. I fitted the optics, along with water and food, inside my pack. Jeff offered to carry the tripods. I used extra webbing to strap them onto the sides of his pack.

  I had spent the previous day glassing the area with 10×40mm binoculars. Other than some initial scent leads near the location of the vehicle and the northern ridge of the trail, I, along with everyone else, had come up with nothing except a couple of strips of faded marking tape left over from a previous season, which the volunteers had removed. And now, finding tracks beneath so much new snowfall was less than promising. Even dogs trained for avalanche search and rescue would have a difficult time finding a scent with these kinds of winds. Each layer of ground cover had been too disturbed, resembling eddies on the surface of a stream, with few, if any, depressions.

  With Kona leading a few feet in front of us, we hiked up the steep hill, easing back into the terrain we’d searched extensively the day before. Once at the top, I unpacked the optics and set up the spotting scope and the high-powered binoculars on the tripods Jeff had carried.

  “Why don’t you use the spotting scope,” I told Jeff. “Mark off grids in your mind. Then pan back and forth till you’ve covered each grid,” I said.

  Jeff stood next to me, his torso slightly bent, while he looked through the scope. Using the high-powered binoculars, I glassed the skyline, then adjusted the glasses just enough to the right so that the left-hand edge of my field of view slightly overlapped with the far right-hand edge. Kona sat beside me, each movement of his head and eyes appearing as calculated as my own. For a moment I thought I’d identified one of the other search teams but then realized the team would have been in the wrong location. I readjusted the binoculars.

  “Looks like we have a couple of new folks on the search.” I was still squinting behind the binoculars. “The two guys from Evergreen.”

  “Can you blame them?”

  “Did they get their truck back?” I asked.

  “Supposed to get it back today. Been getting a ride in with one of the volunteers.”

  Static broke across Jeff’s and my radios, and an occasional correspondence between Colm and the different teams, but nothing was said that would warrant our attention. I continued to glass the horizon. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, I adjusted the binos again, just enough to lower my field of view, and searched areas of brush and shade where Amy Raye might have huddled for protection. I spotted a coyote and then a couple of deer grazing on some wheatgrass. I continued this process until I’d covered the entire terrain grid.

  “Anything?” I asked Jeff.

  “I’m not sure.”

  I moved away from my field glasses. “What is it?”

  “Take a look.” Jeff stepped back.

  The scope allowed us to glass up to two miles away. As I viewed the area approximately a mile and a half to our left and northeast of the ridge, I spotted a sliver of orange in the branches of a juniper—marking tape, perhaps left over from a prior season, from a hunter other than Amy Raye, but we couldn’t be sure.

  “Think we should call it in?” I asked.

  “Probably should.”

  I picked up my radio from my belt clip. “Command, Alpha One,” I called.

  After a couple of seconds, Colm’s voice responded. “Alpha One, go ahead.”

  “We’ve spotted what looks like marking tape about a mile and a half northeast of our initial location. We’re going to check it out.”

  “Go ahead and proceed,” Colm said.

  I made a mental picture of the tape’s location, identifying geological land markings as points of yardage.

  “Let’s pack up the optics but leave the tripods here,” I told Jeff.

  Once again we secured our packs and our rifles on our shoulders. I’d kept Amy Raye’s mittens in a bag in my coat pocket. I brought them out, allowing Kona to reacquaint himself with the scent. Then the three of us began the steep decline toward the marker, the land before us a mélange of fractures and boulders, the spot of orange too far away for us to see with our natural vision or the field glasses we carried on straps around our necks.

  More static broke over our radios. I recognized the voice of the pilot. Colm had ordered him to cover the area south of the subject’s vehicle. Jeff and I were in an area slightly north and east of the subject’s truck.

  Game trails corkscrewed down the ridge like runoff streams. Kona stayed just ahead of us, every so often stopping and looking over his shoulder, then trotting on again. After about a mile in, I stopped and looked through the binoculars to check for the markers I’d identified earlier.

  “Heading in the right direction?” Jeff asked.

  I lowered my field glasses. “Not too much farther.”

  Jeff said, “She was twenty-six when they married. But they’ve been together for eight years.”

  I hesitated. “Farrell and Amy Raye? How do you know?”

  “I heard him talking to one of the other guys
this morning. They’ll have been married seven years in a couple more months. The girl is her stepdaughter, but she lives with them,” Jeff told me.

  Jeff and I were now within twenty feet of the tree with the marking tape. Jeff’s voice was soft, but also matter-of-fact. “It’s hers.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Even from where we stood we could see the bow and the quiver leaning against the trunk, almost hidden from the branches.

  And then Jeff said, “He’s onto something.”

  Kona was on the other side of the tree beneath a thick bough that was weighed down with snow, his tail wagging, his feet pacing frantically around a two-by-three-foot area as he sniffed the ground.

  “What is it, boy?” I said.

  Kona stopped pacing, his nose still to the ground. Air blew quickly in and out of his nostrils, sounding much like the occasional static on the radio.

  I stepped to the other side of the tree, bent down, and ever so gently lifted the bough to get a better look.

  Around the base of the tree was a small shelter, where only a light layer of snow had blown in, barely covering the boot impressions that had been left behind.

  Jeff stepped toward me and crouched down. He pointed to an area about a couple of feet in front of the boot imprints, just as I caught sight of the same thing—two rounded indentations like small craters, no doubt made by Amy Raye’s knees.

  “Either she was sheltering herself from the weather, or she was using this spot as a blind,” I said.

  With the bough still lifted, I looked at the quiver. Only two arrows were fitted into the notches, and on the fletchings of those arrows, each was marked with a number two and then three. The first arrow was missing. Hunters numbered their arrows by preference of flight. With her first arrow missing, I knew Amy Raye had taken a shot, but whether she had made contact with that first shot, I wasn’t sure.

  I reached for my radio. “Command, Alpha One.”