Reluctantly, he’d said okay, either because he didn’t want to be afraid or because he wanted to please me. Perhaps he felt both of those things. But after about twenty minutes he hadn’t returned. I stopped what I was doing to listen for him. I didn’t hear his footfall approaching the camp, didn’t even hear the snap of a twig. I yelled for him several times. He didn’t answer. All around us was rocky ground and twisted roots. He could have fallen. He could have hit his head. He might have wandered off in the wrong direction. And we were on a high cliff. What if his footing had slipped?
“Stay,” I ordered Kona, who was still tied to the tree and had already begun to whine. I sprinted for the truck, a cold film of sweat on my skin as I continued to yell for Joseph, all the while getting no answer, all the while mad at myself for not having gone to the truck with him. I hadn’t thought his going to the truck alone was a big deal. I’d wanted to get the tent set up. Then I was going to prepare the fire pit and organize the food. We were going to cook hot dogs and tell stories and look up at the stars.
Joseph wasn’t at the truck. I continued to yell his name. Kona had continued to whine from the campsite and had now set into barking, making it difficult for me to hear anything else. I branched off toward the west of the trail, screaming for Joseph and looking in the dirt for his footprints. How could he just disappear? He was right there. He’d wanted me to go with him.
And then, faintly, I heard his cry. “Mom!”
I cried back, “Joseph! Where are you?”
And again, “Mom!”
I was moving in the right direction. Joseph’s voice was becoming louder. He was crying. He was frightened, and I had let him go to the truck alone.
Joseph and I continued to call for each other back and forth until I spotted him crouched on the top of a rock at the edge of the cliff, about fifty feet above me. He’d taken the wrong path from the truck. He must have followed a game trail that led him to the edge of a rocky ledge. He was a good half mile from the truck. He’d gotten scared and run faster, had kept running, trying to find me, until the trail had ended. There he had stopped and begun to call for me. How long he’d been calling, I didn’t know. It was easy for a voice to be carried in a different direction by the wind, to get lost in the crevasses.
I climbed the fifty feet or so of rocks toward my son. I grabbed him in my arms. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I am so sorry.”
He tried not to cry. He tried to appear brave. “I couldn’t find you,” was all he said.
—
Yes, someone could get lost in these parts. And a person unfamiliar with the terrain might be no better at finding his or her way than a nine-year-old child.
Kona pulled at the leash, eager to get going again. I commanded him to sit, then removed his harness. The harness had let him know he was there to work. It would no longer be needed. Kona knew he was on a job. “Climb down,” I ordered Kona, who had been sitting alert, watching me, waiting for my next command. I followed him to the other side of the ridge.
A small creek meandered through the gulch, its edges splotched with red twig dogwood and mountain mahogany. The ground around it, lying mostly in the shadows of rocks and trees, was soggy with mud and snow. I searched for footprints but saw only those made by big game. We crossed the creek and headed east toward Big Ridge, a thick forested range and a steep incline that led to a slick rock face. The ridge eventually turned into Cathedral Bluffs and cut through the entire East Douglas area. Having covered more than a mile of expanse and come up with nothing, no tracks, no prints, no evidence that anyone other than wildlife had been there, I directed Kona northward, moving along the base of the ridge.