I guessed Jeff to be in his late fifties. He was quiet, which I liked, not offering much about himself. I had learned from Colm that Jeff was Mormon, and that he’d had a granddaughter who’d died from falling off a horse. Jeff dealt with the tragedy by helping others with theirs. He was a cowboy in the truest sense, providing for his family from the cattle ranch he and his sons operated in Dinosaur, about twenty miles west of Rangely. He’d sip hot water instead of coffee and speak with a voice as sonorous as the guttural sigh of a working dog that had just retired at the end of a day.
As Kona and I began the decline toward the Ford truck, again he picked up the scent. I climbed into the backseat of the vehicle. Once more, I checked the ammunition case. There were enough bullets missing to load a six-round revolver. Then I picked up the compass pouch, about five by four inches. The compass wasn’t there, but tucked inside a pocket in the pouch was a yellow piece of paper from a legal pad. I unfolded the paper and read a list of coordinates, as well as east declinations. The last coordinates listed matched a couple-mile-square area of the northwestern corner of East Douglas Creek, with a ten-degree east declination. I carried a small digital camera with me in the cargo pocket of my pants. I took pictures of the items, including the list of coordinates. If the compass belonged to the woman and these notes were hers, she was more than adept at using the instrument. Too often the hunters I came across knew only how to use a compass to point them in a general direction, if they even carried a compass at all. But these notes indicated that the woman not only was proficient, but also would have had the knowledge and skills to adjust the compass to the location’s declination, aligning the magnetic field’s north to true north. If indeed these items belonged to Amy Raye Latour, I could assume she had the instrument with her and possessed the competencies and skills of someone familiar with the wilderness, or at least someone who had planned ahead before venturing out on her own.
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.