“You wouldn’t think the snow was deep enough.”
“It’s not, but like you said, there’s some drifts.”
“You know what you’re saying?”
Colm nodded. “We’d be looking for a body, not a live person.”
“We’d be switching to search and recovery,” I said.
“It’s too early to call it that yet.”
Farrell approached us, stood next to Colm. “Can I ask you something? How long can she stay out there? Realistically, how long could she make it?”
Colm looked to me before answering. This was turning into the first multiday search we’d had in Paisaje County in five years, and the last had ended successfully with a backcountry skier finding a vacant cabin after spending only one night outside. People usually turned up within the first twenty-four hours. Men were the worst. They grossly underestimated distance and their ability. Women typically stayed put. Colm could tell Farrell we were at an advantage. We were looking for a woman.
“Maybe a few days. Maybe a week. We just don’t know,” Colm said.
—
That night as I lay on the double bed in the small hotel room, drafts of cold from the window blew in. I thought of Amy Raye Latour out there in the cold. And I thought of her husband, in a part of the state he’d most likely never been before, by himself in another one of these rooms. I wanted to tell him I understood. But the truth was, no one can really understand what another person is going through. I didn’t know what it felt like for him to hold his wife, to sleep by her side, what it felt like to bring a child into the world with her.
Kona, who had been lying beside me, stretched his torso and plopped his head on my chest. I stroked the short, silky hair on his ears. His mouth made a slight smacking sound.
I tried to calculate how far Amy Raye might have traveled from the truck. Typically when hunting for big game a person stayed within one, at most two miles of the vehicle. Packing an animal out any more than that could be an enormous feat. Perhaps she’d traveled farther from her truck than our search group had first anticipated, especially if she’d been bugling back and forth with a male.
I’d suggest to Colm that we expand our search. If the woman had been pursuing an elk, it would have been easy for her to become lost even with a compass. People rarely checked their maps when in the heat of a chase, and once someone was lost, panic could drive a person farther in the wrong direction. By the time she checked with her compass, she wouldn’t have known where she was on the map, so there was a chance her directional device would have done her little good. This inhospitable country looked much the same, whichever way one looked.
There was another possibility. She might have gotten a shot, and if she hadn’t made a clean shot, she could have tracked the animal for miles, possibly never finding him.
I’d talk to Colm. We’d have to expand our search. Maybe he was awake.
The wind rattled the windowpanes. The storm was moving in. I climbed out of bed, walked over to the large window, and pulled the curtain aside. My room was on the second floor, with an exterior door to a concrete walkway. The sky looked black and thick, like soot, despite the handful of parking lamps below. I opened the door, leaned my torso out. The temperature felt warmer than when I’d first turned in, maybe by ten degrees, the air more humid. In these parts, a warm trend nearly always preceded a snowstorm. Colm’s room was three doors from mine. I stepped onto the cement and looked to my right. His light was off. Then I looked toward the lights in the parking lot to see if there was any snow coming down; the darkness and the overhang had made it difficult for me to tell. I thought I detected the beginnings of flurries, or else the wind was picking up flakes off the trucks. I stood there like that for a few minutes more, letting the cold and damp awaken my skin, stood there staring out over the vehicles, recognizing most of them as belonging to volunteers on the search. The whole thing was peaceful, as if I were the only living soul awake.
I closed the door and climbed back into bed. Kona was still lying at the foot of the covers. Despite my stirrings, he hadn’t moved.
“Hey, boy,” I said, nudging him with my foot.
I lay on my back, pulled the covers up to my chin. Kona moaned, a long sigh that rumbled in the back of his throat.
—
When I awoke I checked my watch on the nightstand. Four o’clock. I made coffee in the four-cup carafe in the bathroom. I took a shower. As I finished dressing, there was a knock on the door.
“Saw your light on,” Colm said. A dusting of snow covered the shoulders of his jacket.
“I see the snow’s coming down.” I shut the door behind him.
“Four inches so far, and we’re in the valley.”
“Want some coffee?”
“I was going to ask you the same.”