When he stepped up to the rail, Joliet was back to business, scouring the water. Hawkins saw nothing, but a few random chunks of flotsam. “There’s nothing down there.”
He was about to follow up his observation by pointing out that she would have jumped in for nothing, but she pointed toward shore and said, “But something was.”
Rings of water rippled across the lagoon. But they weren’t just moving away from the Magellan, they were also moving toward it. “Whatever it was that made that splash, it didn’t fall from the ship. It was closer to shore.”
“It wasn’t Kam,” she said.
Hawkins scoured the scene with his eyes, looking for some sign of what had been in the water. But like most everything in the ocean, whatever made the splash had left no other trace, save for a few ripples on the surface. That’s when he turned his eyes to the sandy shore and saw something he recognized without any trouble.
“Footprints,” he said. “On shore.”
“Where?” Joliet asked. “I don’t see anything.”
Hawkins pointed toward the prints, but knew she wouldn’t see them. They were indistinct and masked by the glare of the white sand in the bright sun. But he knew footprints when he saw them.
“Here,” Jones said, tapping Hawkins on the shoulder.
Hawkins turned to find a small pair of binoculars in Jones’s hands.
“Like to watch for whales in my free time,” Jones explained.
The binoculars weren’t very powerful, but they worked well enough to reveal the details on the beach. The footprints were more like toeprints. Whoever had made them was both barefoot, and running. They emerged from water, turned a hard run, cutting a line parallel to the water, and then into the jungle. “Someone was in the water,” he said. “Whoever it was exited the lagoon in a hurry, then moved along the beach.”
“I knew it was Kam,” Joliet said and then snatched the binoculars from Hawkins’s hands. She searched the beach for herself and lowered the binoculars. “You should have let me go.”
Hawkins’s patience began to wear thin. “Whoever was in the water—”
“Kam,” she said.
“Whoever. He was gone before you got to the rail. If—if—you managed to cross the lagoon without being eaten by whatever took Cahill’s body, you wouldn’t be able to track them in this jungle. It’s too thick.”
“And you could?”
Hawkins could see Joliet was responding out of frustration. She liked Kam a lot and was clearly concerned. He was, too. But her knee-jerk reaction would put herself in danger and, if she went tromping through the jungle in hot pursuit, was likely to wipe out any trail left behind. “Yes, Avril. It’s what I do.”
That sunk in slowly. Joliet’s tense shoulders relaxed. “Sorry.”
Hawkins thought about his time as a park ranger. He’d loved the job. The outdoors. The scenery. The pay was shit, but the life; it was good. Most of the time. But sometimes people got lost. Or attacked. And when that happened it was Hawkins’s job to find them. He had an almost unnatural ability to find missing people, though he knew it was simply a result of having the best teacher.
Hawkins grew up in Durango, Colorado, right on the border of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation: 1,058 square miles of protected land, if you ignored the Sky Ute Casino and Resort. Hawkins’s love of nature brought him to the reservation to hike and explore and, after meeting them on a trail, he became friends with Jimmy GoodTracks and his father, Howie, who took the boys hunting whenever possible. Hawkins’s mother had died in childbirth and his father, who never forgave him for it, was a drunk. So Hawkins spent as much time with the GoodTracks as he could.
Tragedy struck a year into their friendship when Jimmy was hit and killed by a truck, whose driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. Not long after Jimmy’s death, Hawkins’s father up and left. For good. Sharing a mutual grief, Hawkins and Howie GoodTracks adopted each other. While the adoption wasn’t legal, he had no living grandparent or relatives who cared, so no one came calling. They became the father and son both had lost.
The GoodTracks name came about on account of Howie’s ancestors being expert trackers. Tribe legend said that they could find a man lost in the mountains blindfolded, tracking by scent and sound alone. Howie spent the next six years teaching Hawkins everything he knew. By the time Hawkins went to college, he could follow a trail that was invisible for most people.
“Your name is fitting,” GoodTracks had said after Hawkins followed a three-week-old trail that had been windswept and rained on to find a feather hidden beneath a stone—a final test. “You see like a hawk.”